Jin Mao Tower – Shanghai China

On my 29th birthday we found ourselves in the incredible city of Shanghai. Growing up I have always loved skyscrapers so needless to say I was in heaven being in Shanghai. During the day we went to a beautiful canal town on the outskirts of the city (already blogged about it) but that night we decided to head over to the futuristic Pudong area of the city to check out one of Shanghais tallest buildings…the Jin Mao Tower. This beautiful tower is 88 stories tall and has a beautiful observation deck. The first thing I remember about this experience is stepping out of the subway station in Pudong. This particular part of the city is all quite new and everything is big, clean and shiny. There were numerous high end stores including a Louis Vuitton that looked like it was made entirely of diamonds (it looked exactly like it was). We entered the line for the observation deck at the same time as a tour bus full Asian tourists were so it was pretty chaotic. However, before we we new it we were on the observation deck and were rewarded with an incredible view of Shanghai. The sun was just going down and the lights of Shanghai were just coming on. We found one little corner that was open (very rare as the entire place was so crowded) and just sat there to watch the night fall over “The Bund” area of Shanghai. We then eventually made our way over to the other side of the building were we were rewarded with an incredible view of the Shanghai World Financial Center (one of the only buildings taller than the one we were in). This building is shaped like a bottle opener (yes it has a huge hole in the middle of it) and the top lights up with thousands of strobe lights every 15 minutes. We sat there for about 45 minutes so that we could see the building light up at least 3 times. As we were about to leave I noticed that there was a large round structure with windows right in the middle of the observation deck. I walked over and was blown away to see that I was looking down 40+ floors at an open lobby that was the Hyatt Hotel of Shanghai. It turns out the top 40 floors belong to the hotel and the entire lobby is open (hollow shaped) and the top is covered in glass and was located on the observation deck (which is were I was standing). Needless to say it was an incredibly unique design. The line to get on the elevators to go down was extremely chaotic as we were there with hundreds of other Asian tourists. However we eventually made our way down and when we walked outside the view looking back at the tower we were just in was spectacular. Being such a huge fan of skyscrapers it was the perfect way to end my birthday!