Secret Royalty On Tour

If cities were supermodels, Shanghai would be the impossibly tall, other-worldly beauty, all height, confidence and angles, with silky molasses-coloured hair, improbably bright blue eyes, flawless skin. The kind of presence you simply can’t look away from.

I was struck by her scale and shine. There’s a palpable sense of pride in what’s been built. The cleanness, the efficiency, the sheer velocity of it all. It’s intoxicating.

Meanwhile, somewhere at street level, a lone visitor, just 163 centimetres tall, was discovering what Shanghai feels like without any of the usual digital crutches. No VPN. No shortcuts. Just the bright idea of “It’s only three days, I’ll cope without one,” followed almost immediately by the realisation that I would, in fact, not cope that well at all.

Google? Who?
Spotify? No, you do not need to listen to that right now.
WeChat? Brilliant for chatting to people, baffling for anything else, sending me in circles like a foreigner’s initiation ritual. I swear it was playing with me.
Maps? I would’ve done better with a sundial.

Anyway: The Upper House. Very slick hotel. Very serene. Very much the everything’s fine energy I needed after the Shanghai streets. The Upper House had the upper hand and it absolutely restored me on half a dozen separate occasions. This included the sauna and the pool.

And yes, I could have done the responsible tourist thing and visited the Oriental Pearl Tower. Instead, I hunted down the China-only adidas range I’d spotted in Outlander Magazine a week or two earlier and came home with what I’m convinced is the singularly coolest jacket in the entire country.

A wild, dazzling, high-functioning fever dream of a city, and now officially a very strong contender in my own personal ‘Coolest Cities in the World’ category.