localculture

Shanghai's French Concession is my favourite neighbourhood in any Chinese city. I know — I'm a Chongqing girl, I should say my hometown. But the French Concession is different. Wide plane-tree-lined streets. 1920s art deco buildings hiding speakeasies and indie bookstores. Old lane houses where laundry hangs between centuries-old architecture and modern coffee shops. I take a morning walk there every time I'm in Shanghai: start at Wukang Road, grab coffee at a random lane house cafe, walk through the Fuxing Park (where locals ballroom dance in the morning — yes, really), then end up at a xiaolongbao place on Xintiandi for soup dumplings. Most tourists rush to the Bund and Pudong and miss this entire side of Shanghai. The Bund is spectacular at sunset. But the French Concession is where the city breathes. If you only have one day in Shanghai, spend the morning in the Concession and the evening on the Bund. That's the real Shanghai contrast.

Chongqing in summer hits 40°C — and I mean that literally, not as a figure of speech. The kind of heat where walking from your front door to the car feels like a bad life decision. So where do locals go? Underground. Not basements or malls. Real air-raid shelters dug into the mountains during World War II. Today they're converted into hotpot restaurants, tea houses, and even a museum. The temperature inside stays around 22°C year-round, no AC needed. I took a British family to one last week. We sat in a cave tunnel eating hotpot while outside the city baked at 41 degrees. The dad kept touching the stone walls, amazed that 80-year-old military tunnels now serve the best goose intestine I've ever had. That's what I love about this city. Nothing gets thrown away. Every space finds a new purpose.