Di Shui Lake Shanghai

In august I visited a lot of placed in the area of Shanghai and Nanjing. It was a business trip so I had not too many opportunities to capture a lot of pictures. I spent 7 days in China and I stayed at 4 hotels, traveled in and around Shanghai, went to Nanjing by train and then back to Shanghai by train. It's the feeling where you constantly need check out to bring your bag with you during the day because the next night will be somewhere else. Hectic.

But, it was also a fun trip, I love trips, and I tried a lot of new food (good and bad) and met great people and saw some interesting things. One location worth sharing is Di Shui Lake outside Shanghai. It's an circular artificial lake and we spent 2 nights here at a Crowne Plaza hotel.

The hotel was beautiful, huge, but so empty. It felt like we were the only people staying there. From the inside the hotel looks like a space ship and it was shiny like a diamond. The pictures below I took with my old iPhone and still it looks sparkling, so you can imagine how it was in real life.

The lake it self, Di Shui Lake is completely circular and very popular among the locals. Personally I wanted to stay on Shanghai city but the local colleagues where very stubborn and wanted to stay here by the lake. Also, the few other guests at the hotel were families with younger kids, enjoying a getaway closer to nature. Because that is how the hotel did their PR, come here and enjoy the lake and the fantastic closeness to nature. You can see a picture of the location and lake below.

Source

I guess you are used to different things dependent on where you lived. I'm happy they could photo shop the above picture because the reality looks like this. These pictures are taken one morning when I decided to have a walk by the lake before going to work.

It looks a bit foggy right? You are looking at air pollution. Grey, sticky, polluted air. It was disgusting and just breathing normally outdoors gave you a feeling of throat pain. Air pollution was worse then when I last visited China, when going by car on the highway you could see the polluted air taking away the sight, even on the level of where cars and people are moving, not only just covering above the city as a grey lid. And remember that this is over 1 hour by car outside Shanghai in the "nature".

I found a nice brochure at the hotel that I guess makes people want to travel to Di Shui Lake, but I'm not so sure that the picture is describing the reality... Eco Tour...

I kindly asked my colleague what is making the sky grey. And she confidently answered that the farmers are burning a special plant on the fields and that is making the skies and air grey... right.  Its scary how governments and media is affecting peoples beliefs.

This experience by the lake was ok, despite the polluted air, until I was served seafood. I try to avoid seafood in China but I ended up in a small secluded room, everyone around one big round table, and they started to serve the food. Of politeness I didn't take any photos but they were extra proud of the white fish that was caught in the lake (!!) and I could not avoid tasting it. Never eat fish in Shanghai, it tastes like mud. And I don't want to know what that fish was eating in that lake.

Nevertheless, I had a good time and got a good reminder that we all need to pitch in to save our fragile world, we only have one.