The following is a short list I complied from my experience about both the good and the bad of living in the city of Shanghai.
1. Pro: Food
Food in Asia is all-around pretty great. It's cheap, it's tasty, its fast to prepare. From dumplings to fried noodles to steamed buns...at least you know you'll never go hungry here.
2. Con: Pollution
Yes we all know about this little inconvenience. SH is not nearly as bad as Beijing, but we all remember those days where the pollution index was so high we weren't allowed outside. To give you a sense of how bad it is, an average day in NYC is about 25, SH about 150, and Beijing a whopping 400.
3. Pro: Fake Markets
This was one of my favourite parts of Shanghai when I was living here. Adequately named, they are malls that sell knock-off brand name products at a lower price. They have gotten considerably more expensive nowadays, but are still a great place to hit up and go shopping when in town.
4. Con: Public Toilets
Maybe I'm just really picky when it comes to lavatory hygiene, but China seriously has the worst toilets I've ever seen. You can get used to the squatting, but the smell is just intolerable.
5. Pro: Diversity
As Shanghai continues to grow, it's easy to notice the increasing population of foreigners in the city. It's great to see cuisines from around the world cropping up, a variety of languages heard on street, and the potential of bumping into someone from all the way around the world anywhere, anytime.
6. Con: Segregation
Unfortunately, with the increasing foreign influence, I have noticed the gap between the locals and the foreigners/rich Chinese is growing. There are areas that are purely local, where people sell fruit for a living and probably live on less than $20 a day, and then there are the highly developed and luxurious areas like The Bund where people are constantly living it up. Yes this is true of all cities, but it just feels more obvious in Shanghai.
7. Pro: Nightlife
Speaking of The Bund, I have yet to mention to exciting nightlife of Shanghai. From clubs to pubs to shisha bars, you can find virtually anything to your liking. Not to mention the relaxed drinking age and how relatively inexpensive it all is.
8. Con: Censorship
Yes, the big elephant in the room. Kiss your beloved Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, and, incredibly, the entire Google search engine goodbye. Even with a VPN, the sites are slow and will not respond the way you are used to. Sigh. Netflix is especially a problem because they do not allow access with a proxy, however you can stream from Watchseries.cr as an alternative.
9. Pro: Disney
Newly opened in 2016, Shanghai Disneyland is the perfect place for a day out. Be sure to check out it's most popular ride, Tron, as well as the highly amusing Frozen Musical Sing-along, where foreign actors try pretty unsuccessfully to perform in Mandarin.
The following two statements are a bit harder to categorise but I have heard many of these things from friends regarding Shanghai, and they apply almost exclusively to those who went to international school there.
10. "It was the worst years of my life."
Those who said this did not have the best experiences in school, and it therefore disrupted their entire experience of Shanghai in general. They look back upon it with a sort of bitterness, even though really it wasn't the city itself, but the bubble they were in within the city,
11. "It was the best years of my life."
Those who said this were the opposite; they had a wonderful experience in school and yearn to go back to those days. But I find this statement equally sad because high school is only the beginning of life, and if you experience your best years so early in life, what is there to look forward to?
