Where do locals actually go in Shanghai?

Fuxing Park opens at 6am, and by 6:30 the plane-tree lanes near the Gaolan Road gate are full of retirees doing tai chi, couples ballroom dancing to a crackling speaker, and men slapping cards onto stone tables. In October the osmanthus along the paths smells of honey and apricot, and after 9am most of them have gone home. Wulumuqi Middle Road, a 25-minute walk west near Wuyuan Road, is where Xuhui residents buy greens and fresh tofu before work; a jianbing from a cart there costs about 8 to 10 yuan, roughly US$1.30 at 6.68 yuan to the dollar. People's Park on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon is the strangest local scene in Shanghai: parents line the walkways off Nanjing West Road with open umbrellas taped with a son's or daughter's age, height, salary and flat ownership, and they bargain over matches in Shanghainese. They are there to find a match for their children, so ask before you photograph anyone at People's Park.

For laptop days, skip the Former French Concession. On Anfu Road, between Wulumuqi Middle Road and Changshu Road, the cafes are full by 11am on Saturdays, the tables are tiny and staff turn them over fast. Daxue Road in Yangpu is a 5-minute walk from Jiangwan Stadium station on Line 10, where Fudan and Tongji graduate students set up with laptops on weekday afternoons, coffee runs 25 to 35 yuan, and nobody hovers. Shanghai Library East, on Hehuan Road in Pudong, is the best free workspace in the city, its long hushed reading rooms smelling of new timber and paper. Public wifi across Shanghai almost always asks for an SMS code sent to a Chinese mobile number, and Google, Gmail and WhatsApp sit behind the Great Firewall, so an eSIM that roams through a Hong Kong or overseas carrier gets around both problems on day one. Manner Coffee, the local chain, charges around 15 to 20 yuan a cup from takeaway windows with almost no seats. That is coffee for the walk, not for a day's work.

When evening comes, Shanghai moves toward the Huangpu. The West Bund boardwalk along Longteng Avenue in Xuhui stretches roughly 11 km of riverfront, and on Friday and Saturday nights from 7pm, skateboards clack over the concrete near the old coal hopper while runners and dog walkers share the path. The air off the Huangpu smells of diesel and wet stone, and barge horns carry a long way after dark. Columbia Circle, at 1262 Yan'an West Road in Changning, fills on weekend afternoons with office workers on its lawn and in its cafes, and it is calmer and cheaper than Xintiandi, which locals mostly leave to visitors. The Bund and Yu Garden still draw Shanghainese on public holidays, though during Golden Week, from 1 to 7 October, the crowds at both can turn a 10-minute walk into 40 minutes.