What should I avoid in Shanghai?

The scam that catches most first-timers in Shanghai starts with a smile on Nanjing East Road: two or three friendly 'students' ask you to take their photo, chat in good English, then suggest a traditional tea ceremony in a back room nearby. The tea tastes thin and lukewarm, and the bill tends to land between 500 and 2,000 yuan, which at the 12 October rate of 6.6928 yuan to the US dollar is roughly $75 to $300. The same script runs around People's Square and along the Bund promenade, sometimes with an 'art student exhibition' swapped in for the tea. Say 'bu yao' (don't want) and keep walking toward the river. To be fair, Shanghai is not a dangerous city: TTDI rates it 7.2/10 for solo-traveler safety (see the TTDI Solo-Safety Index), and the risk here is to your wallet, not to you. Strangers who open a conversation in English on those three stretches are selling something.

Pudong Airport is where tired people make expensive choices. Men in the arrivals hall will murmur 'taxi?' and walk you to an unmarked car, and the fare to a Huangpu District hotel can reach 400 or 500 yuan. Ignore them and follow the signs to the official rank outside Terminal 1 or Terminal 2, where the meter runs and the same ride likely costs 170 to 220 yuan. The Maglev is the other first-day trap: fifty yuan buys 8 minutes of speed, and the line ends at Longyang Road station in Pudong, still about 20 minutes by metro from the riverfront hotels, so you haul bags through a transfer anyway. Metro Line 2 runs from the airport to the city centre for under 10 yuan in a little over an hour. One practical note before the flight: Google Maps, WhatsApp and Gmail are blocked on local Wi-Fi in China, and many small shops now turn away cash and foreign cards, so install a roaming eSIM and link a Visa or Mastercard to Alipay before you board.

Two paid attractions on the Huangpu River are not worth your time. The Bund Sightseeing Tunnel charges about 50 yuan to roll you under the water in a plastic pod, past strobing lights and a droning soundtrack, while the public ferry from Jinling East Road costs 2 yuan and gives you cold river wind on your face, a whiff of diesel, and the Lujiazui skyline straight ahead. The Oriental Pearl Tower is the second to skip: its queues can run past an hour on weekends, and the tower you came to photograph is missing from every picture you take inside it. Go up the Shanghai World Financial Center instead; the 100th-floor deck sits at 474 metres and looks down on the Pearl's pink spheres.

Yu Garden itself deserves 90 minutes, but the bazaar wrapped around it does not, with its jade trinkets, shouting hawkers, and a takeaway line for soup dumplings that might cost you 45 minutes. Walk to Jia Jia Tang Bao on Huanghe Road, north of the big square, where the room smells of black vinegar and shredded ginger and a basket of pork xiaolongbao costs around 30 yuan, arriving steaming, thin-skinned and full of broth hot enough to burn your tongue, so bite a corner and sip first. Don't book Shanghai Disneyland Park for your first full day: it sits at the far end of Metro Line 11, about an hour from the centre, and a jet-lagged 12-hour park day tends to wreck day two as well. The riverfront on any evening of the 1 to 7 October National Day holiday is shoulder to shoulder, with police one-way systems on the approach streets; the week after is kinder. Shanghai read 22.5°C and mainly clear at 7pm on 13 October, with humidity at 73%.