Shanghai’d Day 2

Offerings at the Confucious Temple

Spent the day wandering the streets and neighbourhoods of Shanghai – Fuxing Park, Xintiandi, Confucius Temple & Yuyuan Gardens. Wandered down many an alley through ‘wet’ markets full of seafood, veggies, frogs and other unidentifiable things.

Cargo bikes - very impressive.

Marveled at the kites, sites and madness on the streets where a mix of buses, taxis, cars, mopeds, bikes and pedestrians try to co-exist without too many casualties. Loved the bikes, the bike lanes, the bike parking and the cargo bikes – very inspiring.

And what up with the donuts? There are a serious number of donut shops in this city, Mister Donut, Dunkin Donuts, Donut Express – it seems fried dough is universally loved.

The enormous amount of development on what seems like every corner is for the upcoming World Expo this summer – the Expo logo is everywhere as are the little blue mascots that look alarmingly like gumby. Rumor has it they’re expecting 70+ million visitors over a 6 month period. That is like having 2x the population of Canada coming to your city. Hard to comprehend the scale of it & hard to imagine it will all be ready and emerge from the bamboo scaffolding to greet the world on time.

I’m spending this evening prepping for the first of 3 factory visits tomorrow – this one is to the facility that ‘cuts & sews’ our bags. Looking forward to it – we’ll be reviewing the findings from a series of audits we’ve done in the past year and assessing progress to date. More on that tomorrow…

Expo guy is everywhere

Tags: China, Ethical Sourcing, factory compliance, fair labor, shanghai, social compliance, sustainable purchasing