The story appears on

Page A5

September 5, 2017

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

HomeMetroSociety

Group wedding to mark cruise liner festival

AN osmanthus blossom festival, a float parade and a group wedding at sea will form part of a carnival from Saturday near the city’s major cruise liner port in Baoshan District.

The Shanghai Cruise Liner Tourism Festival, which runs through October 6, will also include an international darts competition and sightseeing tours along the waterfront at the Mouth of Yangtze River, where a “continuous footpath” is about to be built, the district government said yesterday.

The activities are all part of the city’s annual tourism festival.

The event aims to showcase the Wusongkou Cruise Liner Port, which has become the Asia’s largest and the world’s fourth largest cruise liner port following Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Cape Canaveral in the United States, said Zhu Zhongwei, director with the district’s waterfront commission.

The port, which opened in 2012 for cruise tourism, had 2.8 million inbound and outbound tourists in 471 cruise trips in 2016, up 63 percent on 2015. As of last month, the port has handled 1.87 million tourists in 308 cruise trips, said Zhu.

Expansion work on the port will be completed by the end of the year to allow four cruise liners to be able to berth simultaneously. The port will be able to handle 1,000 cruise liners a year by then.

The district government will organize guided tours during the festival to showcase the scenery along the Huangpu and Yangtze rivers.

Not far from the port, people can walk into the city’s biggest osmanthus forest in Gucun Park during the festival.

Over 10,000 osmanthus trees covering 2.6 million square meters will fully blossom in the park from September 22. The trees in various species will turn the park into a sea of red, orange, yellow and green flowers with a sweet fragrance, said Ye Qiang, the district’s tourism bureau director.

As a highlight of the festival, about 20 couples will attend a group wedding on a cruise liner in a five-day trip on September 20 in a bid to develop a new wedding ceremony format to please the post-1990s generation.

“The number of post-1990s have outnumbered their 1980s counterparts for the first time this year to become the main marriage force in the city,” said Cao Zhonghua, president of the Shanghai Wedding Trade Association.

The younger generation has quite different demands for their weddings comparing with their predecessors. They ask for fewer traditional conventions and more fun, Cao said.

A darts and music festival will be held on September 23-24 at Elite Valley on 258 Changjiang Road.

Dozens of floats will parade along a 4-kilometer-long route in north Shanghai on September 23 to mark the climax of the cruise liner festival.


 

Copyright 漏 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

娌叕缃戝畨澶 31010602000204鍙

Email this to your friend