Shanghai

John: We went to Shanghai from Hangzhou in a way that is unavailable at home: bullet train! 300 kilometers per hour, smooth as glass, cool and comfortable. Also relatively cheap. This is something we need in the US.

Shanghai is enormous; there are something between 15 and 23 million people here, depending on how you draw the perimeter and how the government decides to do the counting (there are apparently a lot of people living here illegally, and the government is not eager to have them as part of the official count.) Enormous tall apartment buildings go on for miles. There's a brand-new metro system, with three new lines opening this year alone. For a long time, it has been one of the most Western-oriented of the cities of China; in the early twentieth century, much of the city was divided up between foreign powers that had sovereignty over their own areas; the area known as the Bund is where the Western banks and businesses were headquartered then, and the architecture in that area, dating to the 1920s and 30s, feels a lot like Chicago. The neighborhood once known as the French Concession is now filled with pricey condos, nice restaurants, and stores with familiar high-end brands: Prada, Apple, Jaguar. There's a whole lot of capitalist consuming going on around there in the city that was once the headquarters for the Gang of Four.

We got to town in the evening, and went immediately started doing some consuming ourselves, going to dinner (of course!) at a fantastic dim sum restaurant, one that had pictures of people like Jackie Chan and Mel Gibson eating there on the walls. All I can say is that you haven't lived until you've had dumplings made with chicken and truffle. 

With (as always) limited time in the city, we went the next day to the Yu Gardens Market, a cluster of old buildings in the center of town. It's packed with shops selling all sorts of things; we got Aidan a beautiful Chinese suit with a dragon on the front, and also a marble stamp with his name engraved on it in Chinese characters. It's a crowded and interesting, with temples and gardens intermixed with shops in narrow alleys:

One of the alleys in the labyrinth of Yu Gardens Market.

The central square of the market; note the Starbucks in the lower right.

We went to the temple of the city gods, which was unimpressive compared to the Linyin temple in Hangzhou, perhaps because it looks very much like the statues are recent and not very artistic recreations of older statues; maybe the originals were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution--that happened in a lot of places. (We learned in Hangzhou that the temples were largely spared there because Chou En-Lai was a resident, and he prevented the kind of destruction that was common elsewhere.) The streets around are filled with markets selling odder bric-a-brac: kites and fans, but also things like Cultural Revolution playing cards and statues of Mao, which read in context more as kitsch than anything else. Or at least that is how it seemed to me; we didn't get into any conversations about how people feel about Mao these days. Nor could we if we wanted to, since the language barrier was pretty profound much of the time even in so modern and outward-looking a city as Shanghai. We traveled from the ship to town by taxi, and had to do with slips of paper that the travel agent who came on the ship (as they usually do in port) wrote out for us with destinations in Chinese characters.

In front of the Shanghai Museum, a very nice museum of Chinese art.

And we wandered--to a couple of very nice parks, each of which had some amusement-park style rides (including some bumper cars that decidedly did not meet US standards of safety), to the Shanghai Museum, to various areas, on and off the beaten paths for tourists. We know that we barely scratched the surface here--it's a huge and exciting city.  Stuff is happening here--there are new building projects everywhere, and there's a lot of energy around the place. The Pudong area, which we did not enter, is the city's business and financial district. It's across the river from the Bund, on land that until 1989, was farmland and a chemical factory.  Here it is now:

That is, everything behind us here was build in the last 20 years or so. It will be interesting to return here; I hope we get the chance.