Mega City

  Shanghai, China
Saturday, May 19, 2007

I became good friends with my counterpart in Shanghai (two jobs ago at AMO) and we had the incredible good fortune of being able to visit them and stay in their 'spare' downtown apartment during our visit to Shanghai.  Thanks again!!

Fit For A King

Jessica, her husband, Alex and their 6.5yr old son Geoffrey lived only a few streets away from us.  This meant that on the morning we alighted our sleeper train we arrived at their place to "real" coffee (ohmygohd - it wasn't nescafe with "white" and too much sugar all in one pack) and freshly baked French croissants with jam.  A surreal juxtaposition from only moments earlier where we'd been fighting with crooked taxi drivers who refused to turn on their meter and dodging flying spit blobs at the train station.  Suddenly we found ourselves listening to Geoffrey belting out Mozart concertos on his extremely elegant black piano. 

Welcome to Shanghai.

I had been to Shanghai once before on a flying work visit.  I had managed to visit the Bund in the day time and spent the evenings at extravagant, glistening, delicious restaurants.  My view of Shanghai was: excellent shopping (especially for Prada jackets and Nine West shoes), excellent dining (and I mean incredible tasting food) and just a huge, busy, bustling place.  This time round we have spent lots of time admiring the city at night and strolling the Bund when the whole city seems to really come alive.  The banks of the Huangpu River look amazing when the floodlights lights come on.

The Bund

The Gothic architecture down 'bank' street is straight off the set of Batman and the modern sky scrapers on the other side are also out of this world. [Having said this, it looks much more grim and polluted before the sun sets].

Pollution made the city look this blue

I would have to say that one of the highlights of my visit (but probably Iain's worst nightmare as I dragged him from place to place) was finally purchasing my new wizz-bang sexy SLR Nikon camera.  We probably spent a bit too long gauging prices and haggling with vendors - but at the end of the day it worked and we got my kit for a great price! ;)

One of the things I have to mention about China (which I have forgotten to mention thus far) despite it being one of my favourite obscure points of note...... is their distinct love of cucumbers.  Most would be aware that I too am a cucumber lover and would gladly substitute lunch, dinner or snack-time with a Lebanese cucumber.  The Chinese seem to chomp on cucumbers all day long.  Squatting on the street, at the beach, climbing mountains, on trains, at picnics as an accompaniment to their pot noodles and awful spam looking sausages there is always a cucumber present.  [My personal celebration of victory after climbing Tai Shan was a giant, peeled cucumber!]  It's sensational.  It goes even further, with almost every restaurant I have eaten at serving a 70c dish which consists of Lebanese cucumbers sliced lengthways with a drizzle of soy sauce and sesame oil and freshly sliced chili atop for decoration. I mean where else could you find this?  Sheer brilliance which almost completely rights the wrongs of their spitting society.

We did lots of other things in Shanghai but I am happy to let Iain go into more detail. 

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Do you find Sydney a little too "small town"? Maybe Bangkok is a little sleepy for you? Development maybe just not fast enough for you in Beijing? Well come on down to Shanghai.  

Normally the world's megacities are determined by mayors of dirt poor locales engaging in population oneupmanship that in all reality is probably unverifiable and unquantifiable. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro says "yeah, well fifty squillion people live in my city", and the mayor of Mexico City responds "well, fourfty quintillion people live in my city", and so on. Yes, and most of them live in cardboard boxes. For the quibblers - and I'm one - that's not a city, thats an Ikea.  

Oriental Pearl Tower

But not Shanghai. It is a megacity in the true sense of the word, and when you hear 14m people live there, you can quite believe they all do, and that most live pretty well. Its polished, grand and pulsating with energy and innovation. Its heart is a CBD of giant buildings that just keep going and going on either side of the river and washing out from it. The 1870-1920 Bund architecture (the riverbank downtown where all the foreign banks built heavy stone edifices on the oozing mud) is preserved as the focal point with the city growing out powerfully behind it.  

Whether cause or effect, Shanghai is very different to anywhere else we've seen in China. Another perfect (and still expanding) Metro. An inexpensive and cosmopolitan restaurant scene. And a very nice holiday from the world of spitting.  

A bit of this experience lent credence to the new perspective of seeing China like Europe, and really being 'made up' of seven smaller nations. The Shanghainese are not Han (90% of China is), and they are noticably different in food, culture and manner - even skin colour, being much paler. I may well acquire a "Free Tibet" bumper sticker on my return. But I may also add a "Free Shanghai" sticker as well.  

Now, Shanghai also has the MagLev. In our straitened budgetary circumstances we treat each dollar as a little friend we are loathe to farewell and do so only with salty little tears in our eyes, but the $25 return trip to the airport was money well spent. We weren't flying anywhere, we were just seeing what all the fuss was about.

Maglev top speed

Travelling by MagLev is great: you feel every inch of speed, and the sense of danger isn't far away. Unlike a plane where you have no reference point, this train was cutting its arced path only a handful of metres above busy freeways while banked on its side at 45 degrees and travelling at a very reasonable 431km/hr. You spend half your journey attaining this top speed, then they basically cut the power and you coast in to the station for the last half. 32km. 7 minutes. $500m well spent in my book. I hope a Town Hall to Gosford line is under consideration (a 12 minute commute!)

A hint of danger? Wind resistance is a factor, and you get the odd fairly decent bump and bobble which is just a shade disconcerting sitting in a metal box without wheels atop a flat concrete plinth 10m above a roadway. At 400 km/hr. I wish I understood enough science to know what was keeping us stuck there: as it stood I merely found myself reexamining my views on religion.

We were once again fortunate to enjoy exceptional hospitality here, with Claudine's friend Jessica (and husband Alex) letting us use an apartment that was between tenants. We are gaining a real appreciation for the simple luxuries of the world: your own washing machine, a lounge upon which to stretch out, a kettle...

Jessica and Alex also took us out for some very 5 star Shanghainese food. I feared midway through the meal I was making a little piggy of myself (four people: nine dishes) - and my pork belly hotpot induced hallucinations later that night seemed to confirm that my gluttony switch, long dormant, could still function. Duck tongue, pigeon, lotus root, soup dumplings. All in a restaurant district being born out of a former garden created in around 1900 by the Mitsui company of Japan and later appropriated by Mao as one of his many holiday houses around the country. (Its on a scale like a small university). What a night. And even followed by a little impromptu city tour and a late night Starbucks stop.

We spent a lot of time in Shanghai buying Claude a new camera. Yes, shopping is fun, so I'm told. Unless our quality of holiday photos improve dramatically in the following 3 entries repercussions may be forthcoming.

More of the museum

A final highlight for Shanghai is their excellent museum. Most Chinese museums focus on features of little interest to, well, anyone. You are more likely to read or hear that an object is "7.5 cm tall, 6cm wide, 4.3cm in depth, and blue in colour" than to hear anything about its provenance or relevance. The Shanghai Museum bucked this trend.

I normally find the pottery and copper work part of museums just heartstoppingly brainbendingly tedious (c'mon, its all about the paintings). Its amazing how many people around the world banged out a near identical wobbly iron/ copper pot about 3000-4000 years ago: its like an early period of globalisation occurred and if you look hard enough you'll find an Iron Age Made in Taiwan - Jamie Oliver by Tefal imprint on each example. The Shanghai museum took a different tack, and had numerous examples of the casts required to make each item. I left feeling that this is something I should have been taught to do in school. I feel smelting and pot making is a fundamental skill I must have just so Iron Age man can't mock me from a distance for my lack of basic skills.

Qing dynasty vase

In the pottery section, they really pull out all the stops - some items I really saw as on a par with a great Impressionist painting: hard to convey here although Claude has one or two great photos I think. What is illustrative is how much the export of porcelain funded the early empire (and the early and pretty much continuous wars if you're a glass half empty person). They built for the home market. They built extensively for the Islamic market. They built for Europe and the UK. And somehow what they make today seems to pale beside what they could make all those years ago.

A trip through the museum also gently coaxes and coerces you into learning more about the various empires and dynasties. You can see the development of one way of thinking end abruptly as a more murderous dynasty is in the ascendant. Its easy to forget that Genghis through to grandson Kublai Khan ruled the place for 160 or so years around 1300AD. Not much pottery being made then.

In the museum you also see the transitions from Confucious and his followers (about 500BC) until the Qin emperor takes over and makes the focus of all education about one focal topic: him. He united China into the country you mostly see today, introduced one currency and also offered some fairly brutal thoughts on law and order: favorite punishments including not just death by boiling, but that the deceased be poked with a stick after his death. Now there's your deterrant to reoffending.

The Museum has one comical aspect: a top floor gallery otherwise out of place housing the Gallery for Minority Peoples. All Chinese museums seem to have this in a belated central directive type attempt to show how much Taiwan and Tibet (among others) have always been part of China. All it shows is how different they've been and for just how many years they've been dead keen to not be any part of China at all.

Sydney is seeming a smaller, even slightly antiquated, place with every day I spend here (a feeling started in Bangkok). But that can be fixed. I still miss its tea, its bacon and the eggs benedict at Joe's: all items that seem unexportable. And if anyone can email me a picture of a blue sky that wouldn't be too bad either. For the best of both worlds I'll print it out and gaze at it as I go back and forth on the MagLev.