I love... Shanghai

My friend Emily noted how casually I mentioned that I was traveling to Shanghai for the weekend. To explain this, Kelly and I spent the whole trip there trying to think of the appropriate US comparison. True, it’s a plane ride, so it can’t be like Boston to NYC. Chicago seemed too far, so we finally decided that NYC to D.C. felt right. It’s definitely a trip, and a new city to explore, but it’s not a big leap. One of our co-workers goes to Shanghai so regularly that he couldn’t meet up with us while we were there because his tennis lesson turned into a tournament that lasted into the night.

Nevertheless, being there did feel like a trip…back to America. I’d expected it to have a more western feel because in the 30’s it was built up by foreign businessmen. (In addition to the fact that Beijing, being the conservative, Mao-centered capital, has long held out from western influence.) Regardless, I was shocked at how much more cosmopolitan and orderly it felt on the streets of Shanghai. There were no giant piles of brick and dirt on the broken sidewalks. I was asked to wait on the sidewalk instead of in the street. I even saw a traffic cop stop a bicyclist who had “too many” cardboard boxes, (when in Beijing terms he had barely begun to stack.)

I was never more convinced of the different feel of Shanghai than in People’s Square. Walking around the pathways in the park, looking at groups of people hanging out on the grass, I remembered Central Park for the first time in a long time.

Outside the Museum of Modern Art, which is in the square, we were stopped by some young Chinese tourists who asked us to take their picture. They asked us where we were from, and we said New York (for lack of a long conversation.) Their reaction was, “Ahh! Welcome to China’s New York!”

After the square we walked to The Bund, which is the downtown area of the city that faces the river. I’ve compared this view to the sculpture park in Astoria, as it faces the Pudong area of Shanghai.

Comment from Inside the Museum: I’m not one to comment on art, but one exhibit that struck me was an instillation of five shelves with broken eggshells. Inside the artist had written “random words from the English Language Book.” Each word was repeated many times in its shell in blue pen. I couldn’t help but wonder if this is how Chines people feel when we use their characters without regard to their meaning.