Shanghai to Beijing

I'm in Beijing!

Also, I've been writing this post over a couple of days, so forgive me if it sounds a bit fragmented. This is also my last day of relative freedom, since tomorrow is the placement exam, classes start on Monday and we’re hitting the Great Wall on Friday, so pretty much this’ll be it for long, thorough, touristy posts. Haha.

Shanghai passé

I spent my third-to-last day strolling around the French Concession 法租界 in Shanghai, which definitely lived up to its “tree-lined” description of it that I kept reading about in all these guidebooks. I took a ton of pictures of the streets, which are beautifully laid out with wide sidewalks, wide traffic lanes and trees growing along the entire way. Since I had the Lonely Planet guidebook with me I sort of followed the walking tour that it laid out which hit up a bunch of the highlights of the district, but because I got too tired I couldn’t exactly follow it. Still, though, the district is absolutely beautiful, and if you’re ever in Shanghai and want a change from the sterility of Pudong or the chaos of the Old City, the French Concession is the place to go.

Beautiful streets...and shady trees, particularly great since there was actually sun there that day.

Also, one of the reasons that I might have liked the French Concession so much is that I saw the sun and blue skies that day!

A quick roundup of the places that I hit up on Wednesday:

(1) Xintiandi 新天地

This is kind of a retail complex with faux-shikumen buildings and super-overpriced food. I hit up the Shikumen Open House Museum 屋里厢石库门居民陈列馆and the site of the 1st National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. The Shikumen Open House Museum is really cool – it’s a recreation of old Shanghai residences from the 1920s and 1930s. Technically there aren’t any pictures allowed but I took a bunch anyway. It’s a really cool concept, and it’s really impressive that they let you walk through the rooms without any bars or anything separating you from the items.

Apparently, this is a room at one of the corners at the shikumen house, which is the worst room because it gets warm in the summer and cold in the winter, so it was a room often rented out to people, such as writers (such as Lu Xun!)

The site of the first national congress of the CCP is really only interesting if you know a bit about Chinese history, which, thanks to Spence, I do -- otherwise it’s not really worth a visit. Though it’s free. No pictures allowed here either.

(2) Sun Yat-sen’s Former Residence 孙中山故居

More or less what it claims to be. Again, the usual pattern of museum with artifacts, followed by a slightly-less-than-impressive house. At this point, I was getting a little tired of museums, so I didn’t really stay that long.

Father of the (Chinese) Country, aka 国父

(3) The Moller House 马勒别墅

This wasn’t open. It’s a nice-looking Scandinavian-style house in the middle of Shanghai, so the juxtaposition is kind of incongruous.

Unfortunately it wasn't open. But isn't this random, a Scandinavian building in the middle of the former French Concession in the Chinese city of Shanghai?

(4) Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre 宣传画年画艺术中心

This place has a really cool collection of propaganda posters dating from 1949 to about 1979 or so. The admission is 20 RMB and it’s really interesting to be able to see the pictures for real. Don’t, however, get anything from the adjoining gift store -- I think it’s overpriced (obviously the posters are super-expensive) and you can get most of the Cultural Revolution memorabilia elsewhere.

Self-explanatory.

Shanghai future

On my second-to-last day in Shanghai I more or less spent it strolling around Pudong, which is actually a really boring place to walk around because there’s nothing on the streets, which are super-wide, and it’s just filled with skyscrapers, which, while interesting, get kind of boring after a while. The only reason I went was to go up the Jinmao Tower 金茂大厦 to get some views of Shanghai. At 70 RMB admission, the view had better be good, and it was, except that the omnipresent pollution of Shanghai sort of clouded the view, which was really unfortunate. Still, though, I was able to get some good shots of the city.

The Oriental Pearl Tower in the foreground and the Huangpu River and the Bund in the background. It's kind of sad that there's so much pollution that from the Jinmao Tower you can't really see much.

After I got out of the Jinmao Tower I walked back to the metro stop at Lujiazui, but along the way I was able to take some snapshots of these two impressive towers in Shanghai:

Left: the Jinmao Tower. Right: the Shanghai World Financial Centre 上海环球金融中心.

Then at night, Gang, Rosie, Jiaona and I went walking along the Bund before the lights turned off at 10 pm and went on a mad photo-taking session as we walked along. It’s really a gorgeous street at night, and thanks to some help from Gang I think my night pictures of the Bund and Pudong turned out better. Unfortunately a lot of the pictures are spread among the four cameras that we have so I'm just picking one that I have that I like.

The Customs House.

All in all, I had a really good time in Shanghai these last couple of days. It was nice to start my summer in China with a city that encapsulates so much of China at once and, in my view, has a lot of history. I mean, obviously Beijing and other older cities have more traditional Chinese history, but Shanghai in my mind demonstrates some of the most interesting parts -- the concessions, foreigners in China, China’s 改革开放, etc. There isn’t another city in China in which you can get such a good idea of the influence that foreigners have had on the country, which is something that I think has been Also I had a blast hanging out with all of the Bulldogs. It was great.

Storms, pollution, traffic and mud

After a fairly uneventful plane ride from Shanghai Hongqiao airport 虹桥机场 we landed in Beijing, where the first thing I noticed immediately was the heavy, heavy smog and pollution. Granted, as I learned later, it was about to rain -- but still! According to the informational map and display we were at 2000 ft but outside my window all I could see were gray skies. Then I look down and all of a sudden realize that the ground is rapidly, rapidly approaching and in a minute or so we land, all amid this huge haze. I thought Shanghai was bad -- it's nothing compared to Beijing. It's absolutely ridiculous. Also, the ride back to BLCU took up three and a half hours (and it’s like a 30 km ride), mainly because the traffic was just horrendously slow.

Walking around yesterday and this morning was pretty miserable because of the rain that’s been coming down and the unpaved streets outside of BLCU, so my flip-flop-wearing habits have become rapidly curtailed since arrival at BLCU, since one trek outside in the mud and rain has quickly taught me that that wasn’t really a good idea. Hopefully it’ll get better soon. And of course there hasn’t been any sun, which isn’t really a surprise.

Other than that, I’ve basically just been going through the motions of settling in, so I won’t bore you with that stuff. Suffice it to say that I’m enjoying my last day of freedom before Chinese classes and school start and I have to start speaking Chinese 24-7. In a way I’m kind of looking forward to the language pledge because it’ll give me an excuse to just try my best and speak, mistakes and all, and hopefully I’ll be able to improve much more quickly than I have been.