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.

Metropolis infested with foreign adventurers

...or so says the Shanghai History Museum in a description of concession-era Shanghai.

In the last two days, I've been out and about Shanghai, the first day with a bunch of the Bulldogs here and today on my own. I probably (actually, make that definitely) won't post as often once I get to Beijing, and probably they won't be as long as this one will probably end up being, but I figure I might as well write a bunch while I can.

Impressions and neighborhoods

Shanghai's a huge city, and its neighborhoods are totally different from each other. The Bulldogs are staying at the Rayfont Hotel (上海南普瑞峰酒店) in the Old City in southern Shanghai. The neighborhood around here is fairly un-Westernized, very traditional and in parts quite poor. Depending on which streets you take, if you walk south towards the nearest metro station you walk through a neighborhood that is in part fairly dirty and squalid. It makes you think about the economic renaissance that China is going through, and at the same time how many people are left out of it. When I was looking for the metro stop on Sunday, I came across a sign in Chinese that I pieced together to say something along the lines of "Congratulations to the residents for signing the agreement to move into new homes!" In much of the literature that I've read about China, I always seem to run across something that deplores the destruction of the old architecture, whether it's the hutongs 胡同 in Beijing or the shikumen 石库门 in Shanghai and its replacement with "soulless modern architecture" or some variant thereof. But having actually walked through some of these neighborhoods, and realizing how run-down some of these buildings are, I'm not so sure that we have the right to criticize the destruction of all this architecture. It might be historic, but historic doesn't necessarily equal humane for the people living there.

But at the same time, if you walk north from this hotel, you walk through a neighborhood that, while not Westernized in architecture and still packed with people (and nothing like Pudong or the French Concession), is full of bustling shops and tons of people strolling around and generally seems like a good traditional shopping area.


This is on the way to the Yuyuan Gardens. Ignoring the modern-looking architecture in the background, the foreground is what this part of Shanghai looks like.

So that's the Old City. Then there's Pudong 浦东, which is the shiny new part of Shanghai on the west bank of the Huangpu River 黄浦江 and is totally different and Westernized and new. Rosie and I went walking along the Bund 外滩 last night and I snapped a ton of pictures. There's not that much to be said that you can't really see in the picture, except for the fact that the Oriental Pearl Tower 东方明珠塔 is one of the most distinctive buildings I've ever seen.


Pudong! This is before we walked back in the other direction and saw the upper pearl of the tower swathed in a polluted haze.

And finally there's the European-style architecture of the Bund and the French Concession 法国租界. A couple of us went to eat at a restaurant (which in itself is a whole other story) located in the French Concession last night and when we got out of the metro it was like we were in a totally different city. The street was wide, there was an actual sidewalk, all that stuff in the guidebooks about "tree-lined boulevards" actually turned out to be true and, aside from the Chinese characters of course, we could have been walking in any European or East Coast city. Which I guess is not surprising, but it was still a little jarring to see the difference. I'm going to try to go back to the French Concession tomorrow or Thursday and snap some pictures of the streets.


Yours truly in front of the Customs House, Bank of Communications building and Russo-Chinese Bank on the Bund.

Getting around

I've largely been getting around on the Shanghai Metro, with a couple of taxi rides. The metro's really nice (aka clean and cheap, unlike the New York subway, for instance), with a couple of caveats:

(1) The absurd opening hours (this is the really irritating one)
Last night, Rosie and I discovered that line 8 of the Metro closes before 10 pm. What?! Perhaps people don't really go out at night here (something that I HIGHLY doubt), but some of the lines close ridiculously early here, forcing you to take a taxi back. Luckily taxis aren't that expensive (they're like 11 RMB for the first two kilometers or something like that

(2) The incompleteness of the system
I guess this isn't really a system flaw, because the system's really new, but it's irritating.

(3) System maps portraying the future
Some guidebooks and maps have the bright idea to print maps for distribution that include the numerous lines under construction or being planned. That's great if you're interested in the system's development, but if you're trying to get somewhere it makes things a little difficult, because you don't want to plan to take a line that doesn't currently exist.

Yuyuan Gardens 豫园

This is a set of gardens that dates from the Ming dynasty in the northern part of the Old City in Shanghai. The shops around this area are super-touristy but the garden's quite pretty and the way that the stone walls are set up the whole area seems larger than it actually is.



Awesome dragon.

Shanghai Museum 上海博物馆

If you're a museum person at all, I recommend this museum -- it's got a ton of good collections of Chinese art, calligraphy, sculpture and bronzes. And there's a temporary exhibition on loan from the British Museum about the ancient Olympic Games as well, which is only going to be here until July. Plus it's free. Apparently the bronzes are supposed to be the centerpiece of the collection but I never really made it there because I started with my favorite things (calligraphy) on the third floor and I got pretty tired wandering around the seal, Ming and Qing dynasty furniture, Chinese coins and minority nationality art (really) collections.



This is probably my favorite piece of calligraphy in the entire collection.


There's a whole gallery devoted to "China's minority nationalities" that includes tons of wax figures dressed up like this.

Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre 上海城市规划展示馆

The name sounds really boring but it's actually a lot of fun. Basically it's this whole museum dedicated to the future of the city and how it's going to be this amazing environmentally-friendly transport-convenient metropolis of the future. There's a bunch of exhibits on Pudong, the airports, green Shanghai, etc., but the really cool exhibit is on the third floor where they have this huge model of Shanghai as it apparently will look in a couple of years. I think this was definitely worth the 30 RMB that I paid to get in.


Wow. Just wow.


This is in the lobby of the museum. It's kind of Star Wars-esque if you ask me. It's like the "Greatest Hits" of Pudong. Also, you can see part of the sign that says 城市，让生活更美好 or "Better City, Better Life."

Shanghai Municipal History Museum 上海市历史陈列馆

This museum is in the bottom of the Oriental Pearl Tower. The admission for the museum is 35 RMB (if you go up to the top of the tower the admission is different, there's like seven different fares depending on how high you want to go and what you want to see.)


It's somewhere in here. Also, it's amazing how low the clouds/smog/fog were.

This museum was excellent, except for the part in which my camera ran out of batteries halfway through. It takes you through Shanghai's history through use of a ton of wax figures and model streetscapes from the early Ming dynasty era to the end of the concession era in the 1940s. There isn't much on the history of the city from say 1949 to until about 1990 (when suddenly economic reforms emerge), which isn't surprising given this government's preference for rewriting history. Anyway, I really liked the museum, even if wax figures are kind of corny, because the way it's set up, particularly in the concession-era portions, is like a mock streetscape, so you sort of get a feeling for what walking Shanghai during that time must have been like. (This is also where there's a plaque that describes the concession era as one in which Shanghai was a "metropolis infested with foreign adventurers." All in all, though, the propagandistic level of the explanations in the museum is actually pretty low, lower than I was expecting.)


The dastardly British arrive and begin Shanghai's "semi-colonial and semi-feudal" era!


An opium den.


So far as I can tell, an actual boundary stone from the French Concession from the early Republican period.


A miniature of an early-1900s streetscape.

...

If it looks like I have a particular love for museums, it's because it's been raining all day today, and a walk along the Bund and strolling the French Concession didn't really seem like good ideas today.

All in all, though, these last two days have been pretty amazing. I've been able to see a ton of the city, and with two days left before I head north to Beijing on Friday, hopefully I'll be able to explore the French Concession a bit and get a bird's-eye view of Shanghai from the Jinmao Tower 金茂大厦 in Pudong. But in any case, I'm having a ton of fun, stretching my legs and making the most of these last few days of vacation before the grind of HBA begins. :)

Airline adventures and Shanghai start

So I'm here, in Shanghai, after what surprisingly wasn't that bad of a journey (aside from an hour or so in Hong Kong, which I'll get to in a moment) at the hotel in which my friends Gang and Rosie are staying.

To start from the beginning, the 14-hour-40-minute flight from LAX to Hong Kong wasn't actually as unbearable as I would've expected it to be. Maybe it's just a function of getting older, or getting more used to these cross-country flights that I'm always doing now. In any case, I slept on and off for quite some time and watched a couple of movies and presto! I was landing in Hong Kong.


I like taking pictures of scenery and landscapes, so I took pictures of Hong Kong airport as I was waiting. (particularly because of the pretty mountains in the back.)

Unfortunately, I got into the terminal to discover that my flight to Shanghai had been canceled, and so I had to stand in line behind this guy from Italy who was getting increasingly ticked off that the super-overworked woman behind the counter couldn't magically make his tickets appear out of nowhere. If I hadn't been so nervous that I would be stuck in Hong Kong for ages I probably would have felt sorrier for the clerk and more irritated at the man.

On second thought, though, there are MUCH worse airports to be stuck in for a long layover than Hong Kong airport. It's a beautiful airport and the duty-free shopping is astounding.

The flight from Hong Kong to Shanghai was fine, after I managed to get on one (it was only 2 hours and yet they served a full meal of which I of course took full advantage. Take that, American airlines!) Again indulging my like of random scenic pictures, I took some snapshots of a random Hong Kong village:


My first impression upon getting into Shanghai and the cab ride to this hotel was the absolute grayness of the sky -- I'm from LA, so it's not as if I'm a stranger to air pollution, but at the least the sky is blue. Here it was just absolutely gray. I can't decide if it's because of smog or fog...I'm inclined to think the former, since it's already early afternoon.

In that vein, this is (one of) the views from one of the rooms at this hotel:


There's some interesting-looking ruin-type things in the front of this second photo but I'm not entirely sure what they are.

My most overwhelming impression, in the end, though, is that it reminds me a lot of being in Taiwan -- the super-strong AC (which, apparently, is called 空调 in China, as opposed to 冷气 which is what I always grew up saying) and the muggy, humid, hot air outside. I guess I'm back in Asia!

Departure

I'm leaving for China tonight, so in 24 hours I'll be at Hong Kong International Airport boarding my flight for Shanghai (and I'll land in Shanghai on Sunday at noon, if everything goes according to schedule.)

It's kind of weird to think that I'm leaving the country for so long -- I've never been abroad for this amount of time before, and not by myself, either. I'm really excited though, a few last-minute jitters aside.

So probably the next post will be from China -- hopefully the flights won't be too bad.

The Plan

So I'm pretty excited about this summer. I'll be blogging about my travels through China and Taiwan from June through August, courtesy of the Light Fellowship.

The Plan

Now to May 26: Yale
I'll be chilling at Yale, playing the carillon, eating, spending time outdoors (if the sun decides to cooperate), reading summer novels and seeing a ton of my friends who are going to be here.

May 26 to June 7: California
Back to the best state in the Union. More of the same, i.e. reading, eating, spending time outdoors, chilling. Let me know if you're going to be in Socal.

June 8 to June 13: Shanghai
This'll be my first time in China, so I figured I'd start it off by seeing this crazy city. I know a couple of people who are going to be in Shanghai for internships this summer, so I'll be staying with them, exploring the city and hanging out.

June 13 to August 16: Beijing
(What I'm actually going to China for.) I'll be studying Chinese at Harvard Beijing Academy and staying through the first week of the Olympics. I'm really excited.

August 16 to August 26: Taiwan
I have family in Taiwan (mostly in 台中 Taichung), so I will be relaxing with them after what promises to be an intense nine weeks at HBA. I'm really looking forward to going back to Taiwan, since I was last back two years ago. Definitely let me know if you're going to be in Taiwan -- I'd love to hang out!

Post

My address while I'm in Beijing will be:

(Name)
Harvard Beijing Academy
Convention Center
Beijing Language and Culture University
15 Xueyuan Lu, Haidian Qu
Beijing, 100083, P.R. China

or

(姓名)
北京市海淀区学院路 15 号，100083
北京语言大学会议中心，哈佛北京书院

And that's about it -- 11½ weeks abroad in total. It should be fun. :)