shanghai: the new world capital

[VV o n g B a]

http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501040927/

a group of stories and photo essays on the hotness of shanghai. i gotta agree w/ one of the stories in there, the sheer optimism i experienced there was unlike any other city i've been to.

[kimpossible]

got pics? you should do a write-up of your experience. i'm interested and i'm sure there are others.

[contra_diction]

i'm definitely interested as i intend to move there in the near future. i'll be going there for a month in february... do tell!

[VV o n g B a]

i actually have a ton of pics so i'll post a few. i'm gonna need to resize them to attach them here tho. so i'll post a pic or two per write up. and since i have the pics organized by date, it will be in chronological order. i'll see if i can get something posted by tomorrow night. no promises tho.

[Emperor_Mike]

Well, I certainly can't wait to go in a month's time.

[VV o n g B a]

my first couple of days in shanghai.

as i was driven into town from the airport at some ungodly hour in the morning, the first thing i noticed was the lights. the highways and buildings are all lined w/ neon lights. dunno if this is a general asian thing or what, but it was pretty cool. u enter the city and ur presented w/ festive colors. good first impression.

i stay at my friend's relatives place for most of the trip. they live in the 3 story penthouse of their particular building. i was kinda surprised at how great the place looked. the place was spotless (kept clean by a maid who was paid 4 yuan an hour... approx 50 cents/hr) and had fashionable furniture and new electronics. apparently they had only moved into the place a few weeks ago. it cost about $150-200k i think (not including political connections).

the most immediate striking thing once daylight hit was the sheer amount of construction going on. it was absolutely incredible. literally anywhere u turned u saw cranes and more cranes. there was some statistic that 50% of all the cranes on earth are now in china. believe it. the apartment complex i stayed in was under construction itself. i had the feeling that 70-80% of the city was built within the past 5 years. i'm sure the actual numbers aren't that exaggerated, but the feeling is there.

first place i visited was the famous bund area around downtown shanghai. the bund is bunch of french influenced buildings facing the huangpu river. the pic w/ the guy and the kid is my friend and his cousin. the building on the left is the shanghai museum and the low building on the right is the opera house. dunno what that tall building in the background is called tho. last pic is from that same downtown area but at night. they like colored lights in their public parks... more later.

[AliBabaIncorporated]

They consider air pollution index below 100 to be newsworthy. shenzhen has average 20% lower air pollution, less inflated property prices, and people aren't as arrogant. (Oh yeah, and they speak the national language to each other instead of looking down on people who don't speak their little dialect).

Enjoy it while it lasts cuz it's going down at a rate of 2cm per year.

[VV o n g B a]

They consider air pollution index below 100 to be newsworthy. shenzhen has average 20% lower air pollution, less inflated property prices, and people aren't as arrogant. (Oh yeah, and they speak the national language to each other instead of looking down on people who don't speak their little dialect).

Enjoy it while it lasts cuz it's going down at a rate of 2cm per year.
too true. i'm planning to post a pic of the god awful air over there later.

as far as the language thing goes, i personally didn't feel much arrogance except for this one girl who had studied in korea. she had no qualms about praising shanghai and denigrating other cities and countries and the ppl that live in those countries. i did meet some other proud ppl but they were more proud of china in general. but my friend's relatives may have acted a bit differently around me than around native chinese cuz they knew i was a close friend of their relative and could only speak halting mandarin. i certainly heard from non-native chinese that commented on the arrogance.

[contra_diction]

i speak only a little bit of mandarin which i've learned over the last couple of months...i plan to have a good knowledge of the language by the end of next month, but i know my accent and intonations aren't good. i'm afraid to be looked down upon, even though i'm trying really hard. what would they think of me trying to get a job?
thank you for the pictures!

[truMp]

Hopefully my 500th post will make Hong Kong the new world capital :P

[Filiprish]

Year 2020 = Shanghai world capitol of high finance (marks my words)

[VV o n g B a]

everybody's heard of the rampant piracy that goes on in china. they have ripoffs of every brand in existance and many that aren't. instead of hello kitty u get hello bit (as in rabbit). instead of air jordan's u get air qiaodan's. they have a yao brand shoe that doesn't exist. instead of an old white guy's kentucky fried chicken, u get ... some old chinese guy's chinese food. and in addition to nominally legal malls, u get the xiangyang market, which is an insane market full of ripoffs. the place is huge and if the merchants recognize u as western, they follow u around trying to get u to buy stuff. and sometimes the products aren't fakes since they make the originals in china. they just smuggle overproduction out of the factory.

but they don't just have ripoff clothes... no no. they also have ripoff tourist traps. they have a tunnel under the bund in which u take a tram. the tram ride is slower than walking and u walk thru as series of flashing lights and low quality sound effects which they describe as heaven and hell. then at the end they have what they call an aquarium with exotic fish which is shown in my picture. finally they have something they call the sound fantastic voyage. u enter a room w/ a long table w/ earphones on it. u put the earphones on and they turn the lights off and play more lame ass sound effects. can't say it wasn't entertaining tho cuz me and my friend were crying towards the end b/c it was so fucking bad.

next is high tech shanghai. i hope my attachments work. this is the 3rd time i've tried this b/c my power went out and i couldn't upload correctly or something.

[sinisterpanda]

hahaha, that's some jiving aquarium they've got there!!

[yoMAMA]

poor fish.....

;)

[Napoleon Chynamite]

So does anyone have a plan for what to do about the fact that the city is sinking 2 cm per year, or is there pretty much nothing they can do about it and/or they're just sayin fuck it, it won't affect our lives so we don't care? I see a strange irony when comparing this fact with the optimistic attitudes of the Shanghainese people, haha.

[Kennyb]

Been the Shanghai and I loved it, despite the prices there can be abit too expensive but that's what you get for a developing and one of the biggest commercial city in the world. On a bias side here that I prefer Hong Kong more than Shanghai is because of the language barrier, however it is on par - that is not including the amount of spitting and making horrible noise to get the flem out of their throat....

*shudders*

[VV o n g B a]

high tech shanghai: first of all, let me say that despite the pics i'm posting, there are still parts of shanghai that aren't high tech. i didn't take pics of the neighborhoods that looked like they were still in the 19th century or earlier, but they are certainly there. and ppl still ride bikes in areas as upscale and commercial as nanjing dong lu. there are still many many poor ppl.

but the face of shanghai to most ppl taking public transportation is gonna be busses like the one shown. it was practically brand spanking new and may have been running of cleaner fuel like natural gas or something. it had an lcd tv that took a digital broadcast signal from somewhere. it may have had a gps b/c there was a computer voice always announcing where it was and where the next stop was in both mandarin and english.

the same goes for the subway system. lcd's in every subwaycar and large ones in the terminals. and the terminals looked great. i also rode on the subways in beijing and they suck. think of nyc's subways as compared to washington d.c.'s subways and u'll have an idea. but shanghai's were nicer than d.c.'s.

they also had some nice modern bridges and stuff. i think there were several bridges that looked like the one pictured but i could be wrong. notice the trucks in the bridge picture. u don't see too many of those inside the older parts of shanghai b/c the authorities outlawed trucks in the older more crowded streets. i believe the day we saw this bridge we were going to the indoor skiing facility. prolly built by japanese. i don't have pics of the inside unfortunately. it was pretty damn big and we went snowboarding inside. they had 3 levels, the highest of which wasn't open for some reason. me and my friend got bored of the 2 open levels and just started going up to the third on foot and snowboarding down. a few more ppl started doing the same and they eventually opened the 3rd level officially. i don't think most of the ppl there had the mentality of challenging authority or else the level would have been open a long time ago.

[yoMAMA]

So does anyone have a plan for what to do about the fact that the city is sinking 2 cm per year, or is there pretty much nothing they can do about it and/or they're just sayin fuck it, it won't affect our lives so we don't care? I see a strange irony when comparing this fact with the optimistic attitudes of the Shanghainese people, haha.

wasn't new york or boston built on a landfill as well?

[amidaladown]

shanghai is built on a landfill? It's been a bustling place for over a hundred years. Why would it sink? Isn't the city part of the mainland?

[AliBabaIncorporated]

shanghai is built on a landfill?
The weight of all the new skyscrapers combined with crappy hydraulic engineering in Pudong. My university has the same problem with one of our libraries. High water table in the ground, and the engineers forgot to account for the weight of the books when they built the place.