Fall Weekend in Shanghai - Part 1

     We returned to Shenzhen Monday night, after spending a long weekend in Shanghai.  Leah doesn't have many school breaks when we'll be able to travel in China, so we took advantage of her vacation this week.  It seems unusual to have a full week off only five weeks into the school year when everyone's just starting to get some traction.  But this is holiday time, between the Moon Festival last week and National Day coming up on October 1.

We stayed in the French Concession district of Shanghai.  Despite the name, there never were all that many French who lived here after France made this part of Shanghai a sort of outpost in the mid-1800's, subject to French rather than Chinese law  until the 1940's.  We stayed in a small apartment in the peachy-tan building to the left in the background.  The young Chinese-American owners were doing a brisk online business renting it out for short stays now during the 2010 World Expo going on in Shanghai through the end of October.  The location was great:  interesting neighborhood, tree-lined streets, a few small wet markets nearby, and a 5-minute walk from a Metro stop.  We rode the Metro a number of times and were impressed.  It was well-marked, clean, much faster than a taxi or bus, and a mere 3-4 RMB ($.45-.60) per ride.  China has spent a lot of money in Shanghai the last few years on infrastructure like the Metro, getting ready to show off the city to the rest of the world during the Expo.  In the photo, notice the laundry drying on the rods extending out over the street.  Electric clothes dryers are not used much in China, even by those who could afford one.

Saturday morning we awoke to classical piano music blaring over a loudspeaker.  Looking out our window we saw these students lined up in formation, going through morning exercises on this playing field.   After a half-hour they broke out into squads of 20 or so, and neatly jogged two-abreast off the field.

The next two mornings it wasn't music, but car horns that we heard, and not just stray beeps, but conversations between horns,  as impatient drivers competed for road space even on a weekend in this congested city of 17 million people.  This was a lively contrast to our apartment in Shenzhen, where we are on the bay side of the building, with no road and no car noise.

Bikes and scooters abound in Shanghai, much moreso than in Shenzhen.  We had to be careful whenever we stepped off a curb, because they were everywhere.  I took this shot as I crossed on a green light, perhaps overly confident that all these cyclists would wait at their red light.  The woman on the left is wearing a helmet, a rarity, although it doesn't look substantial enough to offer much protection.

Here's a motorcycle taxi, one of a few we saw on the Shanghai streets.  The image on the side of the taxi is famously modern Shanghai, looking out over the Huangpu River toward Pudong's skyscrapers.  Prior to China declaring Pudong a Special Economic Zone less than 20 years ago,  it was mostly swampy farmland.

And here we are, pasted into the same scene as the one on the side of the taxi above.  I'm sure you pick out the Oriental Pearl Tower in the Pudong skyline.  This much-discussed structure with its multiple spheres, some of them hot pink, is a good example of what I think of as a certain exuberance in some modern Chinese styling.  What a contrast to the uniform drabness of the Cultural Revolution.

We are standing on the Bund, which is an elevated wide walkway along the Huangpu River.  On one side of the river is ultra-modern Pudong, and on the other are the huge old colonial banks, trading houses and hotels built in the 1920's and 30's, reminders that Shanghai was the busiest international port in Asia in the 1930's.  The Bund was filled with tourists when we were there on a Saturday afternoon, not just foreigners, but lots of ordinary Chinese people, too.