first day of study touring in shanghai
first of all, here's a link to the photos for this day: http://web.mit.edu/awol/www/beijing/june11/. hope you enjoy them - i picked out the ones that were good. there are a lot, just to warn you. if this were really a good blog, i would combine pithy text with well-framed photos, but you'll just have to settle with somewhat witty text and the photos on my webspace.
life lived out of hotels is always strange at first because you have to learn the ins and outs of a new place. this morning we headed to the dining room for breakfast with our breakfast tickets, which were reminiscent of a hostel. breakfast was a motley assortment of stuff - congee, noodles, (really greasy) fried rice, dumplings, cake, you name it. it was fun, though, and all of it was familiar - i had assumed that most of what i'd see would be totally foreign. after breakfast i discovered the wonder that is a lower cost of living: for about USD$0.50, i bought enough water for 2-3 days. shocking! in europe, water is exorbitantly expensive because you're a tourist and they know it. in china, they know you're a tourist, yet water is still really cheap.
following our departure from the hotel we boarded our bus to go to the jin mao tower, which is in the center of town. or, what seemed to be the center of town. it's supposed to look kind of like a pagoda, and was designed by SOM (!!!!! danger alert!!!). the tower is really just like any tall tower - the observatory serves as a 360-degree viewing area without any care for the design of the space. and the exterior space is useless because it's so sunny here. but the elevator was kinda cool - it did 88 stories in 35 seconds. the only really odd thing about skyscrapers in shanghai (besides awful design) is that despite their height, they are far away horizontally. there are very wide streets that are blindingly sunny, and a whole lot of uninhabited, parched grass. it's not like new york city, where the towers are all packed close together. from the observatory you can see all of that; dennis says that there are two building types here - slab and tower. and it's true.
we then took a moment to admire the bund, which was nice and breezy, if not particularly exciting. we were standing on a bit of walkway/plaza which seemed like it should go on forever but didn't. the water in the river is brown-green, and i wouldn't jump into it for love or money. there's no way i want to know what's in that bracken.
from there, we visited a former mcp student's office, where we got a tour and some info about the tsinghua campus. we were also plied with fruit and drinks. we ate the former happily, despite all travel warnings not to eat foreign fruit. nobody got sick, though - we must be a lucky bunch. after that we went to see the xintiendi projects, which is a preservation/development project that renovated historic buildings, but turned them into a european-style pedestrian mall. we had lunch there, and sitting at an outdoor table, it really did feel like we were in europe. it's popular with the tourists, and most people there were a young chinese person, a chinese tourist, or white. mostly white. we wandered around a bit, discovering that the area is pretty small, about one city block. also attached to the block is a park of the same size, built by the developer. the developer did a nice landscaping job - if the park were in a temperate area. it definitely doesn't provide any shade from the blazing sun, though. as a result, the park is pretty much deserted.
speaking of pedestrians, chinese streets and sidewalks are one big game of chicken. people break all rules except one: "don't get killed." professor yu, our tsinghua guide here, waved his red flag in the street, as if we, the tourists, had the right of way over incoming traffic. and indeed, sometimes incoming traffic deigned to stop for us. go figure.
the tourist nature of our jaunt is a little bit of a love-hate relationship. on the one hand, it's nice to be on an air-conditioned bus - although the weather here is not as bad as i had envisioned it. perhaps i was subconsciously trying to condition myself to the climate here. on the other hand, though, i need to walk a city to understand it (even if the city is as big as shanghai); since we drive everywhere, i don't have a great handle on where things are and how big the city is. the city is busy with people, but is somehow different from a busy american city. quieter, maybe? though it is sunday... we did walk back to the hotel from the bund, though, which seems to indicate that it's not very far from our (very cheap but nice) hotel to the downtown. as you get farther away from the downtown, the sidewalks narrow, stop, are pre-empted by scaffolding, and are generally less friendly. oddly enough, the bridge we crossed was kind of like the bascule bridges in chicago, complete with brightly lit buildings (i'm thinking of the one near the nbc building).
all in all, i don't feel like i'm in a chinese city, which belies shanghai's colonial past. there isn't much historic architecture left, or vernacular space, and you can see distinct styles of the west in all of the buildings. yuyuan garden's marketplace is historic architecture (c. 1880s) but i still felt that i could have been in a recreation of historic architecture in the US - it was slightly surreal. though the marketplace is a little fake, it's still a nice reuse of architecture. the garden, in particular, is exquisite. built for a wealthy family as a small garden (!), it's a winding, confusing maze of serene rocks and trees, though it's slightly marred by all of the cameras (including mine).
it's interesting to see chinese culture gentrify from the inside. chinese "oriental" culture has always been used by foreigners - like the chinese-style shirts/tunics that were all the rage a few years ago - but in places like xintiendi, chinese culture is getting a makeover in the hybrid chinese-european way. high-end restaurants use chinese principles of space to design the restaurant, but appropriate western artifacts like glass wine glasses for every kind of wine.
i realy expected people to be ruder, more pushy, and louder. in my short experience thus far, people are quiet and not that pushy, and not in your face unless they want you to buy something. i don't feel like i've seen all of the city (or a representative slice of it), and i'm pretty sure i haven't. the big thing that's missing to my eye is the cultural/leisure institutions: museums, movie theaters, playhouses, etc. we passed one packed park (occupied chinese-style with the entire community sitting there, talking and not talking), but that was it. we saw shopping malls, but no libraries. non-consumerist institutions appear to be hidden to the eye.
traveling in a large group is very different from traveling with family or with a smaller class group. in portugal we were only six, so it was easy to get around the city. getting through the subway with 20-plus people? funny joke. we have numbers assigned to us so we can count off instead of asking the useless question, "is everybody here?" the consequence of the bus is that i feel like a tourist, which i don't like at all. people here are also more likely to try to take advantage of a group (or, white people in general), but it's safer to be in the large group. there's probably no happy medium, though, just preferences.
life lived out of hotels is always strange at first because you have to learn the ins and outs of a new place. this morning we headed to the dining room for breakfast with our breakfast tickets, which were reminiscent of a hostel. breakfast was a motley assortment of stuff - congee, noodles, (really greasy) fried rice, dumplings, cake, you name it. it was fun, though, and all of it was familiar - i had assumed that most of what i'd see would be totally foreign. after breakfast i discovered the wonder that is a lower cost of living: for about USD$0.50, i bought enough water for 2-3 days. shocking! in europe, water is exorbitantly expensive because you're a tourist and they know it. in china, they know you're a tourist, yet water is still really cheap.
following our departure from the hotel we boarded our bus to go to the jin mao tower, which is in the center of town. or, what seemed to be the center of town. it's supposed to look kind of like a pagoda, and was designed by SOM (!!!!! danger alert!!!). the tower is really just like any tall tower - the observatory serves as a 360-degree viewing area without any care for the design of the space. and the exterior space is useless because it's so sunny here. but the elevator was kinda cool - it did 88 stories in 35 seconds. the only really odd thing about skyscrapers in shanghai (besides awful design) is that despite their height, they are far away horizontally. there are very wide streets that are blindingly sunny, and a whole lot of uninhabited, parched grass. it's not like new york city, where the towers are all packed close together. from the observatory you can see all of that; dennis says that there are two building types here - slab and tower. and it's true.
we then took a moment to admire the bund, which was nice and breezy, if not particularly exciting. we were standing on a bit of walkway/plaza which seemed like it should go on forever but didn't. the water in the river is brown-green, and i wouldn't jump into it for love or money. there's no way i want to know what's in that bracken.
from there, we visited a former mcp student's office, where we got a tour and some info about the tsinghua campus. we were also plied with fruit and drinks. we ate the former happily, despite all travel warnings not to eat foreign fruit. nobody got sick, though - we must be a lucky bunch. after that we went to see the xintiendi projects, which is a preservation/development project that renovated historic buildings, but turned them into a european-style pedestrian mall. we had lunch there, and sitting at an outdoor table, it really did feel like we were in europe. it's popular with the tourists, and most people there were a young chinese person, a chinese tourist, or white. mostly white. we wandered around a bit, discovering that the area is pretty small, about one city block. also attached to the block is a park of the same size, built by the developer. the developer did a nice landscaping job - if the park were in a temperate area. it definitely doesn't provide any shade from the blazing sun, though. as a result, the park is pretty much deserted.
speaking of pedestrians, chinese streets and sidewalks are one big game of chicken. people break all rules except one: "don't get killed." professor yu, our tsinghua guide here, waved his red flag in the street, as if we, the tourists, had the right of way over incoming traffic. and indeed, sometimes incoming traffic deigned to stop for us. go figure.
the tourist nature of our jaunt is a little bit of a love-hate relationship. on the one hand, it's nice to be on an air-conditioned bus - although the weather here is not as bad as i had envisioned it. perhaps i was subconsciously trying to condition myself to the climate here. on the other hand, though, i need to walk a city to understand it (even if the city is as big as shanghai); since we drive everywhere, i don't have a great handle on where things are and how big the city is. the city is busy with people, but is somehow different from a busy american city. quieter, maybe? though it is sunday... we did walk back to the hotel from the bund, though, which seems to indicate that it's not very far from our (very cheap but nice) hotel to the downtown. as you get farther away from the downtown, the sidewalks narrow, stop, are pre-empted by scaffolding, and are generally less friendly. oddly enough, the bridge we crossed was kind of like the bascule bridges in chicago, complete with brightly lit buildings (i'm thinking of the one near the nbc building).
all in all, i don't feel like i'm in a chinese city, which belies shanghai's colonial past. there isn't much historic architecture left, or vernacular space, and you can see distinct styles of the west in all of the buildings. yuyuan garden's marketplace is historic architecture (c. 1880s) but i still felt that i could have been in a recreation of historic architecture in the US - it was slightly surreal. though the marketplace is a little fake, it's still a nice reuse of architecture. the garden, in particular, is exquisite. built for a wealthy family as a small garden (!), it's a winding, confusing maze of serene rocks and trees, though it's slightly marred by all of the cameras (including mine).
it's interesting to see chinese culture gentrify from the inside. chinese "oriental" culture has always been used by foreigners - like the chinese-style shirts/tunics that were all the rage a few years ago - but in places like xintiendi, chinese culture is getting a makeover in the hybrid chinese-european way. high-end restaurants use chinese principles of space to design the restaurant, but appropriate western artifacts like glass wine glasses for every kind of wine.
i realy expected people to be ruder, more pushy, and louder. in my short experience thus far, people are quiet and not that pushy, and not in your face unless they want you to buy something. i don't feel like i've seen all of the city (or a representative slice of it), and i'm pretty sure i haven't. the big thing that's missing to my eye is the cultural/leisure institutions: museums, movie theaters, playhouses, etc. we passed one packed park (occupied chinese-style with the entire community sitting there, talking and not talking), but that was it. we saw shopping malls, but no libraries. non-consumerist institutions appear to be hidden to the eye.
traveling in a large group is very different from traveling with family or with a smaller class group. in portugal we were only six, so it was easy to get around the city. getting through the subway with 20-plus people? funny joke. we have numbers assigned to us so we can count off instead of asking the useless question, "is everybody here?" the consequence of the bus is that i feel like a tourist, which i don't like at all. people here are also more likely to try to take advantage of a group (or, white people in general), but it's safer to be in the large group. there's probably no happy medium, though, just preferences.
posted by awol at 9:01 PM
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