Shanghai

We arrived in Shanghai yesterday afternoon, and will be leaving tomorrow morning. I wish we could spend another day here, there is so much to see.

We were caught in rush hour traffic on our way to the hotel from the airport. Shanghai has an elaborate street system, not unlike LA, with elevated highways over the local streets. The original city has a ring road where the old wall used to be, and with the overwhelming growth over the years, they built a second ring road. The city can by dizzying. We are staying at the Nanjing Hotel, which is in the British Concession area near the Bund.

We got a bit of a history lesson yesterday from two Australian architects working here, from all the wars and the different concessions given first to the British, then the French, then the Americans, to the Jewish ghettos, to the old LiLongs (lane houses) that dominated old Shanghai which are being demolished to make room for new developments. We finished the tour with drinks on the rooftop deck of a building on the Bund. This is a city filled with architectural delights, and the city is spectacularly lit up at night. There's a big floating electronic billboard boat on the river, and the lights atop the buildings. It is also overcast, partly from the pollution, partly from the particulate matter floating around from all the construction. Construction occurs 24 hours, and there are hordes of new developments. The City is looking towards developing 9 towns within the city, each with its own economic base.

Keep in mind this is a city of 16 million, the 4th largest city in the world!! We went to the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall. There is nothing that makes planners happier than visiting a temple paying homage to planning. On the 3rd floor, there's a scaled model of the city, with river and all. Environmental protection and the greening of the urban environment is also high on the agenda. Shanghai is also planning to build one of the largest airports in the world, with the capacity to handle 60 million passengers a year. The scope of the public projects and the rate of growth here is just mindboggling. Much of the environmental clean-up is geared towards the 2010 Expo to be hosted here.

We also visited the Jin Mao Tower, the tallest here in Shanghai, and got a good look at the building that looks like a bottle opener, the other skyscraper under construction next door. The bottle opener was supposed to be the next tallest building in the world, surpassing the Taipei 101, but I think some other building in Dubai that was recently completed is even taller. You snooze, you lose.

Just came back from checking out the wholesale market. Did not buy anything because venders were surrounding us like fleas and we could not get a moment's peace, which makes shopping very unpleasant. I guess we foreigners are fresh meat for these predators.

Looking forward to seeing an acrobatics show tonight.