Impressions of Shanghai

Well, I'm sitting here waiting for the inauguration of President Barak Obama, and I ... oh, snap! Dustin Hoffman is there! SWEET! Man, he's so cool... See, my writing is kind of live, in spite of the fact that this will be posted later :D Anyways, as I was saying, I figured now would be a great time to write a little about what I've been up to in Shanghai. I'll be getting internet soon (though, as you read this, I've already gotten it), but I'll write as if I already had it :P

Well, we had something of an adventure yesterday (the 19th as of this writing) at the airport. As I mentioned last post, our flight was a wee bit delayed. What I didn't mention was how the airline offered to put us up temporarily at their airport hotel and serve us a complimentary lunch. Fortunately (or perhaps obnoxiously) we were only there with enough time to be issued rooms, get called down to lunch after ten minutes, then leave right away again. Appartenlty the pilot for the original flight became ill and was unfit to fly, so they had to send a replacement from Beijing. A wonderful side effect to all of this was that they were able to move most of the other people that were on our flight to alternates, so we had the plane almost entirely to ourselves (I think there were five people that weren't part of our group). It was about an hour and a half from Xi'an to Shanghai, just a bit longer than the trip from Beijing to Xi'an. We landed in Shanghai, and as soon as I got off the plane my skin, throat and lungs leapt with joy at the blessedly moist air :P I exaggerate, of course; I haven't had any problems at all with the dryer air of Beijing and Xi'an, but since Shanghai is so close to the coast the air is much cleaner, especially compared to Xi'an. I've had a chesty cough for most of today, getting all that dust out of my lungs...
Shanghai certainly gives one a great look at modern China. As I predicted, it's quite different from both Beijing and Xi'an, and not just because of the air. Everything here is incredibly modern; in fact, I don't think it's very much of a stretch to say that New York feels like the more outdated of the two. All of Shanghai's skyscrapers are less than 30 years old, part of that movement to modernize the country. And modern it is. Last night we took a short trip to the Bund, Shanghai's "Golden Mile", a waterfront area lined with skyscrapers. The view is magnificent at night, which is when we made our visit (pictures will be posted). Grabbed dinner at a small out-of-the-way place that had skewers you cooked at your table, then back to our hotel for a much-needed rest.
Day two (today as I write this, the 20th) we took a trip to a vibrant shopping district about a twenty minute drive away from our hotel. We moved through there pretty quickly and then split up to go our separate ways outside of some old Shanghai gardens. The gardens were beautiful, and I'm afraid I'll fill up my remaining space on Flickr uploading even a fraction of the pictures I took. Ok, so I started feeling artistic and got a little shutter-happy, but these gardens really were phenomenal. Lots of small oriental-style buildings (of course) and ponds, and the paths wound through everything in unexpected ways. There was a lot you could find by just looking, and hopefully I was able to get that in my pictures... After that was free time, but I hung with Pong laoshi and Chen laoshi and went with them and a few other people to a nearby temple to check it out. It was a "conglomerate" temple, really simple so it could cater to Hindus, Daoists, and Buddhists. I still need to find a Daoist temple to go check out... Then we went and checked out the shops we missed, I got a few things, and then had lunch. After lunch I wandered around with a couple people for a while and we made our way back to the hotel. I guess we went a little out of our way at one point, because the walk was much longer than it should have been XP Got ourselves a little something to eat, and I got some internet in the business center to e-mail a few people, which brings me back to where I was at the beginning of this post... Alright, Obama's going to get sworn in now, so I'm off. Next post!