Last Thursday (now 2 Thursdays ago) I flew down to Shanghai to hang out with Meg while she and Sara were still in China.
Meg and I stayed with Ian, who has a pretty swanky apartment, and I got to sleep on a mattress without pointy springs for the first time in 2 months. Pure heaven.
Now I only spent the weekend there but wow! I’m going to try to put Shanghai in perspective…
It’s big, dynamic, has good food, a bar with Sam Adams, and great taxi signs…overall a great place. Still I was trying to find a way to show people how big the city is.
In my best SAT impression - Beijing is to Washington, DC as Shanghai is to Manhattan.
While I don’t normally approve of just posting landscape pictures (just buy a postcard) I’m going to do a few of them below.
First my fun Shanghai fact of the day…
In about 1840, Shanghai had around 35,000 people. 50 years later the population was over 1,000,000. Now the official population is around 17,000,000.
Anyway we spent the weekend eating good western food with a bunch of other expats. I even ended up having lunch with a Deloitte colleague I worked with in Cincinnati around 2000. It was good to see a familiar face and she gave me lots of pointers on transferring from the US to China.
On Saturday, Meg, Ian, Sara, Laura (Sara’s friend), Tage (from Detroit, well GM at least), and I had brunch and then Ian took Meg and I sightseeing.
After more good food on Saturday night I flew back to Beijing on Sunday. I’m pretty convinced I was flying with a bunch of people who had never flown before. As the plane took off the passengers (most of them pretty old) started going “Ahhhh”, “Ohhhh”, etc. and talking very excitedly. Kind of cute actually.
Ok the pictures:
I took this from the window of Ian’s apartment. I then turned about 30 degrees to the left and took this:
Both of these pictures show part of a residential section of Shanghai. Now on the famous section, the Bund.
Shanghai was populated by westerners from about 1850 until the early 1900s. As a result you’d probably be able to mistake sections of the riverfront architecture for some European city.
The Bund is right along the ‘Pu’ river. The city is divided into the old and new sections of Pu Xi and Pu Dong. Since ‘xi’ means ‘west’ and ‘dong’ means ‘east’ I am assuming that the Bund is on the west side of the river. The Deloitte offices are about 3-4 blocks behind these buildings.
Meg, Ian, and I then took a very surreal ride under the river. My pictures didn’t turn out but just trust me on this…strange. Anyway, we proceeded to head up to the Grand Hyatt in Pu Dong and used the windows in their restaurant to take in the size of Shanghai.
Apparently it is this way to the ocean. I wouldn’t really know because unlike Beijing I had a tough time keeping track of directions.
Meg, me, and Ian in ghost mode. If I remember correctly (and I probably don’t) the GM headquarters are in that shiny building in the middle.
When I looked down from the Hyatt I could see they were building a new building which I thought was pretty cool from this angle. I also just read that Shanghai is sinking like Venice (apparently about 9mm a year). So the skyscrapers are built on giant concrete rafts.
We needed the famous skyline photos right? The tall pointy building in the back right is where the pictures above where taken. The hotel starts on floor 55.
I tried to get George Jetson as he flew by but couldn’t take the picture quickly enough. So this Chinese dude said he’d be in the picture.
Detroit in the house.
The Shanghai taxis have the NYC style taxi info posted behind the driver in both Chinese and English. I found the following two translations of the same section to be quite enjoyable.
My favorite sign so far. You may have to download this picture and zoom in but make sure you read rule #2. #4 amused me as well.
Same section different taxi company.
Until next time, I won’t connive at you if you don’t connive at me.