Shanghai, China, July 6th

First full day in China. Jet lag stung a little but for I almost slept through the entire night. Since we were both up early my roommate and I went for an early morning walk around the hotel this morning before breakfast. The dichotomy of Shanghai is astounding. The pictures you see in the on the link at the bottom of the page are from a walk basically around the block. We went from a four star hotel at the main intersection to people cooking in the streets in about thirty feet. Everyone we saw was extremely nice and had smiles on their faces. Yet, when you turn onto the next main street you see nothing but skyscrapers with Starbucks on the ground floor. You can contrast the pictures of the side streets to the pictures along Nanjing Road which makes the Manhattan and the Miracle mile in Chicago a bit envious.

One of the most funny, brilliant, and enjoyable things Paul, my roommate, and I saw was the UPS …... fan fest, for lack of a better description. To escape the heat, more on that later, we ducked into a mall and saw throngs of Chinese, mostly young packed around demonstrations being done at a UPS booth in the main part of the mall. You could have your picture taken, play a delivery video game, and watch UPS toys load and transport other toys all while dance and techno music cranked in the background. By the way we did all of the things and attracted a rather large crowd, apparently a chubby American is fun to watch.

We spent the day mostly walking around the modern sights of Shanghai. There is not much left of the old stuff and what is left is going to going away soon. This is troubling but understandable considering the a lot of the old stuff was put there by foreign powers who had forced there way into China ports by getting them addicted to Opium. So know the former concessions are now areas where foreigners spend tons a money in China. In fact a few of us decided to forgo shopping for a beer at the Paulaner Pub in the Old French Concession of China. I realize that the previous makes little sense but it is none the less true. That’s where the picture of me and the decidedly ungermanic beer girls came from.

The Yu Garden was also beautiful as advertised but still quite crowded. After the Yu Garden we watched a demonstration of silk making. (I got a few videos so check them out on my Picasa Photo site. After a great lunch, the food is great; we went to a Confucius Temple. It was awesome. The temple had the Analects of Confucius carved on the temple walls. The phrase I took a picture of reads, “Confucius says.” A pretty common phrase.

After dinner we slid over to the over to the train station to take the over night train to Beijing. I can not describe the amount of people at the train station. The massive scene of humanity was unlike anything I had ever seen at a train station, ever. The sleeper train was very nice. It is a non-stop train and only comes to about $75 dollars. I think I was in bed for about ten minutes before I fell asleep.

A couple observations. One, I was totally impressed by cosmopolitan Shanghai. Its development is unlike anything I have ever seen. I am not sure what I expected to see but Shanghai makes New York City look like …, Memphis. I also wonder will happen to the people in the side streets. They seem like their time in the city is running out. Second, Shanghai reached 38.5 degrees Celsius which is about 102 degrees Fahrenheit which incidentally broke a one hundred and fifteen year record for the city. And lastly…, thank god for Gold Bond. Enough said.

Link to photos of Day 2 in Shanghai.