Shanghai

What a cool city! We our guide, whose card reads "Jack Robinson," is a huge sports fan and takes his profession very seriously, in that he wants to be the absolute best guide possible. His English is excellent and he is very knowledgeable about the city.

We're staying at the Four Seasons Hotel, which is maybe the nicest hotel I've ever stayed in. The room is huge and beautiful, the service is terrific and the health club is to die for.

The city, which has 18+ million inhabitants, is like East meets West. By most appearances, it looks like a European city that has been abruptly populated by the Chinese. The building style is different from anywhere else in China, but would be unremarkable in France or Holland. But all the signs are in Chinese (and English). We started our tour with a visit to a park, where men were flying kites, old people were doing Tai Chi, younger people were ballroom dancing (tango, fox trot, that kind of thing), and others were loudly singing songs in large groups, with a header up by an easel holding the lyrics. Jack said that they are songs praising the Communist Party, but he also mentioned that most of the old people had now left the part to stand outside the nearby stock exchange and follow their investments. So there you go. China in a nutshell.

We walked around the area called the French Concession. When China lost the Opium Wars, which as far as I can tell were about the Western countries wanting to be able to sell opium in China in an unfettered manner. The resulting treaty gave control of pieces of Shanghai to the British, French, Japanese and Americans (who ceded their part to the British when WWI started). It's this kind of history that helps Shanghai look the way it does. After walking through the residential neighborhood and shopping in some nice boutiques we went to an area called The Bund, a well-known street along the river. The buildings are about 30 early 20th century beauties in a row along a curved street. THey all look like banks, and I guess many of them are, though some have stores like Armani or Hugo Boss in the lobby. Apparently it's special at night when it's all lit up.

We then went across the river to the financial center, where most of the tallest buildings are being built. The Grand Hyatt has its lobby on the 56th floor of an 87 story building, and a fantastic atrium. After lunch, we went to the "Old City." It's called that, but it was all rebuilt in the 1980s because...okay, you should know this by now, the original was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Apparently it was actually the orignal commercial hub, but it's just a bunch of cute souvenir shops now. In its midst, however, is the Yu Garden, noted by our guide as one of the 3 things one must see when in Shanghai. It is a beautiful thing. Even though it's pretty small and a bit crowded (apparently it's shoulder to shoulder on weekends) it's beautiful and peaceful. This whole feng shui thing has something to it, even if part of the idea is to allow dragons to fly through the space easily.

That evening, we saw the Shanghai Acrobats. It was an impressive show, but Cirque de Soliel has spoiled the drama of this sort of thing.

Shanghai 1