A brief trip

The whole school went on a field trip on Wednesday and Thursday of this past week. I found out on Monday that it was finalized and would take up two whole days. I spent both days in Shanghai with Soma, the Korean teacher who teaches Chinese to the little kids and to me. He’s the only other young male teacher at the school and I practice spoken Chinese with him. I got to know him better over two days spent walking around the city - it turns out he’s half Taiwanese and speaks Chinese fluently because he studied in Taiwan and at a Chinese school in Korea. He then studied English at a university in Korea and for two years in New Jersey, so he also speaks English really well.

I bought a Chinese-English dictionary and some food (really good bread and a bag of German granola). I went back to the Yu Yuan Garden area and tried a new food – the “xiao long bao” from a restaurant that is supposed to serve the best xiao long bao in the world. Some say there’s a better xiao long bao at a famous restaurant in Taipei, but these little pork and soup dumplings are originally from Shanghai and given the long line that is always outside the take-out window, I’d say this place’s dumplings are without equal. They were really damn good and eating them next to the garden’s goldfish pond ringed with neon lights was perfect.

I went to two new museums. One was a contemporary art museum on the Bund. It was somewhat bare and had two odd exhibits – one with images of giant balloons in places around the city, including one in the museum, and a circle of video monitors showing people crawling from screen to screen in a continuous loop.

The other museum was at the Oriental Pearl TV tower, which I had never visited before. We went inside the base of the tower to visit a historical museum and skipped the overpriced trip up to the higher levels. The museum was cooler than I expected. It had a lot of old things like cars, local goods, and stones and signs that used to mark the boundaries of the foreign concessions. Much of the museum was recreations of different shops and street scenes with wax statues, which doesn’t always look great but the glimpse into each stage of the city’s history was really interesting. When we left and took the metro to the other side of the river I recognized a few names of famous places on the subway map and saw a couple of the historical buildings that we saw scale models of.

Behind all the new towers and shopping malls in the city lies a fascinating history of the rise, fall, and second rise of a huge city. It was once a small, overlooked fishing town on the Huangpu River known by some as “little Suzhou.” Since the economic reforms 30 years ago, it has became the dominant port in eastern China and now has about 20 million people (many times more than Suzhou) and is the center of China’s fashion, media, and financial industries. In between were some opium wars, rebellions, and a revolution.

And the last new thing I did was to ride the ferry across the river. I didn’t even know there was a ferry, only tour boats, until my Chinese friend pointed it out a few weeks ago. It cheap and quick – only 0.5 yuan and no more than five minutes to get across – and riding along with a bunch of crusty old Chinese guys and young delivery boys on motorcycles and was fun.

Pictures from the two days are online.