May Day Holiday

I spent a couple days in Shanghai last week. Since May 1st is a holiday it was a four-day weekend. The long weekend coincided with 80-degree temperatures and sunny skies so the city’s sites were packed with tourists. I had lunch with a Chinese friend in a student restaurant on the busy East China Normal University campus on Friday. He showed me his dorm room, which was about the size of the double dorm rooms at UW-Madison, but these have four lofted beds over a small desk and dresser. The beds were a simple sheet of plywood and a blanket, no mattress. I’ll be living on campus at the Beijing Language and Culture University this summer, most likely in a double room, so I wonder what the accommodations will be like.

Later in the afternoon I met another Chinese friend who I had met at New Years party and have kept in touch with ever since. We walked along the boardwalk next to the Bund, which was packed with people, and then took a bus to the Yu Yuan Garden, which is a popular site in the area called Old Town. Until the 1980s, the city was a collection of old two or three story buildings traditional Chinese buildings, save for a few Art Deco buildings in the foreign concessions. I was surprised to learn that until 1983, the tallest building in the city was the 22-story, 275-foot high Park Hotel. Now it is the nearly finished World Financial Center, which is 101 stories and 1,614 feet high. Anyways, it hard to imagine that the entire city used to look like the Old Town and the hundreds (thousands, maybe?) of new highrises are all less than 25 years old.

Many of the old neighborhoods were razed and replaced with newer and much taller buildings. The Old Town neighborhood around the Yu Yuan Garden and a Confucian Temple were preserved, albeit significantly transformed in the way of becoming a tourist shopping mall of souvenir stores and ice cream shops.

It was a flashback to the only other time I was there, which was in late August when it was extremely hot and humid and the place was crawling with tourists. Funny to think that I was so awestruck and overwhelmed back then.

There was lots of good street food and I had some melon slices and bubble tea. We went to another food street where seafood is kept alive in buckets of water on the street. There were also a few live chickens, ducks, and snakes outside some restaurants. We weren’t so adventurous and went to a dumpling place, where we had two kinds of dumplings, noodles, and a rice dish with spinach that I found extra delicious – it was just like risotto.

We went back to the river to see the skyline and all the lights. On my past several visits to Shanghai there was poor visibility due to rain or smog, so it was nice to be able to see everything again, and it is different every time.

I stayed with my friend, which was the first time I’ve slept in a Chinese person’s apartment. He lives a long bus ride away on the south side of the city, in a neighborhood built for the World Expo. It was a barebones apartment supplied by his employer, a joint venture company with the German company Thyssen-Krup. I slept on his spare bed, which was basically a wooden box with no mattress. When you do have a Chinese mattress, it is always really firm and not much better than a plank of wood.

Some pictures are up at my web gallery.