a weirdo in china, pt. 8: intermission

Sorry for the extensive delay in posting this -- the internet was awful at my Beijing hotel, and after leaving Shanghai I couldn't connect to my blog to post anything.

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The next day was another big one for sightseeing. I decided to visit Yu Garden, a famous household garden dating back to the Ming dynasty. I decided to try to find it without relying on GPS, and I got completely lost on the way, and accidentally went to the City God Temple first.

This guy looks smug for a reason.

It's ostensibly a large temple complex dedicated to the particular gods who oversee Shanghai. In practice, it's a tourist trap, and does a poor job concealing that.

Such craftsmanship.

Room after room of cheap, shiny Buddhas and other god-figures got old REAL fast. I was glad it only cost USD $1.50 to get in there, because otherwise I would have been really grumpy! I only stuck around long enough to snap these photos and I was on my way.

These people are praying that they don't have to spend much longer here.

I turned the corner and found my real destination. After fending off a very pushy woman begging in the ticket line, I got my ticket and made my way inside a much more serene spot.

To enter, you need to cross the Nine-Turn Bridge, so designed because apparently demons are stupid enough that they get really confused when a bridge turns a lot and they won't be able to follow you across it. I don't know, the demons I've met have generally had a bit more wherewithal, but I suppose you take what placebos you can.

I don't know why they were spraying mist all over this boat.

There were some pretty cool fountains, though. And I wasn't even inside yet!

The gardens themselves were gorgeous. Shanghai contains a fair amount of foliage for a filthy cesspool of a city, especially in some of the hipper shopping districts, but everything generally feels constrained and disappointingly regimented. The gardens were different, there was a bit of natural, unchecked beauty. It was more like the constructions had been placed around the natural elements than the reverse, and it was beautiful.

I spent almost two hours just soaking in it. I think I may have been starved for nature, and a sense of cleanliness.

The thing about Shanghai is that everything is filthy. Yes, the streets are littered with trash, but so are the sidewalks, and so are peoples' homes. It is imperative that you are understand that this is just the natural state of things there. Regular people lack the time and inclination to pick up large messes, there is only a token effort made at official street-cleaning, and so piles of refuse and rubble simply grow and encompass entire stretches of walkway, courtyard, or alley.

Admittedly, this is outside of an active construction site.
But it actually looks better than many of the storefronts I walked past.

On top of the general sense of disorder, there's dirt and decay everywhere. Most of the official notices I saw were faded, frayed, or otherwise distressed. It's like the entire city is a broken window. Coupled with the poor air quality and fundamentally mercenary attitude of the populace, and Shanghai has all the character of a highway truck stop. And not one of the more savory ones. Beijing's a little different, but I'll get to that later.

There are some bright spots.

So the gardens were truly a much-needed time of respite for me. It gave me the chance to recharge my batteries, in a sense. Plus, it was quiet, which I only really understood I'd been missing when I returned into Shanghai proper and found myself once again assaulted with the clamor of dozens of millions of people doing their thing. And, of course, once again lost myself in the backstreets, far from the city center.

But a typhoon was on its away, and I had to hasten home. I only had one day left in Shanghai after this, but at least I felt like I had really seen it from every side, from the glitter and futurism of the Bund to the scrappy, beaten-down streets at the edge of the city. What more was left to see?

a weirdo in china, pt. 7: photoemission

On this day, I finally saw what all the fuss was about.

It was a relatively quiet start to the day. My feet were hurting a bit from all the walking I'd been doing, so I took it easy and explored the local neighborhoods a bit, but there wasn't all that much to see.

For lunch, a friend and I got Anhui food. I thought standards of quality were pretty low around here in general, but this place opened my eyes. Their vegetable of choice is celery.

That last one is jellyfish, for your information, and it was pretty gross. It had the consistency of a plastic wallet and the flavor of a plastic lemon. Maybe somebody does jellyfish right, but it wasn't these guys. Also, they lied to us and told us their cuisine was similar to Sichuan, just because that's what we were looking for. Jerks.

After that disappointment, I knew I had to make things right. I had to visit...the Bund.

The Bund is a stretch of river walk in Shanghai that has a perfect view of all the most iconic buildings in the city. It is, without hyperbole, one of the two most amazing views I've ever experienced, with the other being the sight of the cathedral in Cologne.

Nanjing Road, where the crush of people approaches the ridiculous. This cop had to cut off the crowd and order us to stop so that cars could go past, but people kept slipping past his cordon, smugglers in the night.

It was amazing. It was necessary. If you go to Shanghai, go see the Bund.

a weirdo in china, pt. 6: superposition

On Tuesday, I wanted to go to the Shanghai Museum, a wonderland of cultural and historical artifacts.

It looks like this.

But I was not able to go! It turns out that if you give 1.4 billion people free admission to a really nice museum, then the lines get kind of long. I wasn't prepared to give up three hours, so I wandered around until I found the real prize, the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, tucked away in an adorable little garden off of People's Square.

The museum itself was...not what I was expecting! Its interior was wholly devoted to a set of exhibits meant to create the impression of living through a video game. It ranged from the lamely bizarre (a group of artsy films inspired by Toy Story where toys move around if you stare at them long enough) to the awesome bizarre, like so:

The main exhibit was a journey into madness, a story about the end of the world, fighting to save the last living plants, failing, being killed, and having your brain transferred into a digital consciousness, ushering in a quantum superage. It was very intense.

In the end, death was a release.

After the museum, we found a Japanese restaurant in a fancy mall, and I got to eat OKONOMIYAKI!!!!!

I went home and promptly passed out. Then dinner was KOREAN BARBEQUE!!! I guess I wasn't really in the mood for Chinese food that day.

I wish I had more deep and soulful thoughts on the nature of daily life in China. The only thing I can share is that, at least as far as Shanghai goes, eating seems to be peoples' #1 form of entertainment. There doesn't seem to be that much else going on, but food is everywhere and fanatically indulged in. The food culture is pretty intimidating, given that it's dangerous for the untried to eat things of questionable hygiene (such as most FRUITS, VEGETABLES, and MEATS). You never know how long something's been sitting out, or what it may have been sprayed with to keep it going.

I can't even drink the water from my hotel tap.

So what does that leave the rest of us? Those without Chinese stomachs or linguistic ability? I can't say I'm really sure. How can I possibly have explored all the great sights in a city of 24 million people in less than a week? When I ask people, they just shrug and tell me to wait for Beijing. Shanghai is cool, and it moves fast, but there's something to be said for thinking ahead, investing in a future you can't quite imagine, and that doesn't seem to be in the nature of this place. There is now, and there is next, and there is nothing else worth thinking about.