ChinaBlog MiniTrip End

The sun has just set over the Olympic Torch Building out my twelfth-story window. I've been gathering and organizing all the footage from this incredible 5 day trip to the southern part of China. It feels incredibly home-like here in my Beijing apartment, much more so than I ever would have thought, and not a little relieving that I am no longer living out of a suitcase. For the first time in a few days, sweat is not pouring down my face Airplane-style, and there are no mosquitoes to be heard, but I am also sad to face the work ahead for my thesis. I want to keep exploring this place. I've clearly just scratched the surface, and a trip from one city to two others is not even close to allowing for a full understanding of this country. Although I will say that after three days in Shanghai I have a pretty good feel for how it differs from my home port of Beijing. For one thing, it is a lot more vibrant. Beijing is a city of nonstop movement, but that movement seems always related to work and completing the never-ending set of tasks that develop when erecting a city of 20 million in half a decade. On the other hand, twenty years ago Shanghai was a bunch of rice paddies, and since then has become the second largest urban center in China. But it feels as though its growth and development have long ago slowed to normal heightened Chinese levels. The city's vibrancy comes from a strong night life, and a younger-skewed populace that thrives on modern convenience. If you want to make some comparisons, Beijing's endless urban sprawl is similar to Los Angeles', and Shanghai's density and youth is similar to New York's. These are obviously gross generalizations, but they can work on the surface.
--Our nonstop shot from Hangzhou to Shanghai came after an amazing tour through a Hangzhou bamboo plantation and factory. I'm still scratching at the volcanic bumps left behind by some of the biggest and, according to the plant manager, fiercest mosquitoes in the world. You could feel them landing on you, not by stinger or wing flaps, but by weight. 'Oh, haha! A puppy just jumped on my shoulder! Now where did you come from little fella-OHMYGODWHATTHEHELLISTHAT-GETITOFFGETITOFF!' And then the weakness sets in, your knees buckle, and you're scratching in another spot for the rest of the month. But aside from that, they might easily have filmed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in this plantation, because it is nauseatingly beautiful. The factory ran like a swiss watch, with a surprising number of women 'throwing the slats'. That's what they call working in a bamboo factory. Actually, I just made that up. But that's what it should be called. And now it is. By the time we were out of the 156 degree factory heat we were almost unable to muster the strength to get to the train station. I was worried that our 'hard seat' tickets would give us 10" of butt space upon which to hang on for two and a half hours of dear life, bone-rattling 20mph rail travel. Imagine my surprise, for the second and last time on this trip, when the sleekest, modernest, shiniest bullet train pulled up to the platform and silently halted before us. The wide, comfortable seats were anything but 'hard', and could be labeled more accurately as 'ohlordthat'snice' or maybe 'doweeverhavetogetoffthisheavenlything'. The hour flitted past quick as a trackside bamboo shoot, while the sky got darker and more menacing as we approached Shanghai. By the time we arrived lightning was constant through the ebony clouds, illuminating tiny parts of the massive skyline one fragile blink at a time. Our mad, haphazard scramble through the muddy streets of Shanghai left us and our belongings all manner of soaked, and I considered myself a genius for having stuffed an umbrella in the outside pocket of my bag, despite the 75 degree weather of Beijing when I left. Always be prepared, and such. After several wrong turns, a similar number of frantic phone calls to the hostel, and even a couple of verbal directions from passing Europeans, we found our glass hole in the wall and slipped inside...into the greatest hostel my meager travels have ever brought me to. It's difficult to describe how nice this place is, but I would liken it to a W hotel. If you've ever seen one of those, you'll get the idea. If you haven't, check one out. It may be cheesy as a hotel chain, but as a hostel it's heaven on earth, especially for $18 a night. And the fleet of young ladies who staffed the place all spoke excellent english, and were invaluable in navigating the city over the coming days.
--Our (meaning me, Jamie, Mark, and Sean) first dinner was inside a place recommended to us by my Beijing roommates, who had been in Shanghai for one day before we arrived. I got a hamburger, fries, and a coke, which was the first such dish I've had here, and it only cost $25. Not 25 Yuan, as you would expect in Beijing. My can of Coke, no refills, was $5. Five. Dollars. It almost made the burger and fries a good deal. Needless to say, we all returned to the hostel fuming. If you're wondering why we even ate dinner there, it was because the district we were in, on that particular day of the week (Tuesday), shuts down at 10. We arrived starving at 9:55. It was either eat expensively or not at all. We ate. And fumed.
--The next morning, however, we awoke with an air of optimism. Shanghai was before us, waiting. This time it was me, Jamie, Mark, and Matt. You might be able to tell who all these people are if you look at my flickr page (www.flickr.com/photos/chrisward23). We set out to find the French district, which we'd been told was very quaint and interesting, along with a good place to eat breakfast called the Mansion Hotel. We left at nine, arrived bedraggled and hungry at 10:05, and were told that the place closed at 10, and opened again for lunch at 1. What IS it with this place? So we went to McDonald's, where I had a coconut pie and a shot of oj to tide me over. We found ourselves on the main shopping street, and strolled along until Jamie was inexplicably sucked into the black hole that is H&M. There's a spot of oil on the street below my window that looks exactly like a bunny. Hi Sonia! Where was I? Oh, right, H&M. After some cajoling, canoodeling, and conversing, we convinced H&M to let our little comrade slip through its mighty capitalist digits intact. Phew, that was too close. Our next stop was the People's Square, where we met a die-hard Wisconsin fan who ran up to us screaming about some Rose Bowl or other, not knowing that Matt's MICHIGAN ARCHITECTURE shirt pretty much eliminated him from any knowledge of such events. I chuckled and remained silent.
--Our goal was a new-ish building called the Chinese Urban Planning Museum, which has the largest scale model of a city in the world. How big could a scale model of a city be? It's half scale. Ok, not that big. But one of my feet would only crush one of its buildings. And every structure in the city over 3 stories is represented in one gigantic room. Pictures are on Flickr. It's an amazing exhibit, one that must continually be updated as new iconic buildings are erected every 6 months or so.
--The next stop was the Oriental Pearl tower, a Space-Needle-esque thing standing on the other side of the Yangtze from the Urban Planning Museum. A couple subway stops later we emerged underneath it, gawking at the ridiculousness of the thing. It's a gigantic cement tower covered in big metal balls. Pictures are on Flickr. A young Chinese man came up to us and began rattling away in insistent Mandarin, and we stood for a few moments with our heads cocked listening for any uttered word we might latch onto to gather his intentions. We finally were able to communicate that we were architecture students from the US, at which point he switched to his native English and told us that he was from Georgia Tech. It was all a little practical joke to make us look stupid. Ha. Ha. All his asian-american friends laughed heartily at our expense, and we sort of looked at each other with an air of 'um...ok'. Jamie felt especially offended, and invited the lot of them to join us that evening for dinner (with the intention of making them eat something horrible). Admiring the tower for a few minutes, our stomachs tapped us on the shoulder and reminded us that it was 2 in the afternoon, then pointed to a nearby Subway. Mmm...shrimp sandwiches. They don't make them like that back home. Sated, we could have gone back into the subway tunnels for a complicated, crowded ride back across the river, but something about the words 'Tourist Tunnel' in rainbow text on our map managed to snag our attention. What in the world was a 'Tourist Tunnel'? It must be amazing, seeing that it has the adjective 'Tourist'. 'Tourist Anything' is always better than just 'Anything'. It went under the river, and nearby posters had pictures of fish. Maybe it was a 'Tourist Glass Tunnel Across the River'. Or a 'Tourist Aquarium for Easy River Egress'. Or maybe it was just a 'Tourist Tram with Terrible Lights and Cheesy Music Behind Announcements of CONSTANT MAGMA or SPATIAL VACUUM'. It was the lattest. I was excited enough to pay half of Mark's entrance fee, he being the only sane one of our group in his refusal to pay 40 Quai for a stupid tram surrounded in Christmas lights. It actually looks pretty neat in the pictures, but that's only because my camera is so bad at snapping low light. We immediately recommended the 'Tourist Tunnel' to everyone in Shanghai. The other side of the tunnel was a grand riverwalk City Improvement Project designed to concentrate the most amount of tourists into a skinny, unexitable walkway with at least half of the city's beggars, sellers, and pickpockets. I left with a fake Rolex watch and an utter sense of shame. Since it was getting toward the end of the day, and we were in danger of losing what money/dignity we had left, we ducked into a nearby lighthouse and ordered some drinks. The place was empty, so we convinced the owner to allow access to the top of the spire, and we stood up there talking and laughing and looking out over the city for an hour before everyone but Matt and I returned to the hostel. We ate dinner at a nearby cheap, tasty Chinese restaurant, took a bunch of nighttime photos along the riverwalk (the most famous and scenic part of the city), and then crashed into the hostel.
--Our final day of the trip was a frantic dash to cover whatever ground we didn't tread the day before. Matt and I had only one thing on our minds: the top of the Oriental Pearl. After an hour and a half subway ride, we bought the most expensive tickets to the topmost observation deck, stepped into the elevator, and ascended into dense, visibility-slaughtering clouds. They started at about 50 feet off the ground, and were still very door-not-window-like at the tippy top. We stared out at the white nothingness, looked at each other with 'well, this is what we asked for' faces, got back in the elevator, and began the return journey home. There was just enough time to pack all our belongings and cab it to the train station, where we all instantly fell asleep, and woke up 12 hours later in Beijing. It's good to be home.
--It's time now to really hunker down and get some solid work done on thesis. I have three more weeks until I return home to LA, and I still have so much I want/need to do. On monday morning, I'm going to stand up on a guy's balcony in our little village and film everyone's morning routine in the square below me. Then, that night, I'm going to project the morning's film onto the square to create a new ground plane. The place is small enough that people might begin to recognize themselves, and if I do it for several days in a row people in the morning might catch on and alter the way they move through the space, knowing that that night everyone will be able to see it. If you're wondering what this has to do with Architecture, I can only tell you that it does not. And yet it does. Touristly.
-c