Shanghai
Geoff and I took the train into Shanghai for the weekend. In between Chinese cities the landscape alternated between abandoned communes, and freshly stamped out planned communities. Five hundred units of the exact same house arranged in maddening tessellation. The families I saw on the streets and in restaurants were odd inverted pyramids of attention. Grandparents and parents all focused on one single child.
I hadn’t seen many pictures of Shanghai, so the quantity of inventive, colorful sky scrapers that appeared all around us surprised me. The 1930’s architecture of The Bund has banker’s granite fortresses standing shoulder to shoulder with each other. They form a stolid line of columns that look out over the river over at the new growth appearing every year in Pudong. China is pouring money into Pudong to see how many crazy looking multicolored steel and glass buildings its can stuff in one small area before cosmic fish mistake it for a reef and start swimming about it.
Other than touring The Bund, Pudong and Nanjing Road, we didn’t have time for much other than drinking formaldehyde free beer. A barmaid we talked to wanted to know all about the USA. “Is there really a problem with racism against black people?” Every time China is in our news, we feel obligated to mention Tibet or Falung Gong. I think Chinese news compulsively mentions that the US keeps huge populations of black people in rape cages for smoking joints.