Shanghai Shanghai! It’s a wonderful town!
(In front of the Pearl TV tower: Shanghai, China)
I thought I’d begin with this image of our jolly weekend in Shanghai. We had a very busy week leading up to it; on Thursday night, Ying still had a day of important meetings to follow and we spent all that evening on tax returns. At the point of completion, we realised that we had completely neglected to book a hotel for the following day. We used a website (http://english.ctrip.com/) and picked one of the first hotels on the list. We managed to make a very good choice – I’ll post pictures later.
Since we were staying on the Bund, just alongside the river Pu, we were in a very central spot and we walked practically everywhere. This is where we ended up on Saturday afternoon, on an exploratory jaunt arount the building site that is riverside Pudong. It occurred to Ying that the ‘Pu’ of ‘Pudong’ refers to the river and the ‘dong’ bit means East. Pudong = East side of the river Pu. It makes me so relieved when Chinese words make sense, as often they are completely untranslatable.
The city is so vast and so tall, it makes me realise that Suzhou, although large by my puny British standards, is actually small fry next to colossal Shanghai. Swinging around this lamppost, we were on our way to the Jinmao Tower (a kind of art deco pagoda-esque creation nearby) to spy the view of this pearl tower from the top. What you can see here is that the visibility is even poorer here than in Suzhou. This isn’t rain or cloud, it’s haze and pollution, far worse than home and meant that the wonderful promised panoramas from the tower became washed out mirages. I like this tower, it has the aura of an imminent space-age future, but in a decidedly 1980s-90s image. To me, it embodies a snapshot of a future past, a novel (and endearingly inaccurate) prediction of architecture to come.
