Spent some of my holiday weekend in Shanghai on a trip with my wife. After a long flight (12 hours) back to a city I hadn’t seen in 6 years. Everyone said I wouldn’t recognize it. Not exactly the case. There’s just a lot more highrises on the skyline than before. The city is looking more like a cross between Bladerunner and The Jetsons. The “Bladerunner” look comes in part from the huge video billboards that cover whole side of buildings. “The Jetsons” look comes from rather interesting designs that look very 21st century. Like most of China there is an interesting mix of the old and new that extends to the streets where you see the lastest German street machines alongside guys with peddle carts roaming the streets for recycling. Modern supermarkets in one block and casual street markets in another with carts of fresh vegetables, tanks of live fish and  crabs and cages with live poultry. The Fall is a great time for Shanghai. The weather was very Bay Area like and I went out for my morning stroll in shirtsleeves. My wife knows the area around her layover hotel well and sent me out for fresh pork buns or Cha siu bao(two fried and two steamed. Yum!) to have with our coffee. Of course Starbucks is right around the corner, but we make our breakfast coffee in the room. We try to be aware of our surroundings and possible problems (pickpockets, scammers, etc) but we were caught  unaware on one of the busy and modern shopping streets, Huaihai Road. There we are outside the Cybermart looking totally like tourists with our map out checking addresses and street signs when this guy comes up, drops to his knees in front of Jacquie, and starts squirting black shoe paste on her sandels. Before we could say “Bu Yao” (don’t want) he’d added more and buffed, grinning all the while. We were shouting “no, no, no” when a local family came up and started telling him to leave us alone. As we hurried off he followed demanding money! Extortion 101, Chinese style. Just down the street looking for  a taxi (to take us to a tailor we’d heard of at the Cloth Market), we were also pitched a “hot” laptop three times by the same guy. Seems wherever we go in the world we are just giant dollar signs to many people. I’m really tall so there’s no hiding. I just try to smile and move on. The flight back was delayed many hours so we headed down Monday morning to the Bund. It’s a riverside part of old Shanghai with many classic sturctures from the early part of the 20th century. We treid to get into the famous Peace Hotel, but it turns out this structure from the 1930s is being totally restored  and opens in 2009 as the Shanghai Fairmont. We headed down Nanjing Road, China’s most famous shopping street taking in the architecure old and new and doing some window shopping. A good length of the eastern part is a pedestrian boulevard till you get to People’s Park. Then the buildings get a bit less special. We wound up at a favorite “bargain” haunt of flight crews the world over. 580 is the address on Nanjing Road that houses a collection of small shops that mostly sell clothing items, but also electronics and watches (Feikos and Schmolexes). A couple of shirts for me and linen slacks for her and we headed back in a light rain to our hotel for a quick change and then the long bus ride to Pudong Airport.
Next time it’s the museums and a ride on the 1.2 billion dollar Maglev train from the airport to downtown.

In the Tuesday morning Commuter Quiz at 6:30 I had another first time winner. Dennis, a clown from San Francisco (really!), won tickets to Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s The Majesty of Christmas in San Francisco because he knew that The Space Needle in Seattle was the world’s first revolving restaurant. 

hs