Aloha Family & Friends, and thanks for visiting our blog on our current trip to China!
We arrived on separate flights to Shanghai on May 21st - Dani flew in from Honolulu and Jack on a marathon flight direct from Chicago (14 hours of fun). After that much flying you fail to care about jet-lag - you just want off the plane. We met in the baggage claim and jumped in a van for a ride to our hotel. Or so we thought...
Shanghai traffic is insane. The whole concept of a "lane" just disappears. The Chinese road system is dominated by 1st-generation drivers. So there's no wonder the Chinese boast 20% of the world's car accidents with only 3% of it's drivers. Everyone drives as if they're carrying a pregnant woman going into labor. What's even more insane is that pedestrians also seem to have a total lack of regard for cars. It's common to see someone cross the street and stand in between lanes while cars whiz by at 50 mph. Needless to say, we've been pretty terrified at crosswalks. We sat in traffic for an hour before reaching the swanky hotel our professors were staying at in the tony section of Shanghai. We then hopped a cab for another 1 hour cab ride to our hotel near the south Shanghai train station. A 1 hour cab ride costs about $10 US - we quickly discovered that China is very cheap. Our hotel room was $25/night, breakfast the following morning was $1.80 (for the two of us).
The next morning we took off for "downtown", where the really huge skyscrapers are. To get anywhere in China, you need to have a hand-written description of your destination (in Chinese), and your return address. Because no one speaks english, and our feeble attempts at Chinese were typically met with an uninterpretable verbal barrage, you really learn quick that you need a set of handwritten directions. That way you can at least be assured you can get somewhere (and back!) without having to rely on communication. We got downtown and were dropped off at the highest skyscraper in Asia, the Jin Mei building. One thing we realized about mid-day is that China is crowded. This or course is not surprising, but the sheer volume of people is pretty staggering. So when we ran into what the Chinese considered a "crowd", it was a pretty awesome sight to behold. We had unknowingly stumbled into the area through which the Olympic torch runner was passing. Thousands had gathered to witness the event. After 30 minutes, we were all rewarded. Preceded by a caravan of vehicles and floats that "hyped up" the crowd, the Olympic torch carrier finally came into view. The crowd erupted - a million cameras and handheld olympic flags went into the air and the crowd began cheering and chanting.
You realize pretty quick that the Chinese are really excited about the Olympics - kind of in the same way that the U.S. might get excited about the Super Bowl.. only bigger. This is their moment in the international spotlight. Forget, for a moment, about their human rights record, the protests about Tibet - forget about it all for a minute and see the Olympics the way the Chinese see it - a time for celebration and pure joy.
We were inevitably drawn into the shopping district. We picked up a few things and made our way up into the TV "needle" - a huge projection into the sky that is part tourist attraction and the prominent feature in the Shanghai skyline. I don't know how tall it is, but it's really up there. What's incredible is how little you can see from the top. We'd heard stories about the air pollution in China, but this was really unbelievable. We were probably 70 stories or more up and you couldn't see more than a few miles. The sun was almost blacked out - the horizon disappeared behind a haze of smog. We've been in China for a week, and we have yet to see the sky. Our throats have remained scratchy since we arrived, no doubt the product of near-continuous inhalation of noxious fumes and degraded air. We know we've been spoiled, as Hawaii has the best rated air quality in the entire U.S., but our frequent trips to large U.S. cities leave no doubt that the pollution here is more severe than any place we've ever visited.
Apparently air quality in Los Angeles was comparable to Shanghai and Beijing in the 1970s, before the enactment of the Clean Air Act. China's mantra has been to develop now, and deal with the environment later. While not laudable, it's certainly understandable - most Chinese are unbelievably poor, and the acceleration of the economy in the past two decades has opened economic doors of opportunity never before witnessed in Chinese society. But the Chinese will eventually have to reckon with environmental quality - hopefully they will consider serious environmental reforms before health care costs and irreversible damage to their natural resources escalate beyond the point of no return.
On our second day in Shanghai, Daniela and I decided to check out Yuyuan Gardens, part shopping district and part botanical gardens. It was an unbelievably busy day - we were surrounded by an incredible assortment of street vendors and shops. We were constantly buffeted with solicitations to visit art galleries and stores. The architecture in Yuyuan is unbelievably beautiful. It's the kind of buildings you expect to see in China, but are actually pretty rare. Many were destroyed in the Chinese cultural revolution, and many of the surviving structures were rebuilt after fires.
