Welcome to Shanghai, Enjoy Your Sweat

Well, here I am in Shanghai and in my new blog-digs.* So lets get right to it.

I took JAL over from SFO in one of then new fancy 777s. It was certainly nice, but I think it was a bit cruel to make the steerage folks like me walk through the business class, first class, and OH MY GOD YOU GET A HOTEL ROOM class on our way to the less fashionable part of the cabin. Although if anything reinforces the lack of a correlation between airplane class and actual class, it's the walk back out. The first class cabins are often the least tidy. Their newspapers and free slippers and other lavish detritus all haphazardly flung everywhere. What can I say, I'm bitter. I take whatever consolation I can get.

So. Shanghai. It's hot. Like crazy Houston hot. Hot like a Cure song. Hot like you thought that girl was, but it turned out you were really really wrong and boy wasn't that a mistake after all hot. That kind of hot. One of the things I love to do in a new town is just pick a direction and go walking, so I walked from my hotel up in the Fudan area to the Bund. It was hot. Did I mention that? I was a sweat-ball by the end. I think I've learned that walking is not going to be an option until fall. It looks like public transport from now on out.

I have to say that I did like what I saw of Shanghai though. I say "what I saw of Shanghai" advisedly. See, the thing is that Shanghai doesn't really exist right now - at least most of it. In one of those odd Chinese moments, Shanghai is absolutely obsessed with the upcoming Shanghai Expo 2010. Right? How many of you just said, "What Shanghai Expo 2010? Didn't we stop doing those 50 years ago or something? I read Devil in the White City. I thought we learned our lessons." Well, dear readers, China is trying to bring the sexy back, and to be honest, some of those pavilions look pretty fun, but what are they going to exhibit? New mining techniques? The newly discovered tribes of south Manhattan?

So what does this have to do with my attempt at sightseeing? Well, it turns out that all of Shanghai is being leveled and rebuilt. The road that you thought might take you to the Bund actually is rerouted through Pittsburgh, and you're going to have to walk in the middle of the road with the taxis and scooters because the sidewalks aren't there anymore anyway. But that's topped by the fact that they've taken away the Bund. You know, the Bund? The biggest tourist draw in the city? Yeah, it's not really there anymore. It's completely covered with giant construction paneling. You can kind of see most of the famous buildings, and if you look over the walls you can get a glimpse of Pudong, but if you want to see the river and the rest of it, well, no. That's my experience from yesterday anyway. I'm going back, so I'll report back if I just missed the secret passageway.

Oh, also, the chief architect of the madness? The being whose smiling visage hovers over all construction and appears, Kim Jong-il-like over nearly every cash register and ever public empty wall? This dude:

His name is Haibao, and I have to tell you that I hate him already - that Gumby-Elvis thing, with his dead, dead eyes. Here he is telling us about the "harmonized city." That's fun because when something online gets blocked or censored, it's said to have been "harmonized." Joy, right? Welcome to Shanghai, the harmonized city. Sounds like the start to a great sci-fi book, yeah?

Ok, I've blathered on long enough and I need to get out into the hellish heat that is the city to see if I can't hunt down some books I need to be working on. I hope I haven't bored you too much. Watch this space - I'll try to keep it regularly updated with pithiness and photography as long as my pithiness and photography hold out.

*Why a new blog what was wrong with the old one? Well, this one is going to be a little more me and a less less anonymous. That is, I'm letting more people know about this one to let them read about my adventures- such as they are - in Shanghai. Oh, and the name? Well, my Chinese last name is "Hu," and "shuo" means to speak, but 'hu' can also mean nonsense, so "hushuo" usually means "bullshit." Thus, the address, Huspeaks-Hushuo. Har har har, ain't I clever?