Shanghai

    Beyond the cameras that were stationed every 5 miles on our road into Shanghai, it was hard to even remember that we were in China when we initially arrived in Shanghai.  Shanghai is a completely modern city with high rises, good roads, clean streets, tourists, and a couple of old sections or buildings that puncuate an otherwise completely new facade.  The bund, the area along the river, is a gorgeous display of European architecture and wacky lit up boats in front of stylish glowing buildings.  As with most things that were not tourist attractions in China, most things were new.  Even the newness was new.  According to a fellow traveler, the bund had been kind of dumpy even with the many surrounding new buildings until the government saw fit to update it one year ago for the coming Shanghai World Expo.  There were even freestanding supermarkets!  

Almost all tourists here, at the Expo, and at every sight in China were Chinese, not Western.  It was refreshing to know that the things that we saw were beloved by Chinese and truly treasured in China, not just by Westerner's wanting a foreign experience.  English was almost non-existant.  On a busy tourist street we bought our SIM card from a vendor yelling "SIM Cards" to us in English.  I don't expect anyone to speak English, but if you sell SIM cards all day long and you know them in English, I would expect you to then understand the word "minutes" or some combination of words that would show me how to check my minutes.  But alas, "SIM Cards" was the only words these vendors knew, and two more words than most people who we met :)  Even this, though, was refreshing because we had only been in former British colonies thus far and were beginning to believe that English was replacing the world's languages.  Seeing that there were still countries in which English was not universally spoken reminded us that the world is still a very diverse and big place.

In a place full of new buildings, gorgeous Howard Johnson hotels, sweet shops filled of hundreds of people (yes, hundreds of people), street sellers with light up toys that, when thrown in the air, helicoptered to the ground while flashing, we were worried that Chinese culture had been buried under the rubble of modernization.  But, in the center of the city was the free and new Shanghai museum full of exhibits featuring weapons from 4000 BCE, an exhibit of Chinese calligraphy, an exhibit of Chinese coinage (the oldest in the world according to the museum), clothes, bronze statues, and jade.  A beautiful old garden in the middle of a market highlighted the special connection with nature that all of China appreciated (albeit through a thick cloud of fog) and the exhibits at the Shanghai World Expo demonstrated a special sort of pride that we had not yet found in our other destinations.