…because there weren’t enough hours in Day 1.
What do I do in Shanghai? I keep moving. Mom sets a challenging pace of shopping, eating, and shopping. Day 0 (usual arrival time: 6pm local, after a 13 hour plane ride) starts with a 1+ hour cab ride into Shanghai. Once I arrive, Mom immediately starts asking me what I want to eat. This time we went to the new tapas bar located in her apartment complex, Zoco. She’s been talking about it this trip. The proprietor (her neighbor, a friendly guy from Barcelona named Miguel) gave us a number of good tips on the dishes. Notable: balsamic vinegar ice cream.
Then bed.
Day 1, I have a conference call at 8:30am. Construction starts noisily upstairs at 9am, and
the Jawbone wins. We run some errands and swing by a few clothing stores on our way back to the apartment. We achieve purchase. We then meet up with some friends locally for lunch: delicious won ton soup and vegetables; they have something called “pineapple bread” (which has nothing to do with a pineapple except a vague visual resemblance due to a topping of sugar on the round bun), beef chow fun, and a fish head hot pot. Our other friend has a pork sandwich.
We then hop in a car and head over to the fabric market, a rambling, claustrophobic, 3-story building packed with fabric vendors and tailors in approximately 20 x 20 foot squares. Miles of shops. Miles of fabric. The vendors aren’t as actively confrontational as they are in some of the other, similarly-configured malls; these are also used to foreigners and many speak English to the wide variety of tall tourists roaming the halls. We spend hours looking at brocades, Chinese silks, Thai silks, buttons, coats, dresses, pashminas, scarves, and sartorial sins against nature. A few hours later I’m dreadfully jet-lagged and we stumble out of the building with bags full of loot. We repair to the apartment complex for gelato and an introductory session with the tailor.
Dinner: a local new Chinese restaurant (extension of a well-known restaurant in Hong Kong, apparently) where our friend B orders excellently. We roll home and I have another conference call at 10pm. The jet lag is brutally bad by then.
Day 2, I sleep in and halfheartedly attempt some morning yoga. We have an excursion planned, to the north side of Shanghai.
We first stop at Shanghai’s latest architectural transformation – “1933” – a building that was formerly a slaughterhouse and has now been rebuilt into an expo center and party space, in advance of conversion into retail shops and restaurants. The outside is a beautiful Arts and Crafts concrete façade.
The inside is a confusing warren of passages, ramps (including one labeled “cattle road”), and stairs, overhung with the creepy aura of someplace where things used to be killed. We check out a few of the design exhibits, and beat feet when we get too spooked.
Next we head to WuJiaoChang where Chiang Kai-Shek planned an ideal Chinese community in the 30s, with the intention of rivaling the concessions’ hold over Shanghai. A few large buildings survived the intervening years. We start with the stadium, where this year’s Special Olympics were just held. They’re pulling up the field and it’s gloriously large and deserted. CKS built it in order to prepare the Chinese for their first Olympics in 1936 in Berlin. We drive by another building that has since been repurposed as a school. Its façade is dark gray, almost brown, and clearly shows the passage of time. In contrast, what was to be the “facing” building across an imposing central boulevard/square is now a hospital, and it has been cleaned and preserved. We sneak into the building and admire the ceiling decorations and design details. Another building, the civic center, is now a sports university,
fronted by soccer fields and throngs of students practicing golf swings and playing tug-of-war. The building is in the traditional style, but built out of concrete. It’s impressive.
Finally, we stop by the former aviation club. Soong Mei-Ling (one of the famous Soong sisters and CKS’s wife) was head of the Air Force and wanted to promote China’s air power. The building is in the shape of an airplane, with plane details throughout. The interior has been whitewashed and now houses the pharmacy services.
Throughout all this, we drive blithely into the compounds with our private car, pile out, take pictures, drive away again, and no one gives us a second look. We get a few curious stares here and there, but probably because the blond woman, Mom’s friend A, is giving us great historical detail as we walk around, in Australian-accented English. It’s a good time all around.
Somewhere in there we stop for lunch at a local restaurant, whereupon A (whose interests tends to both the historical and the architectural) finds out that Mom’s cousin B is an architect whose family’s roots lie firmly planted in Shanghai. They have a lively conversation, including B’s story of how his childhood asthma attacks in Shanghai were the key to his family’s escape to Hong Kong during the Communist years.
In the afternoon, we get massages. Really cheap massages. Right across the street. Gotta love the local economics. The tailor swings by to show us some fabric, and we decide to eat locally for dinner. Yum.
Here's a vignette from our January vacation: we were stopped in Amalfi on the way to Ravello for lunch and a stroll. The next bus wasn't due for an hour, so mom asked the local entrepreneurial taxi drivers what it would cost to get up to Ravello. We met: Elvis.
