Shanghai'd

I stepped off the airplane this morning after landing back in Hong Kong and gulped down waves of fresh air... Hang on you say, that's not right, Hong Kong is so polluted that the air standing outside terminal 3 at Heathrow airport is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Well, it says something about Shanghai that Hong Kong has never felt fresher to me. I was in Shanghai for a couple of days on business which entailed me having about 4 or 5 meetings a day. That may not seem much but they were spread all around Shanghai and we spent a lot of time in taxis. Shanghai is a strange place - part old China Beijing type places, part the dregs of Manila, the traffic of Bangkok and in certain areas the elegance, architecture and style of Paris. I loved it as a city but I think it would hell to live there permanently. Things that struck me in no particular order; there are an awful lot of adverts for breast augmentation surgery - in taxis, in the fricking male toilets of a bar for Christ's sake; all the taxis have a notice in English which state that you can refuse to pay if the driver smokes, spits or talks on his phone - very reasonable you might think, but the last bit on that list is that you can refuse if the driver is not polite, i.e. doesn't say hello, thank you, or bye bye - sweet but impractical; lots and lots of strange buildings, the weirdest one being the tv tower which has two gigantic spheres one at the top and one at the bottom - crazy lights on all the buildings; mad mad drivers - if you wait until the green man walking comes on that just means that more cars will be driving past; most of all a noticeable underlying buzz of activity and excitement. I arrived on Sunday night and went for a wander around my hotel which was in the Xintiandi region. Xintiandi is basically a disneyfied version of old china buildings - the entire area was razed to the ground and then they built new houses to look like the old and real versions - they've pedestrianised the whole area and it is now populated with trendy bars and restaurants (and the occasional starbucks and haagen dasz of course). On Sunday night it was packed - i stopped by a bar because their live band was being piped outside and they were doing a creditable version of a u2 song. The band was a trio of trendy chinese guys complete with standard rock posing - the furore about the censoring of some of the rolling stones songs (who played in Shanghai the evening before I arrived) seemed a bit irrelevant at this local level - clearly there was no restriction on what these kids could listen to or access. the best part was a chinese version of "Yellow" by Coldplay complete with chris martin facial expressions.

i didn't have a camera with me but I took some piccies on my phone, some of which have come out ok - once I manage to figure out how to download them onto the computer i'll post up the interesting ones.