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Published: December 1st 2010
The next day, I went to the Jingan Temple with Rachel and her two Harvard buddies. The surrounding skyscrapers really dwarfed the temple. We went to Burger King for lunch and all got hamburgers and french fries which was awesome! We also spend some time wandering around Pudong/浦东, which has the biggest skyscrapers that makes up that famous Shanghai skyline that you always see in pictures. This area had a very strange feeling. I guess it kind of felt like downtown Houston. Very clean and upscale, nicely-dressed people walking about. There seemed to be so much space to walk and swing your arms about. We went in the tallest building and rode the elevator to a hotel lobby and enjoyed the view.
The day after that, Rachel had to work, so I went to the urban planning museum. It was pretty interesting. I especially liked the huge model they had of the entire city. It was detailed and took up an entire floor. They had many exhibits about the environment there. Also, they had a temporary exhibition of an expressionist painter who was born in Shanghai and grew up and studied art in Paris.
I wanted to see the
famous Pudong skyline in person. It was on the front of our CLS books so I had been looking at it for quite a while. Actually it was only a few miles away. I could see the Pearl, that building that looks like it has a pokeball in the middle of it that I think was just built for tourism, in the distance, so I just kept walking towards it. Directly across the river from that skyline is the Bund, a series of European-style buildings. So if you walk on the raised boardwalk on the side of the river, you get to check off two tourist attractions at once! I get pretty excited to see Things From the Internet and Things From TV in person (example: the buildings from the 2008 Olympic Games). The Pudong skyline totally didn't disappoint and I took a ton of pictures. On the other side, the Bund was quite a trip. I was like, "where am I???" The buildings had tons of Chinese flags sprinkled all over them, maybe because it was so easy to forget!
I ended the day by going out to a really fancy dinner with Ralf from the CUA and
his wife Jing, both physicists working in Shanghai. They insisted on treating me because we were in China and that's what you do, which was really nice of them!! They recommended that I check out M50, an art community with workshops and gallery space. So that's what I did the next day.
M50 was super rad. It was raining that day and it was a work day for a lot of people, so there was hardly anyone there. (Because people had time off from work during the week to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, their work days got pushed to Saturday and Sunday.) It was the kind of art I like. It was more modern and creative than the kind of art that mainly sticks to reality. But it wasn't like this contemporary "found broken toilet" or "oh look I painted a red line" kind of stuff. The different galleries and artists had all kinds of different styles including surrealist, psychedelic and steampunk. Also a lot of the art commented on politics and society. My camera ran out of juice halfway through. I spent basically the whole day there and bought tons of postcards with art on the back to
decorate my kind of sad apartment. Big thanks to Ralf and Jing for the recommendation!
At the end of the day, I was a super idiot and went to the wrong airport. Shanghai has two airports and I was supposed to fly into one and out of the other one, but I didn't think and just assumed I would fly out of the same place I flew into. After realizing my mistake, I called my mom and my parents bought me a ticket out of Shanghai for the next morning. Thanks mom and dad and sorry about that. My flight was really early in the morning, so I just stuck it out in the airport until then, reading a book and taking a nap. The next day I was back in Wuhan and back in the lab.
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