china

Weekend in Shanghai (updated)

This weekend included a 30-hour but still too brief visit to Shanghai. Shanghai is of course a massive city, and an increasingly vertical one, and probably reminds me more of New York than most cities I visit.

This photo captures both the old and new of the city. In the background is the iconic Oriental Pearl Tower. In the front, we see a high-rise building on side, and one of the tenement buildings that line many streets, with five or more stories of clothes (and the occasional cooked duck) hanging to dry.

It was taken while walking east from a downtown neighborhood towards The Bund, the riverfront in an older part of the city One can look across the river and see the new Pudong district that is most visually associated with Shanghai and features it’s tallest, newest buildings.

Visibility was relatively poor on both days, and I did not cross to the other side of the river to see the view of the Bund.

Food was a major part of day (as it has been throughout my stay in China), and Saturday featured both a snack of “soup buns” at small hole-in-the-wall shop where the upper level was barely tall enough to stand in, and an extraordinary Japanese-fusion meal at which my friends and I over-indulged for a couple of hours. After that, we headed to a local jazz club called the Cotton Club (I wonder where they got that name from?), where we heard what I would describe as a “typical jazz-club combo” that wouldn’t be very memorable except of course that it was at a jazz club in China.

The night concluded with brief stops at a few of the dance clubs. One featured two sections, an upstairs with a mixed-crowd of foreigners and locals, and a downstairs that was almost exclusively local. The latter definitely had better music (deep synth trance and beats). Of course, one of the main attractions of the nightlife (which continues well beyond the hour when almost every city in the U.S. closes down) is the people watching. Without dwelling upon it too much in this article, Shanghai did afford great opportunities for people watching, starting with our walk along the extremely crowded Nanjing Road and concluding as we departed the last club well into the morning.

I did have an opportunity to explore more on my own Sunday. I began in some of the quieter neighborhoods near where I was staying, and experienced a more local view of the city.
A walk through Zhongshan Park was in some was a more aural experience than visual. The park was already relatively crowded, with numerous groups practicing traditional Chinese exercises, dance lessons, and band practicing for the upcoming New Years celebrations:

The “music” of the park would change every few meter, as one moved from the metallic percussion of the band to a group dancing to disco from the 1970s. A few feet later, the disco and 1950s pop is overtaken by slower more meditative traditional Chinese music that serves as the background for exercises. Finally, a small portable player of low quality provides something akin to circuit bending.

Regular readers of this site know that I am fond of urban side streets and alleys, so I spent a few minutes in the narrower side streets of the neigbhorhood:

This alley reminded me of a photo I took not far from home in San Francisco last summer.

Along Ding Xi Road, I met the proprietor of a small boutique clothing store and her cat. Look for them to be featured in the next “Weekend Cat Blogging.”

After lunch together with friends again (one really cannot dine alone here), I headed back downtown via the Metro. I pride myself on being able to get around a city when I have a good subway system, a map and a general sense of direction. I was able make my way back to the Bund and Nanjing Road to see them during the daytime. I think the one word description of this area would be “crowded.” And I mean crowded on a level one rarely would see even in New York, and with far more dangerous street crossings. Plus, unlike my earlier walks, people expect foreigners in this district and are constantly on the look for sales opportunities. It is relatively easy to simply ignore them, but the crowds and constant interaction did become a little draining at times. It’s something to consider, I am a “city person” and I don’t mind crowds, but I do need breaks.

At Peoples Square, I did brave one last round of crowds to arrive at the Shanghai Art Museum. Even though it was only a block from one of the busiest open spaces and transit hubs in the city, the courtyard was a remarkable oasis of calm. After taking a moment to relax, I went inside to see the current exhibition, a retrospective of Wu Guanzhong. His work, which includes both oil painting and ink painting, and often focuses on Chinese scenes and themes. Many of paintings are of clearly of landscapes, animals and architecture of China, with an impressionist quality but also more minimal. However, many of later works were more abstract, although with Chinese themes. This was especially true of his ink paintings, some of which were quite large in size and reminded me of the “Autumn Rhythm” series of Jackson Pollock. One of the abstract in paintings called Entanglement relates back to the Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou, which I had the opportunity to visit before heading into Shanghai and will be the subject of the next article…

Suzhou Grand Canal at Night

So far most of my touring has been at night. That will change over the weekend, but meanwhile here are some nighttime images from the Grand Canal in Suzhou. The city is crisscrossed by a network of canals, one of many things for which it is famous.

The architecture of the bridges and buildings along the canal range from very traditional, as in the above photograph, to more modern. In all cases, however, things are always brightly lit with colored lights here. Even the trees are bathed in a green glow.

The Grand Canal forms a loop that circles the old city, and one can observe segments of the old city wall and the towers just beyond it.

Here is a more modern building along the bank of the canal. It blends the geometric modern features that regular readers of CatSynth know I am fond of with more traditional elements.

Daytime will provide different view of the city entirely. The large buildings and their lights which are so prominent at night fade into the background, while the more modest homes that come down to the edge of the water become visible, as do the city’s famous gardens.

Blog about dinner

Well, we at CatSynth took Jacksin’s comment not to blog about lunch as a bit of a dare, so here is a brief post about last night’s dinner 🙂

Pictured above are (from clockwise left), a local root vegetable, jellyfish, and smoked fish. Dinner every night has included a wide variety of dishes, and this was only the first round. We also had a wonderful local small fish cooked in a stew – it had a very rich and buttery texture, and a mild, sweet flavor, one of the best fish I have had in a while. Additionally, there was another fried fish and an interesting pork soup. This particular meal featured local food from the Suzhou and Shanghai area. Previous nights focused on other regions, including famously spicy Szuchuan Cuisine.

Cats in Shanghai

Well, this story is a lot less cute than the last one, but it still has cats, and a happy ending. From Reuters:

The power of the Internet has saved more than 800 cats from being skinned and served up on Chinese dinner tables.
About 30 animal lovers rushed to a parking lot in Shanghai after reading an Internet posting sparked by animal rights activist Huo Puyang that said two trucks carrying cats in wooden boxes had been intercepted, Huo said on Monday…
…The felines were on their way to the booming southern province of Guangdong, where some residents pride themselves as gourmets who will eat anything that flies, crawls or swims.

What the story (or similar stories on the same incident from other sources) don't mention is how in China there is a distinction between which cats are prized pets and which are food. Long-hair cats like Persians are to be bred and prized, while the common short-hair cats like those in the photo above, or Luna, are potential meals (not that we want long-haired cats to be eaten, either). But it gets worse, some of these cats may have been pets:

Huo's daughter-in-law had been looking for their missing pets and stumbled into the trucks, one of which sped away. The daughter-in-law called Huo, whose animal-loving friends then sent out an Internet alert last Friday.

The activists ended up buying the cats from the driver, after police said there was no evidence that any of them were stolen pets.

For all we know, the poor kitties were actually destined to become pet food or toothpaste. Or maybe part of some shoddy plastic product at Wal Mart…but for now, there's a happy ending in their rescue:

They now hope to place them in homes after posting their pictures and profiles on the Internet.

“They were so frightened,” the report quoted one of the rescuers, Huo Puyang, as saying.

I'm generally not that into the whole pushing-democracy-in-China thing. I could care less about the Communist Party and such. But it is good to see Chinese activists standing up to the sleeze and corruption, whether its big businesses spiking products with poisons or truck drivers stealing cats off the street. The same article (in the “related link” below) documents other recent internet-organized actions in China.