In the City of Brown, Grey and Red

Shanghai is a pungent city day and night, but especially during the daylight hours. Still, at any given time wafting on the breeze your nose will smell burning rubber, roasting meats, brake dust, people wearing too much perfume/cologne and good ol' exhaust fumes from gasoline, natural gas and diesel engines. I can hardly imagine what summer must smell like when the moist low pressure systems blow in from the South Pacific--just thinking of what musky aromas are generated...yuck.


My does she ever look happy to be stuffing her pie hole with processed meats "Hot Dog!" indeed... Then, the bustling alleys just outside Yuyuan Gardens. You can't see it in the pic, but there's a Chinese Starbucks over yonder. Worst. Latte. Ever.

But summer's summer and this is fall and I don't judge a city by its unfamiliar scents, especially when it's a good ten degrees warmer than in the town I flew in from. However, I wouldn't be feeling much of that (comparatively) warm atmosphere because I was stuck on a climate controlled bus. Yes, it was the school trip happening all over again, but this time with commercials. What I mean by that is that with the exception of the Shanghai Museum and Yuyuan Gardens every tour we went on was just a commercial for the gift store at the end, which was sometimes larger than the exhibition itself. The silk factory on the outskirts of the city, the pottery and precious metal craft museum, the afternoon teahouse and that canal-strewn historic town halfway to Pudong Airport whose name I forget, all of them had gift stores with scores of pushy salespeople that were larger than the exhibition itself. (In the case of the historic town actually the entire place was one large gift store.) What was worse had to be that we couldn't leave the gift shop unless our guide was good and damn ready to go, and don't think any of the meek Japanese tourists would dare ask if they could scoot or even walk out of the store on their own, hell no. Drove me nuts...


Taken from the Oriental Pearl Tower's observation deck, the building in the foreground is Jin Mao Tower, China's tallest completed building, while behind it we have the Shanghai International Finance Center, the soon-to-be world's tallest building. Next, inside Yuyuan Gardens.

Thinking about that just now, I started browsing the Wikipedia entry for Shanghai to see what attractions I missed while the tour was stuck buying overpriced jade baubles and I'm officially livid at the tour guide. In descending order of awesomeness I missed: Nanjing Road, perhaps the busiest shopping street in the world; Longhua, Jing'an and Jade Buddha Temples; Wen Miao Market; the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum; and finally People's Square. Un-fucking-believable.

But both nights, after dinner and upon returning to the hotel, I was free. While my coworkers were getting massages with happy endings (seriously) I slipped out into the crisp Shanghai night and headed north. Literally starting across the street from our three or four-star hotel was a fairly wide expanse of tenement housing that looked much scarier than it actually was once you're inside it. The buildings may look like a brisk wind will do them in and foul liquids ooze from bamboo pipes jutting out of alleys ("the black blood of the earth" as Egg Shen might say), but the people filling the hole-in-the-wall noodle shops and sidewalk mahjong games wore smiles as wide as the Yangtze River and laughed harder and more often than hyenas. I'm not saying I'll be looking for a summer home there anytime soon, but just because it doesn't appeal to me doesn't mean it won't work for the Shanghaiese and that I should pity them.


I knew I shouldn't have taken the old gondola out at rush hour on the canal. Doesn't matter though, life's a breeze when you've got a chauffeur.

As I meandered north and then northwest towards the Zhabei and Putuo financial districts I ran into street after street of obviously British-influenced commercial buildings that must have dated from the early 20th century. I had expected men in funny bowler hats and clutching canes to come ambling out of these brownstone offices--now tinted a grayish-brown from years of accumulated dust--but felt dejected when only stuffy Chinese businessmen emerged. Grey and brown are colors you see a lot of in Shanghai, right there along with good old traditional Chinese/communist red. Somehow when you're walking on the grey concrete slab sidewalk, next to the red-trimmed brownstone building undergoing renovation and thus flanked by brown bamboo scaffolding the color scheme just seems to work.

As I walked back towards the hotel around 10PM I was surprised to see the fantastic neon and LCD light shows that adorned the sides of skyscrapers begin to turn off one by one. Unlike Tokyo or Fukuoka that run these virtually 24/7, Shanghai--prompted by what authority I have no idea--flicks it to the 'off' switch within minutes of the hour turning. The result in areas particularly bathed in this glow, like The Bund waterfront, is a descent into the sobering illumination of run-of-the-mill sodium streetlights. When I got back to the hotel and took a glance out the window from the 16th floor I noticed almost the entire skyline in my 180-degree field of view was nothing but abstract silhouettes in black and grey with only the red or white pulse of aircraft hazard lights to punctuate the darkness.

Reading back these two entries I feel no inspiration, no drive to write more as I have in the past for even the most trivial trips to the next town over. I feel hoodwinked. Gypped. I feel like someone owes me $900. Well, maybe not that far--maybe just another ticket to Shanghai for the weekend and no godforsaken tour bus. I will, however, go so far as to say I feel I can not trust my coworkers to organize a trip anymore and in the future will wriggle out of it in any way possible.

And now I feel as if I should apologize to you for what has proved to be a prolonged rant against Japanese-style tourism and a pledge not to do it again--until the next time I do.

--Matt