Random Walk Through Shanghai

I was in Shanghai twice over the past couple of weeks. The city is improving by leaps and bounds. This is a picture of the Huangpu River, which I have always found romantic and alluring.

Pudong, which means east of the Huangpu (Pu, refers to Huangpu and dong means East), is sprouting ever taller buildings. The old Flash Gordonesque Pearl Tower was the tallest thing on that side of the river when we moved there.

This is what Pudong looked like in March, 2000. None of the buildings you see here were finished when we arrived in 1997, except for the Pearl Tower.

They built the Jinmao tower, the shortest of the three tall buildings shown here, while we lived in Shanghai. It was the tallest building in China at the time. (For sake of reference, the Jinmao was just slightly shorter than New York's former World Trade Center Towers.) 

I attended the groundbreaking for the Shanghai World Financial Center, the next tallest building, but it wasn't built until long after we had moved to Paris. It was briefly the tallest building in the world.

Now, they are building the Shanghai Tower, which will be the tallest building in China when it opens next year, and the second tallest in the world behind the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. But not for long - a building that will beat even Dubai's tower is under construction in Changsha, capital of Hunan, Mao Zedong's home province.

This is an amazing video of two crazy Russian guys who climbed out onto the crane on the top of the Shanghai Tower earlier this year.

I had some time to kill and it was a spectacular day, so I took a walk from my hotel to see Fazang temple pictured above. A community of monks lives there. They belong to the Pure Land Sect of Buddhism, which believes in an afterlife in a Pure Land similar to Western concepts of heaven. It is an unusual temple because the architecture is partly Western. It was finished in 1931.

I had visited it last year for the first time with my friend Andy Sheehan when he was visiting Shanghai. It is very active.

People were praying in an unending stream, holding the requisite three sticks of incense to their foreheads and bowing in the four cardinal directions, beginning with the main altar in the temple.

On my way back, I took random photos with my phone of the street life. Here, people eating bowls of noodles outside a small restaurant.

A typical old Shanghai street corner. These are fast disappearing. 

I liked the shadows on the street.

A tea store, with bedding hanging out beyond.

Different kinds of tea for sale on a table outside the tea store. The tea is pressed into discs or blocks. Most of these discs are a popular tea called pu'er, one of my favorite teas, from the southern province of Yunnan. The big disc at the bottom right is 'Old Comrade,' a well-known pu'er brand.

Shanghai is known for having laundry hanging out over the street. You see less of it these days but it is still a feature of the old neighborhoods. I like the red underpants in this picture.

Washing clothes on the sidewalk.

Sitting and squatting and chatting with shadows of the laundry poles that are projecting out over the street.

A curbside meal.

Relaxing with a jar of green tea outside a pajama store.

A sidewalk restaurant.

Entrance to the old Dongtai Road antique market, which will soon be torn down. Again, I like the shadows on the pavement.

A vendor in Dongtai Market.

Another vendor in the market.

A foreign gent with a cane perusing the antique stalls. Behind him, a man of about the same age is riding in a hand-crank tricycle used by disabled people to get around.

Holding court at the entrance to one of Shanghai's lanes. We lived in a lane house before we left town.

Sitting in the shade while garlic cloves dry in the sun.

The Chinese love watermelon.

A discarded bit of old Shanghai.

A streetcorner bicycle repair shop.

Laundry in the sun.

A woman pushing a man in a wheelchair. Nice shadows here, too.

A shady street.

A momentary traffic jam - a typical situation that used to drive me crazy when we lived in Shanghai because the drivers will sit waiting for one or the other to make a move.

Knitting.

I went to eat in a Sichuan restaurant in this group of old buildings. The restaurant is behind the black car. It was called Ba Lazi, which means, I think, Hope Spicy.

I sat upstairs.

I had a beer, gong bao ji ding, kong xin cai, rice and beer. It was good but I couldn't finish it all.

The view from the highway on my way to the airport. Anna and I know the guy who designed and built the 'rocket' building - Jack Portman from Atlanta.

The roads are underlit with blue light at night.

Building, building, ever building.

The building on the right is Westgate Tower, where my office was when I was with The Wall Street Journal. The building on the left is Shanghai Center, where my office was when I was with The New York Times.

The old Russian-built Shanghai Exhibition Center.