Working at Xian Dai continues to be exciting as Brad and I are kept busy on the hotel project. On Friday, we felt lucky to again be invited on another trip by some fellow coworkers who were showing a client some existing projects around the city. My favorite was an old concrete bus parking garage that was redesigned into an office for Tongji University's College of Design Innovation. Looking at the finished renovation you would never guess this modern building was a bus parking garage originally. The renovation added a fourth story in the form of a sleek black cantilevering box as well as a curving copper entryway on the first floor. I also met another American intern at the firm named Tina who toured around with us on Saturday. She is Chinese and besides being a lot of fun, she speaks fluent Mandarin and helps us to maneuver the city when she is with us.
Friday night, Guillaume, Brad, Misha and I headed over to People's Square to walk around and have dinner. The area has a famous pedestrian street lined with shops and bright signs and seems to be a popular place to window shop. We also made it to the Huangpu River's edge, an area called the Bund, where you have a fantastic view of the Pudong side of Shanghai. Pudong's skyline boasts the tallest towers of the city and we plan on visiting the observation deck of the Shanghai World Financial Center on an upcoming clear evening. The tower is one of the tallest buildings in the world and the observation deck is the tallest at 1,555 feet.
Saturday we headed to the French Concession, a famous international district characterized by its beautiful tree-lined streets and low-rise, historic buildings, (a stark contrast to the Shanghai I've experienced thus far). The French Concession is also home for many expatriates and we definitely noticed a much greater number of Westerns as well as businesses catering to Westerners. Tina and I noticed many great boutiques and will be going back to do some shopping! The French Concession also has the only bars that I have seen in Shanghai, so we of course had to visit a few Saturday evening. The bar scene is quite lively although the majority of patrons are not Chinese and the prices are more in line with what you would find back home. We stopped in a bar and had to pay 60 yuan for a pint of beer, (about $9), which is quite a steep increase from the 5 yuan 22 ouncers we often get with our 15 yuan dinners at the small food shops in our neighborhood!
The boys, (Misha, Brad, and Guillaume), have started calling me "mom" since I am the only one with a map and have taken on the role of tour guide. My Shanghai guidebook has been quite handy so far and we followed a mapped out walking tour of the French Concession. Highlights included a number of historic villas and hotels and Fuxing Park, which was my favorite part of the day. I have never seen such a lively park. Besides being beautifully landscaped, the park was full of playing children, kites, ballroom dancing seniors, men playing boardgames and we enjoyed watching all of the activity.
Sunday we headed back to People's Square where we visited the scale model of the city at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall. Needless to say, the model of the city is gigantic! Looking at the model really helped to give a sense of just how big this city really is. When driving around with coworkers from Xian Dai, Shanghai seems to have no end! I took some photos of the World Expo pavilions that were included in the model, since that was our next stop. The World Expo was held in Shanghai last summer and the city undertook major construction projects in preparation. The world expo site is now pretty vacant as many of the pavilions were temporary and have been taken down. The site is now full of fences and wide empty streets and sidewalks, a little erie actually, like an abandoned theme park. We were quite content with missing the actual expo though because attendance totalled 73 million visitors between May 1 and October 31 of last year and people waited 3-8 hours to get into many of the pavilions.
Considering how much we have seen and how tired we all were by Sunday evening, I think we've succeeded in making the most of our first week in Shanghai!
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