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We were briefly in San Francisco, and as we soared away from the airport towards China I saw the Golden Gate Bridge. It's not that visible in this photo!
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We arrived in Shanghai and drove around a lot. Most of the buildings look something like this, and there was laundry hanging to dry all over!
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We visited East China Normal University, which is a major school. There was a huge statue of Mao presiding over the quad. I would love to play Frisbee under his benevolent gaze!
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The food was interesting. It wasn't exactly my cup of tea, seeing as it was all meaty and stuff, but it was rather intriguing. This was a normal meal: we all sat around a table and ate from a revolving platform of communal dishes. My chopsticks-skills became pretty acceptable, I think.
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I love traditional roofs. These are fake reproductions, but they're still pretty.
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More:
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The translations into English were awesome. I wonder what the heck is the actual Chinese name for the "Big Rockery" or — my favorite, which unfortunately I did not photograph — the "Tower of Containing Watery Jade"!
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This is Anna. She is a student at East China Normal University. In this photograph she is eating the puffed rice we bought from street vendors, who were popping it right before our eyes with joyful booms!
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I like these fish. They may or may not be koi. They were all over the place.
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This is the "Bridge of Nine ZigZags" or something. It was created like that because apparently evil spirits cannot make it around corners (or, if they can, certainly cannot handle nine), and thus would be halted before they reached the other side. I actually counted eight and a half, but whatever.
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We went up inside the Tower of the Oriental Pearl, which has no discernible function except as a TV tower and a tourist attraction. It is one of the tallest TV towers in the world, right up there with Prague's Tower of Communism (not its real name), which I was fortunate to see last fall.
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This is a view from one of the globular spheres at the top. Not much was visible because Shanghai is POLLUTED!
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We also got to see the Tower from the ground while we took a river cruise, and I think it is rather more spectacular at night.
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At an art gallery I saw a činská kočičika! It meowed in Chinese.
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In a park I saw this artist, who was painting fans with famous poems and essays. I love how well-read Chinese people seem to be, and I feel very unliterary in comparison. I bought one of his fans because they were beautiful!
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Another cool literary thing: people like to "paint" poems and essays on the pavement with water and let them dry and disappear. Then they do it all over again. I think this is pretty excellent.
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Here are some trees in that park:
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In China, they have blood-donation buses. Speaking of blood donation, the New York Blood Center told me that because I went to China I cannot donate any corpuscules for a whole year!!!
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A lot of Shanghai is under construction. There were zones like this all over the place.
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This picture and the next are of exceedingly poor quality, sorry, but they do show some important parts of the city. There are countless buildings like this that all look the same, and are used to hold the city's 395013953 billion quadrillion residents.
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And then there are elevated highways everywhere too, lending a futuristic air.
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Ewww. Everyone spits so much on the streets that the subway system finds it necessary to remind people not to do it indoors! I heard that Beijing has a "stop spitting" campaign in full swing now in order to get people to stop the practice before the Olympics happen in 2008 and the whole world watches the city. 10 yuan says it won't work. (I found 10 yuan in my camera case after getting back to New York.)
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I think the picture says it all. Except this: what the heck is a crad?
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It's a CHINESE TOUR GROUP! These people could not wait patiently in line.
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Shanghai, China