A Look at Shanghai and Who Needs Facebook??

Day 1 in Shanghai is in the books. We started with a wonderful meeting at Shanghai Children's Hospital with Lily Hsu from project HOPE. Project HOPE has been working at the children's hospital for a long time and Lily has been with them for 11 years, starting as a nurse educator in one of their programs and now an administrator for their Shanghai initiatives. They do work with a lot of different areas within the Children's Hospital, but see a need for more pediatric cardiology care and work within the entire country for our work. Lily has a great sense of what is happening all over China and it was a wonderful meeting with another nonprofit working to help children. Here is Shanghai Children's Medical Center (SCMC) and a picture of Lily:

The rest of the day was free and we spent it exploring the city a little. Shanghai is a city of some contrasts, but it is really very modern and "cosmopolitan". There is no question about its modernity - it is clean, gleaming, there are new buses and cars all over. Lots of young people - all dressed in the latest fashions. But every once in a while the "old" China pops up. A man riding a bike with 3 trees sticking up from a carriage on the back, or the following gentleman:

Do you see that he is sweeping the street with a REAL STRAW BROOM? Of course, the craziest thing was that he swept the street across from where we had our breakfast, then turned into a corner of the building behind him and took a leak. On a public street. In the middle of the morning. As a city employee.

The Worlds Fair was held here in 2010. Shanghai is quite proud of this, and there are still signs all over the city proclaiming "Shanghai - home of the 201 World's Fair!" The new subway system is testament to the kind of money China poured in to help make the city gleam for millions of foreign visitors. No doubt it will all be falling apart in a few years.

Today was a holiday (not really - tomorow is the legal holiday, today is just an extra weekend day for the country - go figure) so there were lots of people out, especially at the park. So we took the subway to People's Park in the middle of the city to walk around and see what was going on. When we entered, there were dozens and dozens of people lined up along the edges of all of the walkways - mostly men - with long pieces of paper in front of them with a lot of writing and each one had a hone number at the bottom. Confusing - I was wondering what this had to do with the holiday - were they selling a service, such as grave cleaning, something important and personal in China. Maybe they were grave cleaners and visitors - you know, for the busy person who didn't have time to visit their ancestors but wanted them to know they were loved and missed. Rent-a-family.

No. This park is where single Chinese men and women go and, on the weekends, try to make a "match". They sit out, yelling at every member of the opposite sex who goes by, and try to engage them to find a spouse. No need for Facebook (oh, that's right, they don't have access to it...) or speed dating, it's a dating park.

We then walked to the Shanghai Museum - a beautiful, huge art and artifacts museum that showcases China's cultural heritage, from jade, to calligraphy, to paintings, to furniture, to ceramics like porcelain, to clothing and ritual items - just beautiful items, and some were almost 3,000 years old. It was an incredible building, and below is it and the most amazing mask we saw that was about 2,000 years old.

We then walked a pedestrian mallway that was teeming with people. Of course, being foreigners and tall, every salesperson approached us to sell "purses and watches".

This led to the Bund - when Shanghai was opened to foreigners (it was one of the first, and few, international ports opened to foreigners in the early 1900's) there were French, British, and American quarters established, which were settled by each and the laws enacted within each were their own, not the Chinese. The British and Americans combined theirs but the French, being French, refused to cooperate. So distinctly non Asian areas grew up in Shanghai, with architecture to match. it is quite striking in an Asian city to see some suddenly French colonial building, but that is what the Bund is, along the river. I liked this picture because it seemed to show what Shanghai, and the Bund, are all about - East meets West, old meets new -

Along the Western side of the river is Shanghai's most recognizable landmark - the Shanghai Pearl. It is a tall, gleaming television  tower built 15-20 years ago.

I'll leave you with a few random impressions:
- The beer generally sucks. It's very light. Nothing dark or with any real flavor. This is a problem for me, but after 1 day I'm figuring out how to get over it...
- There is a nationwide problem of spitting in the streets. So much so that before the World's Fair and Olympics they paid people to walk around and scold people who spit or cursed. But, so far, I haven't seen one person spit or blow their nose in the street. Progress!!
- It's the little things that make you realize you're in a foreign country. Fire extinguishers. Every building has a few. But they keep them sitting on the ground in the corners of rooms - bathrooms in the restaurant, corners of the museum. Not a big thing, but just strange when you're used to seeing them on a wall or in a case in the wall.