Shanghai

Yesterday I made it to Shanghai and I'm finding myself feeling overwhelmed.  2 China's indeed.  Shanghai doesn't look like anything else in China, the number of big buildings is staggering.  Beijing is so spread out by comparison.  It's not just the big buildings, everything feels more cosmopolitan, more opulent, and more international even though I've only just started to explore.  You can really see it with fashion, as people are definitely more conscious of how they look here.  Still, not everything translates well, the hyper-hipster girl next to me is sporting the oh-so-chic female mullet.

I went to the Shanghai Museum today and it's the best museum I've been to in Asia.  It's big enough to eat up most of a day and curated in a modern western-style way.  The ceramics exhibit alone was breathtaking and I found that to be pretty surprising.  Normally I couldn't think of anything less interesting than pottery, but the stunning progression over 3000 years won me over.  Wow, can I really be so effusive about colored plates?

The last 3 days I've had a TV in my room and have felt like staying in during the evening, so it's given me an opportunity to watch more of it.  You can usually get 1 English language channel, CCTV 9, and about 15 Chinese ones.  CCTV 9 is amazingly uninteresting to the point that it's almost always  preferable to watch a Chinese show instead. 

How uninteresting you ask?  The primary focus is on news, which is kind of nice for me, since I don't get that much of it.  But it's the Chinese government's official take on the news, so it's generally focused on how great china is and anything related in any way to the Olympics.  Periodically they give you some truly international news, but it's at the same level of granularity as the weather report - "And in France, it's cloudy".  Then you get to the non news shows.  They all seem to be documentaries  cum travel advertisements on parts of China with thrilling names like "Public transport in Shanghai" (I swear I didn't make that up, that's a real name for a prime time 30 minute show).  I watched a piece on how gorgeous the yellow mountains are and it contained this particularly precious bit of dialogue: "the yellow mountains will put you into a dreamlike state from which some people never wake up".  Don't you want to go there?

The Chinese TV looks pretty much exactly like American television at first glance, but with some exceptions.  There are plenty of western movies, but sometimes with heavy editing to remove parts that don't involve explosions and shooting.  Korean soap operas are popular, as is traditional Chinese opera.  And I see lots of game shows.  My favorite so far I've taken to calling "anything you can do in 60 seconds".  It's basically a talent show where you have 60 seconds to do your thing and then the viewers at home can vote (VOTE! doesn't this bother the govt?) on which they like best.  What makes this so good though is the variety of acts.  Some examples: A guy throws knives are a beautiful assistant (there's an activity that lends itself to being rushed), three belly dancers whirl about for a minute, some awful pop singer tries to prove that she can capture the true essence of banality, a teenager in a track suit does some of the best break dancing I've ever seen.  But I had to save the best for last: This 40-something woman comes on stage with what looks like a volleyball net made with thicker rope.  She then proceeds to bit through each link of the grid until she had separated the net into two pieces, then upon realizing she had more time, just kept biting it into increasingly smaller shreds.  Nothing could prepare me for the elation this caused.  I love China.  For some reason the net biting woman did not win, but I suspect the viewers just weren't ready for her paradigm shifting art form. 

It's also worth mentioning the ads.  It seems to me that you can make any claim you want in a television advertisement.  For example you can see a weight loss creme that you rub onto your stomach and you'll go from fat to thin in no time.  Or there's the breast growth cream which has remarkable powers of augmentation, though all of the models were white.  Apparently this is because you can show European looking women in the skimpiest possible outfits, but there are different rules for Chinese women.  Go figure.  My favorite of the ads so far is this vibrating fat reducer that looks identical to the vibrating back massagers you see them hocking at stores like Brookstone.  It's not clear to me how this product is supposed to work, but they "prove" it in the most amusing way.  They take this piece of meat and press it onto a stack of newspaper.  Then they remove the meat and show you how the fat has soaked through top 5 layers of newspaper.  Then they repeat the experiment, this time using their massager on the meat.  When they're finished with the meat it's been deflated to half it's thickness and the newspaper beneath is a frighteningly nasty greasy mess reaching down through 25+ sheets.  Yep.  I bet you can all guess what I'm bringing home from China.

Lastly, I've posted another 3 photo albums (in reverse chronological order): Xian, Chengdu, and Emai Shan. 

Comments

[mom]

Your purple flower is a bougainvillea. See

http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/bougainvillea.htm

Loved your long post, and your fascination with the pottery--that's a surprise, but how completely cool. You've got some *magnificent* photos in this bunch! I'm going to have to switch my Schwedagon Pagoda wallpaper for the pagoda at Emai Shan. (Those beautiful mist pix are the wrong shape.)

LOL

[liz]

The idea being that if you use the massager, your fat will leak through your skin and out of your body? Sign me up! nothing creepy there!

I want to see the biting lady real bad.

[stephanie]

more pictures of mullets please! ;)