Shanghai

Shanghai exhausted the last of my traveling energy, leaving me is something of a slump. Unlike its cultured and self-content brother Beijing, Shanghai is a grasping, aggressive city perfectly willing to sell any soul it had for the fastest buck. All the hyperbolic descriptions ring true; there is no doubt that Shanghai is transforming at a spectacular pace, and I'm sure that this will eventually bring trickle-down benefits for the multitudes, but it is still depressing to witness the wholesale erasure of whole swathes of historical buildings to be replaced with tasteless steel and glass monstrosities. I plodded through the usual tourist attractions, the sterile hotel-like aquarium with its unimaginative presentations and procession of inmates, including particularly forlorn penguins and seals. They were incarcerated in a grim arctic simulation, hidden deep in the bowels of the cavernous complex, bathed in cold, florescent light as if David Lynch had turned his hand to wildlife documentaries.

The city is an architectural crime scene, and whilst the views from each of the record breaking towers are initially breathtaking, each are the same - grey humanless sprawl to the horizon.

The older, less sanitized parts of the city hold a magnetic charm, similar to the hutongs of Beijing, but wilder and more boisterous; even here commerce is king. My best experience of Shanghai was wandering the old quarters, self consciously sneaking photographs, unwilling to make myself any more conspicuous than I already was.

Nevertheless, the city kept me trapped in it's clutches for too long, the pull of western indulgences (bars, nightclubs, fast food) and the calculated bureaucracy of arranging onward travel conspiring against me. I met Hugo, from Lisbon, who teaches English, and is a talented photographer, and together we planned our escape, heading south to Hong Kong to renew visas, then back into the South West to discover the real rural China...