Shanghai, day 1

Arriving at Shanghai's tidy Pudong airport one is immediately rewarded with that illusive sense of finally being elsewhere, a feeling that is of great relief to those of us who reside in a place that is, maddeningly, both everywhere and nowhere. Within a minute of disembarking we had the camera out and Ness was snapping pictures of the recycling bins. Shanghai, a surprisingly colonial city in appearance, feels bureaucratically communistic and yet aggressively capitalistic, both ancient and modern, eastern and western, and yet wholly Chinese. Refreshingly, China has very little of Dubai's identity crisis, and seems to be a place that is much more comfortable with contradiction.

Jing'an Temple, pictured below, embodies China's history of contradiction, and has survived almost complete destruction twice in the last 200 years, most recently at the hands of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. Currently in a state of incomplete renovation, this Buddhist temple's chubby Siddhartha remains exiled in a WWII era bunker that lies beneath the massive stone steps leading to the temple's largest chamber. I spent nearly half a day at the temple taking pictures, and then set out on foot, in thrall to the swarming bicycles, sidewalk marauding moped maneuverers, and overall metropolitan enormity of Shanghai. Excepting an airport hotel in Chicago, I hadn't been anywhere near a real city in around nine months. 

I found the temple accidentally on my first day time foray outside the hotel, when my dual purpose of caffeinating and orienting myself led me to a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on the edge of Shanghai's French Concession. Chain restaurants help make cities and suburban areas into exactly the kind of soulless nowhere and everywhere places that exhaust my inexhaustible patience. I have the patience to stay in bed until it's really time to get up, the patience to watch entire baseball games (really only at the park), and the patience to post photographs first and text later; in other words an unyielding patience that drives more productive people to drink. I do not have the patience to eat at TGIFridays on three continents, or to join those who routinely seek the comfort of the familiar over the tangy, unexpected sweetness of something new. As in all my pursuits, I'm both imperfect and hypocritical, having eaten at more than one Cracker Barrel during my time on the east coast.

And yet for coffee, I make an exception-- such are the compromises of an addict. Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Shanghai, looks a lot like CB&TL Dubai, which looks a lot like the frat boy/investment banker filled CB&TL on Fillmore in San Francisco which, unsurprisingly, looks a lot like the CB&TL in Los Feliz. And yet the Shanghai branch had one redeeming quality, which is that it afforded a view of the densely packed bicycles and scooters lining the street, which made it impossible to forget that I was in two wheeler loving China, the Costco of human populations.

That night we ate at a Sushi restaurant near the hotel, and wandered into a night club that throbbed with the sound of a competent(ish) funk cover band. The unmistakably cavernous sound of a poorly attended concert stoked both my empathy and resolve to keep it to one drink. With it's koi pond, grasping indoor flora, prayer flags, and chandeliers, the venue itself was infinitely more interesting than the recycled tunes. With The Commodores bouncing around in our heads, we shambled off to the cozy confines of the Baolong Home Hotel.