First weekend in Shanghai

Friday night’s two activities could not have been more different.

First, I went to dinner with a group of 8 people from work. We went to a little hole-in-the-wall local restaurant on the third floor of a sort of dumpy building a block or so from work called “Yummy Place”. It was not. All meals are family style that I have eaten here where one person (not me) orders for everyone. This dinner worked the same. First dish that was brought out was a pile of chicken feet. Not even fried or breaded, just plain (baked?) chicken feet served with tiny hot peppers. You could see the webbing, toes, everything. I am not normally phased by foods of different cultures but this was one of the least appetizing things I have ever seen on a table. Rest of the dinner was unspectacular. Total cost for the 8 of us was about US$12.

After dinner, I met up with my friend Roy from New York and who is now working in ASCP’s Shanghai office. He had some friends who just graduated from Wharton in town visiting. We went out to a super trendy lounge in Shanghai called Volar, with a world-class crowd in a world-class space (Philippe Starck) and world-class prices. We had table service with US$150 bottles of vodka and green tea/whiskey. About 1/3 the price of a similar place in Vegas, Miami, New York, but with the exception of the 98% Asian crowd, you couldn’t tell a difference. But, our bar tab was almost 40x the price of my entire group’s dinner.

How sustainable is China’s economic growth like this? I am mentally composing a much longer separate post about this, but the disparity here between rich and poor is incredible. And China is supposedly socialist.

After the unsatisfying dinner Friday, I opted for an American-style brunch Saturday morning at Kraze Burger, an excellent upscale burger chain that of course is Korean-owned. Then I headed to the People’s Square and to the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. I had heard a lot about the museum and had high expectations.

The ground floor was very impressive - a huge model of Shanghai’s riverfront probably 60 feet long and 10 feet wide, shadowed under Shanghai’s slogan “Better City Better Life”. I wandered around a bit, quite impressed, and took some photos. Then I noticed there was an upstairs. I took the escalator up to the 2^nd floor which had some mildly interesting pictures of Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s. I almost left the museum then but decided to take the escalator up one more floor to see what was there. As I stepped off the escalator, my mouth opened and I literally said “Holy Sh-t” outloud. The entire floor was covered with a model of 2010 Shanghai down to the tiniest level of detail. It must have been 100 feet by 100 feet at least. (Photos below) There was all sorts of other crazy exhibits also – like a 360 degree video tour through 2010 Shanghai, and a room describing the eco-town of 200,000 people the government is building on a now deserted island just up the river from Shanghai. A final highlight was the big exhibit on containerized shipping (photos and shipping note below!).

After the museum I went to the new Xiantiandi district. It’s a “stylish business, entertainment, and cultural complex” that looks pulled right out of Epcot Center. But it is also somehow the new trendy place in town. I had a straiccatella gelato and coffee outside at a nice café. Then I wandered a bit more and found one of the weirdest places I’ve ever been, a German Brauhaus complete with pretzels, home-brewed German lagers, Chinese girls in blue plaid dresses and two Chinese singers on a little stage belting out Bavarian hits. Picture below does not do it justice.

Finally, taking the subway home, I was shocked to see a white guy wearing a Georgia Tech t-shirt! I talked to him, and he was actually with a group of 5 current Tech students who are all CompE’s. Apparently there is an exchange program with Jian Tong University (the premier technical university in Shanghai) which my office sits adjacent to. There are 47 of them studying here this summer. In an interesting nod to undergrad norms these days, we exchanged not phone numbers or emails but facebook IDs so we can meet up later.

Shanghai plan (above), View of museum from People's Square (below)

German Brauhaus (above), Me commanding a COSCO ship (below)

For the containerized shipping fans out there (and really, who isn’t?), an interesting aspect of China’s growth has been its impact on the port of Hong Kong. For years, Hong Kong was the world’s busiest port. As mainland China has grown and as Hong Kong has prospered, it has become more economical to ship directly from the mainland. Despite China’s crazy growth, container volumes at Hong Kong were DOWN ~3% YoY in Q1 2007. Singapore took over as the world’s busiest port in 2006 and is likely to hold the lead in 2007. But Shanghai has moved into second place and is forecast to take the lead in 2008. Over 90% of world trade is shipped by sea.