Shanghai: Month One
11:59 pm on Saturday night and I'm at the club dancing to an old spice girls hit. Everyone around me is shakin' it, even though this song hasn't been popular for about 10 years. The open bar is busy, the dancers who work at the club are up on their pedestals, the bartenders in their white button-downs and spiky hair are juggling empty liquor bottles and the groups in the table service area are trying to look posh. There's slick white décor, low lights, partially glass floors. The scene could be almost anywhere in the world, except that almost everyone in it is Chinese. This is Shanghai.
My move here and subsequent adjustment has been by far the easiest international move I've done so far (the previous ones being to Budapest and Milan). Of course it's in part due to all the hand-holding that the University has done for me: they've organized a lot of things for me like a bank account, the required medical exam, picking me up from the airport, helping me find an apartment, etc, which I've never had anyone do before. And of course it's in part due to the fact that I have done the moving out of my own country thing a couple of times before so I know what to expect. But I would say it's mostly because living is just so easy here for expats.
I've heard murmurs from other westerners on occaision about someone or something being “colonial” and there's certainly a grain of truth to it. For sure a lot of the expats here do live in a colonist fashion, with massive city center villas or apartments, household staffs, expensive cars, children at fancy private schools. To extent there's even a completely different stores and restaurants frequently by westerners and well-to-do Chinese than by the average Shanghainese person. Of course this difference between wealthy and not-so-wealthy exists in any large metropolis, but the disparity here is even more pronounced. For example, a meal in a western restaurant can easily cost five to ten times more than one in an average Chinese restaurant.
Being an English teacher puts me a couple of steps below the standard expat but I'm still in a great position to enjoy life here. Whatever you call it: colonialism or globarlization, there's a lot that I've quickly come to love and appreciate about this city. The first one being my coworkers: without the varied interests that draw people to Shanghai, where else could I find such a motley but delightful crew? The students would have to come next on this list of first-month favorites. While not all of them are the sharpest tacks ever, almost all of them seem to be really transfixed by me as a person: their living, breathing, bit of Americana. What's not to enjoy about that?
Then there's the range of food: I haven't gotten much outside of eating Asian food here yet because there's just such an endless variety even when you just look at all the regional Chinese food, Taiwanese, Hong Kong-ese (?), Japanese, Thai, Indonesian....the list goes on. The Fabric Market also makes it into my top five, I've gone there to have clothes tailor-made and paid a fraction of the price of what I would in a western department store. Then there's the architecture, much of it relatively non-descript but still impressive: skyscrapers as far as the eye can see, the massive Shanghai Stadium across the road from my apartment, the old Jesuit buildings mixed in with the shopping malls of Xujiahui, the occaisional traditional Chinese roof or building that has miraculously escaped demolition.
As I learn more about the city and gain a better grasp of the culture and language these impressions are bound to evolve, my list of favorites expanding, my portrait of the city refining in detail. I'll try to keep the blog as updated as possible, I'm not actually able to access it myself directly though. Thanks to those who are helping me out with this.
For those of you who have requested photos, I've found a great photo essay on Time Magazine's website called “A New Look at Old Shanghai.” This will give you a far better representation of what life in Shanghai is all about than any of the snaps I've taken so far. (Which are mostly of my silly coworkers anyway.)
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1924392,00.html
My move here and subsequent adjustment has been by far the easiest international move I've done so far (the previous ones being to Budapest and Milan). Of course it's in part due to all the hand-holding that the University has done for me: they've organized a lot of things for me like a bank account, the required medical exam, picking me up from the airport, helping me find an apartment, etc, which I've never had anyone do before. And of course it's in part due to the fact that I have done the moving out of my own country thing a couple of times before so I know what to expect. But I would say it's mostly because living is just so easy here for expats.
I've heard murmurs from other westerners on occaision about someone or something being “colonial” and there's certainly a grain of truth to it. For sure a lot of the expats here do live in a colonist fashion, with massive city center villas or apartments, household staffs, expensive cars, children at fancy private schools. To extent there's even a completely different stores and restaurants frequently by westerners and well-to-do Chinese than by the average Shanghainese person. Of course this difference between wealthy and not-so-wealthy exists in any large metropolis, but the disparity here is even more pronounced. For example, a meal in a western restaurant can easily cost five to ten times more than one in an average Chinese restaurant.
Being an English teacher puts me a couple of steps below the standard expat but I'm still in a great position to enjoy life here. Whatever you call it: colonialism or globarlization, there's a lot that I've quickly come to love and appreciate about this city. The first one being my coworkers: without the varied interests that draw people to Shanghai, where else could I find such a motley but delightful crew? The students would have to come next on this list of first-month favorites. While not all of them are the sharpest tacks ever, almost all of them seem to be really transfixed by me as a person: their living, breathing, bit of Americana. What's not to enjoy about that?
Then there's the range of food: I haven't gotten much outside of eating Asian food here yet because there's just such an endless variety even when you just look at all the regional Chinese food, Taiwanese, Hong Kong-ese (?), Japanese, Thai, Indonesian....the list goes on. The Fabric Market also makes it into my top five, I've gone there to have clothes tailor-made and paid a fraction of the price of what I would in a western department store. Then there's the architecture, much of it relatively non-descript but still impressive: skyscrapers as far as the eye can see, the massive Shanghai Stadium across the road from my apartment, the old Jesuit buildings mixed in with the shopping malls of Xujiahui, the occaisional traditional Chinese roof or building that has miraculously escaped demolition.
As I learn more about the city and gain a better grasp of the culture and language these impressions are bound to evolve, my list of favorites expanding, my portrait of the city refining in detail. I'll try to keep the blog as updated as possible, I'm not actually able to access it myself directly though. Thanks to those who are helping me out with this.
For those of you who have requested photos, I've found a great photo essay on Time Magazine's website called “A New Look at Old Shanghai.” This will give you a far better representation of what life in Shanghai is all about than any of the snaps I've taken so far. (Which are mostly of my silly coworkers anyway.)
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1924392,00.html
posted by le poisson rouge at
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