Welcome to Shanghai

We arrived at Pudong Airport in the early afternoon, after a short flight from Chengdu. The three hundred km/hr Mag-Lev train zipped us from Pudong to Shanghai, dropping us in the subway. The Nanjing Hotel was only a few steps from the subway station, and right beside Nanjing Rd., which seemed to be very much like the "Times Square" or "Hollywood Blvd" of Shanghai. We went for a typical Shanghai-style lunch at a busy restaurant, where we had to sit down at a still-occupied table for lack of space. The city specialty is a soupy-dumpling served in bamboo trays.As the sun went down, I stared out the hotel window at Shanghai and took a few photographs. The city looked cosmopolitan and modern, but also also very historic, developing, and crowded. In just an afternoon here, more than anywhere else, I couldn't tell the difference between communism and capitalism. Nanjing Rd. is populated with expensive shops, Western and Eastern. I spotted Zara, Nike, Rolex, Li-Ning (The Chinese equivalent of Nike) Meters Bonwe (Chinese Fashion), along with the ubiquitous McDonald's, KFC, and Pizza Hut, and right alongside nameless alleyway hawkers, with cardboard boxes filled with fake watches or a laminated catalogue page showing fake handbags.In the evening we found some local entertainment in the form of an acrobatics show. Our seats were in the very back of the auditorium, disappointing after the front row experience at the light show in Yangshuo. The lobby smelled like popcorn, and looked like an American movie theatre. The performance was impressive. There were girls doing hoola-hoops, fifteen or twenty at a time, around their waist, arms, and legs. Boys were jumping and doing flips over each other, through hoops. One act featured girls balancing wine glasses on their toes and heads, while spinning around. There was a long segment of a couple swinging from a rope, flying through the air like Donkey Kong, while the music from "Titanic" and images of the movie played on the background screen. I couldn't believe it when one act had ten or twelve people stacked up on a single bicycle, an ordinary bike, riding around on the stage. The show finished with the ring of death motorcycle ball. Four guys started out tearing around in the cage on their bikes, and then a fifth entered, an attractive girl in a short skirt with long hair flowing under her helmet, and much applause ensued.When we came out, a TV camera was set up at the exit, where an excited girl with a microphone was doing some kind of interview with people, maybe for their reaction. The motorcycle woman from the cage of death was also standing by the exit, selling DVD's of the show. A very clever sales trick, but I passed, because Chinese DVDs use different regional settings than North American ones.We made our way back to Nanjing Rd. via a Taxi. "Welcome to take my taxi," a female robot voice said in English as we climbed in. The male driver said nothing. The hotels in China provide business cards showing the hotel's name in Mandarin, so hopeless tourists can give them to drivers when we've lost our way.At the hotel, we decided to get beers from the convenience store and find a bench on Nanjing Rd. where we could people watch. The wide street is for pedestrian use only, except for little red trolley trains chugging through the crowds to move shoppers leaden down with bags. Families were out with little kids, stopping to admire a statue of a woman pushing a stroller. Teenagers were passing by, strutting as if they were on a fashion runway, and puffing cigarettes. A few of the worse off were digging in trash cans for empty plastic bottles.The contrast was pronounced when a destitute elderly person came and waited for us to finish a beer, so they could take the empty can and redeem it for an infinitesimal sum; while in the background people window shopped the Rolex store and carried Prada bags, neon lights blinking down from skyscrapers lighting up the whole scene in red and then yellow, then blue and then green.