all hyped up in shanghai
Hype matters. A lot. Hype might even be all we have left in a world where issues of substance tend to be ignored in favor of the miraculous branded moment of “right now.” The new Shanghai is right at home in this Attention Deficit world, and that is part of why it attracts so much hype at the moment. But dive deeper and one finds that behind all this hype is some substance, a fact that remains true even after the new shiny veneer of this city is stripped away to reveal its many layers, revealing a posse of Canadian immigrants who hold sway over large segments of “Cool Shanghai” — a mysterious result of reverse immigration! If you like building sites, Shanghai is your city. Although slightly fewer cranes litter the city today than before (they’re all in the Middle East now) the fact remains that Shanghai is a boomtown, sucking up people, resources and power at an ever increasing rate. Pudong, which was a farce only 10 short years ago, is now a gleaming metroplis, complete with its own suburbs stretching down the Hangphu river. The city gleams under the neon bulb of progress and has gentrified rapidly, with results especially evident in the last three years. Designer shops litter the city and a new vibe of creativity permeates the nightlife and fashion. Now if only they could do something about that nasty, choke-inducing air.
Arrivals
There’s a Shanghai legend that says if you turn on your laptop while riding the highly-hyped Maglev train as its leaving the station, the electrical charge will erase the contents of your memory drive. While that’s unconfirmed, the real reason to skip the train is that it drops you in a random part of Shanghai, making the journey to wherever you are staying that much more annoying, especially during peak gridlock times. So the better option is to arrange a driver for an airport pickup. Try Mr. Niu, a local fixer without much English experience but who drives a nice car and is very polite. If he is booked he can arrange others to pick you up in a gleaming Camry or Buick (door 10 exit is the best) for a relaxing ride into town. +86 138 1608 8591
Arrivals
There’s a Shanghai legend that says if you turn on your laptop while riding the highly-hyped Maglev train as its leaving the station, the electrical charge will erase the contents of your memory drive. While that’s unconfirmed, the real reason to skip the train is that it drops you in a random part of Shanghai, making the journey to wherever you are staying that much more annoying, especially during peak gridlock times. So the better option is to arrange a driver for an airport pickup. Try Mr. Niu, a local fixer without much English experience but who drives a nice car and is very polite. If he is booked he can arrange others to pick you up in a gleaming Camry or Buick (door 10 exit is the best) for a relaxing ride into town. +86 138 1608 8591
Where to Stay
Although everyone talks about Pudong, and its easy to admire the beautiful Grand Hyatt and Shangri-la, its not really the place to stay if you can help it. Far more fun is to be had in Puxi, near the central People’s Square and the urban heartbeat of the city. Jia Shanghai has recently opened and offers luxuriously appointed rooms in the tradition of Philippe Starck in a well located small hotel. For the more corporate set, the new Le Meridien offers fantastic facilities, rooms, and location, making it the hard to beat option.
Soon everyone will be ditching all of that to flock to the new Park Hyatt, which will move the center of gravity up to the 79th floor as one of the world’s highest hotels when it opens in 2008 at the new Shanghai World Financial Center in Pudong. The stunning hotel features an array of designer luxuries and ridiculously appointed rooms in a “vertical city” that rises 101 stories into the clouds.
Food
xiao long bao. Everywhere you look, the signature dumpling of Shanghai is worth every mouth watering soup-and-mystery-meat-filled bite. Some describe it as an inside out helping of matzah ball soup, but either way it remains worth the experience. Restaurants in the Xintiandi food district offer surprisingly good xiao long bao, and the noodle and cooking shops between People’s Square and the Bund have various delicious versions of the magic dumpling. For other restaurant advice, we dropped in on Carson Block, co-author of the new Doing Business in China For Dummies (part of the series) for his inside tips on the food scene: “Di Shui Dong (several restaurants) is awesome Hunan food. It is cheap as hell and very popular with both locals and foreigners. Basic, basic décor. Laris is one of the few world class restaurants in Shanghai. Fusion food. South Beauty is part of a chain from Beijing with high-end Sichuan food. Decors are all high end, but theme varies from location to location. I wouldn’t say this is touristy, but it’s more foreigner-friendly than a lot of Chinese restaurants. Reasonably pricey for Chinese.” And for that late-night food fix, we couldn’t forget City Diner, which offers milkshakes, hamburgers and speed wifi, even if the service is the opposite.
Activities
If you’re trying to get in on the booming Chinese contemporary art scene, head down to Suzhou Creek to check out some of the Chinese warehouse galleries making money hand over fist. From Zhang Huang to up and comers like Xu Zhen, this is where the big money is sprouting in the Chinese art world. With all the cultural ferment, there has to be at least one bar that is so crazy and underground to make you believe in youthful revolution. If it exists, you don’t know about it, because its likely in a no-name suburb far from the international areas of the center of the city. One local favorite that approaches this ideal is Logo, situated in the southern end of the city and far enough off the beaten track to detour the hordes of tourists tramping through stretches of bars overlooking the Bund on any given night. Michelle Garnaut’s Glamour Bar remains a Shanghai institution and a must see, if only for the fabulous moment that it imbues on your experience, but Logo is where you go for dirty, rampant partying in a smoky atmosphere with cheap wine and DJs who specialize in things like “noise art” and minimal techno.
It rocks, and so do their live music nights, which feature random acts like MIAMI, a twin-set of Japanese girls from Shibuya with an amazing sound that epitomizes cool cultural rebellion and complete lack of knowledge about musical instruments. For the late night set, clubbing in Shanghai continues to get better and better — we like Mint (less pretentious than some other locations with fewer working ladies) and Club Deep — which specializes in thumping, pumping, grinding house music that will leave your ears ringing until next Tuesday. With all that hype, a hype-filter may be in order to help navigate the city, and that comes in the form of Shanghaist.com — a wonderful part of the ist collection of city blogs around the world. Shanghaist cuts through the riff-raff and does a good job of pinpointing what is worth checking out in this gigantic, rapidly evolving city.
Sure, you can shop till you drop, but even the locals know its better to head to Hong Kong to avoid the stiff luxury duties that come with international goods in China, and in this day and age of lead-laced local goods, buying the knock-offs just doesn’t have the appeal it once did. So do what they always did in Shanghai — eat and drink your way through the city, confident in the knowledge that it is cooler and hotter and slicker than ever before, and thus, maybe, so are you. If you believe the hype, that is.
Stan Stalnaker is the founder and creative director of Hub Culture Ltd., a movement with a suite of activities focused on content development, private social networks and global experiences.
He can be contacted at stan.stalnaker@hubculture.com. |
