Celebrating mid-autumn festival in shanghai

CEBU, Philippines - It was 21 years ago when I last visited Shanghai together with a few Filipino journalists, which was a month after the infamous Tiananmen Square incident. With the whole world wondering what the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai would be like, I guess it was time to revisit Shanghai. But this is not an article about the Shanghai Expo; rather it is about Shanghai itself. With the cheap fares that Cebu Pacific offered, I went with my wife Jessica, Paquito and Marissa Unchuan and Engr. Rex and Liza Carampatana.

Luckily, Rex Carampatana booked us in the Nanjing Hotel which was a stone’s throw from Nanjing East Road, that long six-kilometer stretch of a wide main road that Shanghai closed for vehicular traffic and used exclusively for pedestrian and tourist traffic. It is one of the main tourist attractions in Shanghai as it is their busiest shopping street lined with shopping stores and malls and extends all the way to the Huangpu River.

The Nanjing East Road has a lot of train trolleys that go around for tourists to view sites in downtown Shanghai. Police visibility is extremely high in this tourist area. It was quite interesting to see one of the train trolleys still bears advertisements about Wow Philippines, which gives you an idea of how thorough the tourism campaign of then DOT Sec. Ace Durano was and above all, it was still making an impact in foreign countries.

One of the first buildings we visited was the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, which featured a John Portman Art and Architecture exhibition. This facility is quite amazing because you could see the growth and development of Shanghai in the last hundred years. Shanghai back in the 30s was already one of the great cities of the world. One thing that immediately gets your attention is Shanghai’s slogan “Better City, Better Life.”

What caught our attention is the photo presentation of famed Shanghai photographer Mr. Xu Xixian who took a lot of black and white photos in the 70s and now his son, Mr. Xu Jianrong, revisited where his father took those photos and this was shown on TV – a before and after scene. It showed the rapid growth and development of Shanghai in the last 20 years.

The biggest surprise in visiting this edifice was they presented a huge model of Shanghai City in a scale of 1:500 depicting 110-square kilometer of Shanghai, including the Expo area, including Pudong International Airport, which shows all the buildings and the streets, including night lights where after a few minutes the lights in the metropolis dims into darkness.

Just across this facility was the Shanghai Museum, which boasts of a million collections of ancient Chinese art, including 130,000 pieces of national treasures, from ceramics, bronze, lots of carvings and a special exhibit from Russia of Catherine the Great, which was to say an unexpected treat. It was like seeing it in the Louvre in Paris.

Yes, we spent a full day at the Shanghai World Expo; after all, it was one of the main reasons why we went to Shanghai. But you couldn’t see all of the Expo in two or three days, so we decided to devote a full day there. Thanks to the hour-long queues, we only got to see the Pavilions of Canada, Spain, Denmark, and Finland and yes, we did visit the Philippine Pavilion. Perhaps my most memorable experience in the Expo was when we took a free ride on a Fuel Cell bus, the bus of the future that uses fuel cell technology where the exhaust emits only water. Shanghai no doubt prides itself as a city prepared for the future.

Quite timely that it was also the celebration of the Mid-Autumn Festival in all of China, a famous holiday where people give gifts of moon cakes. That meant more people literally flooding the Nanjing East Road, including all the sites across the Huangpu River called the Pudong District, which lies across the Peace Hotel where I stayed 21 years ago. Even the old jazz band was still playing in the Peace Hotel lobby. Back then, there was nothing there. It’s just like looking across Cordova from the Port of Cebu City. Today, there are 847 buildings in Shanghai’s Pudong District that is over 30-storeys high, including the iconic Oriental Pearl TV tower and China’s tallest building the World Financial Center. These buildings didn’t exist 20 years ago!

For shopping, we went to the famous Yuyuan Gardens a famous classical garden located along the Anren Jie, Shanghai. This was completed in 1577 by a government official of the Ming Dynasty named Pan Yunduan. After 400 years of existence and a five-year restoration program, the 5-acre Yuyuan Garden was opened to the public in 1961.

Seeing the Yuyuan Garden gives you a glimpse of old China, which features six main scenic areas, the Sansui Hall, Wanhua Chamber, and the Dianchun Hall. Today, this Chinese style architecture is in reality housing shopping malls and restaurants, which was teaming with people enjoying the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday.

At the end of our short visit to Shanghai, we took the subway to the nearest MagLev station. MagLev stands for Magnetic Levitation. It is the train of the future that runs on magnets and has no rails. It only takes the 30 kilometer distance from downtown Shanghai to the Pudong International Airport a mere 8 minutes, running at speeds over 350 kilometers per hour at night. But in daytime, it runs over 400 kilometers per hour. Indeed, we saw much of the Shanghai of the old and yes, we tasted the technology of the future that would surely become common place in the future of Shanghai. (FREEMAN)