Thursday, October 18, 2007

A "relaxing" day in the garden

So Ted and I have been shopping our little hearts out in Shanghai, hence the lack of pictures and blog posts. We've been waking up fairly early, grabbing some Jiang Bing for breakfast (the Shanghai version has less onion and cilantro, but is crispier and just as yummy), and have been hitting the subway to whatever shopping mecca calls our name that particular day.

But as the magic of retail therapy begins to wane and one mall begins to melt into another, one has to find something else to do in Shanghai. Today, we thought we would pay a visit to the most famous garden in Shanghai, Yu Yuan. It took us a while to drag ourselves out of bed, as all of the walking in Shanghai has begun to wear us down, and the day previous most of our calories had come from the best fried rice we had ever tasted, which was washed down with our first taste of Suntory Beer. While we swigged down four big bottles at dinner (don't worry Grandma, it's a lite beer), we still managed to keep dinner at 60 yuan, which was the best bargain for quality yet at a single meal service. Let's just say beef seared with hot red peppers, onions, cilantro and other greens, stir-fried lentils (Chinese green beans) and peppers, fried rice complete with smoked meat, hot peppers, and a ton of onions and soy sauce, and Suntory, a smooth lite blend of wheaty goodness. Even in all of our American gluttony, we still managed to be outdone by the young men across the room, who immediately struck up a conversation which started with "hey joe!" to the tune of "Hey Jude". They were drunk and very friendly as they kept cracking jokes about Yao Ming ("I believe I can fly"), President Bush, and placed bets as to whether we were from the UK or US. Now that's what I call a cross cultural exchange.

Needless to say, the morning started a little like this blog post: slow. So when we finally and forcefully dragged ourselves to Yu Yuan gardens, we were overwhelmed by what we saw before us. No, it wasn't that sense of wonder that fills one upon taking in such a wonder as the Forbidden City, it was the "Oh my God, why did we ever decide to do this, and today of all days?" sense of dread.

It was that immediate acknowledgment that you have just stepped into the biggest and saddest tourist trap within a 100 mile radius. Complete with Starbucks, Dairy Queen, Haagen-Dazs, and a KFC, this Disneyland/fantasyland complete with authentic-looking architecture filled with crappy goods of all sorts, forcibly overwhelmed the senses in the worst way. I couldn't help but be reminded of the Qianmen area which Ted and I will be documenting once we return to Beijing, as authentic (and protected) historic neighborhoods have been demolished to make way for a reconstruction similar to the one you see here. Complete with a trolley-traversed pedestrian area and "authentic" reproductions of the architecture that stood on the site just a few years ago, I couldn't stop thinking about all of the poor people that have been forced out of their homes in Qianmen, and for this.

But as horrifying of an experience as this was, it is also a good reminder that the work that I am doing on my thesis is worthwhile. While I can't do anything about the development that is already underway in Beijing, maybe I can do something about a similar situation in the future. The Yu Yuan gardens was first-hand proof that when few cultural relics remain from a certain time-period, they will more than likely be stripped of all of their authentic historic value in order to bolster their commercial value. While this sometimes comes in the form of total destruction so that some tower can be built in its place, this can also come in the form of romantic reconstruction purely for tourism purposes. This has happened here in Shanghai, and it continues at this very moment in Beijing.

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