Taiakang Lu
Originally uploaded by rickvonfeldt
It is the weekend here in Shanghai. With work mostly put to rest, I am taking time to enjoy the city. Shanghai continues to surprise and amaze. In all of the cities I have visited in my life, I have never witness the change of a city as fast – as bold – as exciting as Shanghai. You will see a great description of Shanghai below by a writer from National Geographic Traveler.
Part of my weekend jaunt took me today to a place called Taikang Lu. This is a fascinating place where the modernization of Shanghai was challenged by artists and nostalgia. In one of the thousands of neighborhoods of Shanghai, this few square blocks of lane house has transformed itself into a wonderful twisted place of shops and restaurants.
Imagine two streets – that – well – are not streets. They are lanes. Only large enough for the local bicycle pulling a block of ice or for walking people, the lanes served as entrances to hundreds of small two room apartments. Most of the kitchens were outside the front door where running water could wash away whatever items were cut up for that nights dinner.
Somehow, a group of artists started to convert these small one or two room apartments into artists shops, cafes and shops. What has emerged is a compact of twisting small alley’s of hundreds of shops, cafes and restaurants.
This afternoon, I spent hours walking through the tiny alley’s, stopping for coffee or having a bite of Vietnamese food or stopping to watch an old couple chop garlic chives and some vegetables for their evening dinner.
It is a marvelous place. But as the article below suggests – I see it today. And it might be gone tomorrow. Therefore, I just walked around and enjoyed the moments!
Take a look at a stream of videos I took of the place. This 90 second clips was compiled from 37 small video clips I shot today. The music comes from the recording of five minutes of the stringed instrument player you see in the last scene. I hope you enjoy!
VIDEO LINK: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29563531@N04/3579564186/
ABOUT SHANGHAI
This is no place for the weary. Shanghai—ever frenetic, always evolving, perpetually on the make—calls for energy and agility. Nothing here ever stands still. Buildings rise and fall as abruptly as the stock market. Yesterday’s quaint traditional neighborhood is today’s throbbing-neon skyscraper district. Don’t even try to find that odd little tea shop you discovered in a secluded alleyway last year. It’s gone, replaced by a stylish Internet café where you can get 34 types of noodles while you listen to chest-thumping Asian trance music. Tomorrow the café might be replaced by a tattoo parlor or a little boutique selling next-generation iPhone knockoffs. You either adapt or get left behind.
Attitudes change just as quickly as the skyline does. Shanghai’s entire recent history, in fact, has been a saga of ideological U-turns. Nowhere is this clearer than in People’s Square, the city’s central park. Back in the 1930s, when Shanghai was a licentious international enclave, this was the site of a racetrack, a center for gambling and other demimonde diversions. But once the prudish Communists took over, Shanghai morals made a quick about-face. The racetrack was replaced by a bleak, concrete parade ground, where Red Army troops could march, and where dissidents and intellectuals could be ridiculed for their decadent Western views. Nowadays, with wealth and worldliness no longer anathema, People’s Square has been reborn as a cultural/shopping center, an urban showplace of ultramodern museum buildings, the flamboyant Shanghai Grand Theater, and a tangled underground mall.
Of course, such swift changes in ethos are typically engineered by the powers that be, and the Shanghainese are not always so willing to go along. Take for example, the glittering new magnetic-levitation train from the airport: The government wants this technological wonder to be a symbol of the brave new Shanghai, the state-of-the-art city that will soon play host to the 2010 World Expo. But locals won’t cooperate. Despite the maglev’s breathtaking speed (trains travel at up to 430 kph), it’s regarded as too inconvenient and expensive; few besides tourists can be persuaded to use it. These days the city government can’t even get its obstinate citizens to cross streets at the corner—despite the constant pleas of numerous uniformed crossing guards tasked with maintaining order.
Such rebelliousness is actually Shanghai’s most endearing trait. Party bosses may try to play the stern father here, but their unruly charges defy parental controls. Limits are being tested everywhere—in business, in politics, on the Internet. Even the physical city seems to be undergoing a kind of defiant adolescence. Shanghai today has the gangliness of a teenager growing too fast and too recklessly. Its infrastructure groans; its streets reek of sweat, prawns, and chalk dust. The city’s new aesthetic, meanwhile, seems absolutely pubescent: The futuristic style of those wild, overdone skyscrapers sprouting up everywhere might appeal most to 13-year-old boys weaned on sci-fi computer games.
Still, behind the brash exhibitionism and the pretense of Western sophistication—away from the boho galleries of Moganshan Road and the high-end boutiques and restaurants of Xintiandi—an older Shanghai still lurks, a world of quiet gardens, laundry-draped hutongs, fortune-tellers, and backstreet vegetable markets. Despite the constant renovation, tradition somehow persists here. Those elders practicing tai chi on the Bund, after all, seem blissfully indifferent to the nearby offerings of Giorgio Armani, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and their ilk. They apparently realize that the opulent internationalism that now holds sway in Shanghai will also prove to be a passing phenomenon—just another fleeting stage in the city’s never ending metamorphosis.
