My Initial Feelings About Shanghai: Prejudices vs. Reality

Andy Hill

I’ve been in Shanghai for two weeks now and I have to say that I have thoroughly enjoyed being here.

I didn’t know much on my way in

I didn’t really know what to expect of this city while I was planning to come here. I knew something of its history, from it being first opened to Western merchants after the First Opium War to its image of being a seedy and sensational haven of organized crime in the 1920s to its recent meteoric rise as a global city and as host to the World Expo in 2010.

I never do too much research, from a visitor’s perspective, on a place to which I am planning to travel. I like to know some history and culture, but I don’t need to dog-ear an entire Lonely Planet just to know what I should or shouldn’t check out. I do that while wandering around, getting lost and talking to people who live there.

My initial assumptions about Shanghai were that its streets would be filthy, its air un-breathable, its pace intolerable, its rudeness incorrigible and it being an all-around, less-than-interesting place.

I was wrong.

New, clean, pleasant, classy?

It is actually, shockingly, clean. In fact, I cannot think of a single city anywhere near its size that can boast the tidiness of its streets.  By comparison, Bangkok, Paris and New York City seem like trash dumps.

The air is obviously pretty bad, being in the country with the worst air pollution in the world; however, there are so many parks and tree-lined avenues that it really doesn’t seem all that foul.

In contrast to other major cities in Asia, you don’t feel like you are always wading through fumes of bus and motorbike exhaust in Shanghai, which makes whatever pollution is in the air less apparent.

Another thing that surprised me was how so many of the buildings, the concrete, the streetlights, the subways, the entire infrastructure of the city, seem so new.

And I haven’t seen such flagrant displays of opulence since I was in Los Angeles. There are opportunities to buy Rolex watches and Bentleys around every corner, it seems.

Finally, it is not insanely pushy and chaotic. I mean, of course it is a little of these things, and getting off the subways is often an all-out blitzkrieg to get to the escalators; but, walking around the thickest parts of the downtown area has not seemed nearly as overwhelming as many other places I have been.

So, the mental picture I had of Shanghai has been mostly proven wrong over the past couple weeks of pounding its pavement.

I must admit that it is quite a classy and tidy place for a massive city, as evidenced by a man I saw today clear his throat loudly, bend over and hawk a wad of phlegm not onto the ground but courteously into a trash bin.

That is class.