Week 5 - Slowdown and Ancient Town

Foot traffic only

This week was a very welcome slowdown after the whirlwind tour of Qingdao, but it was still pretty busy, as my time here tends to be! What to do when you want a nice slow night? Well, how about watching a Chinese action flick at the movie theatre! “Tik tok”, or something along those lines, was a collaboration between Korean and Chinese actors and producers. It was pretty good! I chose the action movie so I could follow along, as dialogue is usually a secondary thing in the genre. It was a good decision, as I was able to get the gist of what was happening without any major holes. There were some shocking bits of dialogue that were in English, however! Turns out, when Korean and Chinese actors had dialogue with each other, they used English within the movie, which was always startling.

We returned to the Sturgeon facility for one night, in an attempt to do a quick workshop with the scientists there, but I would say that I did nothing and mostly nothing was done. It was an unfortunate use of time, but our party was compensated for our time, and I am sure to be editing some work that will be produced later, so I suppose it was worth it.

Bridge of Lights

I also took a trip to the eastern tip of the peninsula that Dishui Lake and Lingang New City is located on. There is a small park with a whale sculpture that overlooks what remains of the wetland that the French and Chinese built Dishui Lake and Lingang New City on, respectively. Off in the distance, you could see Donghai Bridge, a 6-lane, 20 mile bridge from the mainland to the Yanghsan deep sea port. That’s a long bridge, is what I’m saying. I guess they are building a second bridge, road and rail, to meet transportation demand, so there’s that.

Old style architecture

Later in the week, I was treated to a trip to an Ancient Town. These towns are government preservations of old Chinese architecture and city culture, as the development of China has mostly removed this style from existence. They are fairly touristy, as an older district of any U.S. city might be. They are defined by older architecture, shrines to locally famous Chinese people, narrow streets lined with trinket and street food vendors and in this particular case, a traditional Chinese garden, complete with requisite 9 turns of water and false mountains. The best way I can describe this town would be to imagine China from the traditional U.S. perspective and you pretty much have it right there.

Juxtaposition

After walking around the Ancient Town for a bit, my colleague and host for the day, Xuefang, drove us into the, uh, Shanghai suburb, of Huinan. I don’t really know how to classify it. It is probably 30 minutes from the edge of Shanghai proper, but it is also densely populated. So much so, in fact, that we drove for 20 minutes and were unable to find a parking spot. Full booked up and down every street, parking garages and lots were closed at full capacity. Eventually, we found a garage on the edge of the city, parked and had (another big) lunch before heading home.