We walked straight onto the tarmac in Shanghai and were corralled into a bus on the way to the customs building. Flat, flat, it’s so flat, there are no mountains, just small rows of buildings on the horizon. There’s only an hour time difference, but I sleepwalk through the jangle of Chinese announcements, and follow the signs to the maglev train.
I share the front carriage with three indifferent French tourists, who were too busy looking beautiful and pained to notice that we were in a floating marvel of modern engineering. All cars had a small display above the doorways with current speeds. I alternated between watching the numbers and watching the suburbs whip by out the window. A girl in my hostel that night said the maglev had a special coating on the windows to make it look as if the countryside was going past “slower,” because people would get sick if they saw it passing at the real speed. I wondered what would happen if the maglev flew off the track in a freak accident; vaporized, mushroom cloud, and time travel were all possibilities.
All the ticket machines on the metro change easily into English displays, and I rock back and forth on the dark ride into Shanghai, straining to hear the station announcements, because China is loud. The language is loud, the people are loud, and they will talk no matter where they are. Japanese trains are usually a murky cloud of silence, even in rush hour when crushed commuters turn their eyes to the ceiling and try to imagine a better place to be. But here, people squawk into cell phones, shout across the train, gab to friends, mumble to themselves. It feels alive and communicative, despite almost complete incomprehension on my part.
Emerging from the terminal and walking towards the Bund, with a scribbled map and directions to my hostel, my mind goes into a record-skipping mantra: “Oh my god, China. OH MY GOD. CHINA.” If someone in Shanghai slowed down for even a moment, no matter the reason, Shanghai would run them straight over in the breakneck pace to grow, to improve, to tear down and rebuild. The old colonial faces of the buildings on the Bund are able to stare down the skyscrapers of Pudong only because of historical plaquards – otherwise, they’d have been toast long ago.
I’m sure I gawked open-mouthed at enough of the progress signs in Shanghai that going to the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum was probably a good idea to get geek-satisfied. Where was the city going, and how was it going to get there. The plans were intense, insane – I spent 2 hours staring and gaping with other visitors. An innocent-enough plan for a big container port; plenty of seaside cities have container ports, what’s the big deal? Probably the 32.5 kilometer long bridge that will connect it to the mainland.
The Lonely Planet said there was “an excellent model of the city plan for 2020.” This “excellent model” was one of the things in life you cannot stop staring at. Beautiful, scary, and at a scale that you thought you’d never really see something imagined. The model stopped where the walkway had to go – I doubt Shanghai would actually slow down for something so trivial.
