Another trip back to a place I'd been before, yet has changed so much.
Last time I went to Shanghai was late 2004 or thereabouts. I stayed on the Pudong side, when Sun Microsystems still existed and still had the budget to blow of serious marketing - like projecting the company logo onto the side of the 40-storey hotel building during the event. I was able to enjoy the airport maglev in its full glory of 410km/h (for about 3 minutes), which would have been much more impressive if it hadn't taken 40min to reach the station by taxi.
Things have proceeded apace - as expected. For one thing, there's so much more of it: vast tracts of reclaimed land were visible as I landed, with huge farms of wind turbines dotted out to sea, and some amazing scultping of the land for housing and government retreats. The Puding side has sprouted out, thanks to the world expo in 2008, and no longer appears to be a small bit on the wrong side of the river.
It still is, on the wrong side of the rivier, though - all of the really interesting stuff is on the old Bund side. The Bund itself has been totally rejuvenated - as expected, the crumbling ruins of former colonial glory have been ressurected & turned into swish hotels & office buildings. It was ripe to happen, I just wish I'd had a spare few hundred million back in the early 2000's to get into proerpty development...
The cool feel that was showing in ritzy places when I last visited is much more abundant now - whereas last time the bars and restaurants were all on the super-elite side of the price scale, now there's some really good stuff available at decent prices. Or maybe the Australian dollar has just gone up in the meantime.
i went to a partner office at an extremely funky area probably most closely resembling an incubator park for startups; it also happened to be within a sculpture park.
All to soon, had to leave again. It remains my favourite city in China - too much more still to explore.
