Above the Muck

Ever since my second month here in Shanghai I have belonged to the gym next to my office. Stored away on the top floor of a mall overlooking Peoples' Square, the gym is packed with exercise equipment of all types and even has a pool, dangling precariously over the food court on the floor below (I'd hate to think of all the soggy noddles if the ceiling ever gave way). Though I sometimes swim, I find the headaches of managing the Chinese willy-nilly sense of direction too much to bear underwater, which is why I find myself running on my treadmill (yes, I always run on the same one) more and more often. Not to mention, it has a view too.

Directly in front of me, at the base of the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum stands 'Haribo', the small, blue mascot of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai - he kind of looks like he's made of toothpaste. Shanghai is using the Expo as an excuse to catapult itself into the 21st century, and this little guy is the face of it. To his right runs an official looking boulevard, lined with Chinese flags hanging from every lamp post. The regional government building is at the end of the street, which is why this street offers more pomp than the others. Across the decorated street is the Shanghai Museum, home to more Chinese antiquities than you can shake a stick at. A perfect circle, with odd, vertical loops rising above its entrances, the museum sits like a paperweight in the middle of a park.

As the park's of Peoples' Square fade into the backdrop of skyscrapers, a few holes between the buildings reveal glimpses of the elevated highway system. Here in the heart of the city there are 3 elevated highways stacked one atop the next, with the surface streets running beneath it all. Up close, they are grotesque structures, cleaner than Boston's old central artery, but offering a similar cave like feel beneath. Yet at a distance the traffic glides this way and that, a peaceful diversion to exercise at hand.

Then there are the buildings, with even more oddly shaped hats than the ones I can see from my bedroom. A few of my former roommates were architects, and they told me that the Chinese architectural mindset is to create a standard, mundane building from the ground up, but at the end build the top few floors as crazy, unique or experimental as possible, just to prove that they're good enough to do it. This helps explain the salad fork on top of one building, an oversizes cellphone on top of another, and a Star Wars transport ship on yet another. One of my favorite pastimes is to figure out what it looks like landed on top of the building (and you can't say UFO because it always looks like a UFO).

Finally, rising above it all are 3 buildings so tall, they wouldn't belong in Boston. One of them, though among the 50 tallest buildings on earth, is hardly noticed or mentioned when Shanghai skyscrapers are discussed, because its more famous for the luxury brand mall beneath it, than the tower above. Plus, its name, Plaza 66, sounds more like a cheap Chinese food court than a world class building. Yet that would seem to epitomize China's current image problem, its great things are being overlooked as blase, while the grotesque things are those that catch your eye.

The gym that makes the exercise possible, as running in the streets has too many problems: space, pollution, grimy muck in the streets. I feel that, given the choice of running in muck or looking at the impressive skyline, there is no question I embrace China's recent advancements. It's just that sometimes the muck coming out of China is harder to ignore.