This is Shanghai--part one

The crazy financial Lujiazui district of Pudong, as seen from the Bund (or Waitan) on the other side of Huangpu River. The enormous bulbuous space station/phallic object is the Oriental Pearl Tower--Dongfang Mingzhu. Pudong materialized out of swamp land in the past 15 years. This is the iconic skyline the city's planners are going for in attracting tourists to clog the Bund and foreign investors to fill those office towers.

The white thing is the honkin' Radisson hotel near People's Square (Renmin Guang Chang). It has nice bathrooms.

And I totally got this wrong before, because I'm an idiot: Just behind it is the extremely architecturally out-of-place Jinmen Dajuidan Hotel, not the art museum. The hotel, built in 1926 by the Brits as the China United Assurance Company, has an old-school clock face and is apparently supposed to look Italian. It has been refurbished and, like a lot of the old-school colonial buildings in the city, is now a heritage building.

The Shanghai Art Museum is just behind the camera, to the left. It was built by the British in the 1930s as part of a race club (honestly, you can't get much more colonial than that. Way to go, chaps). Last week it hosted the opening of the Shanghai Biennale, which is pretty cool: There were gigantic, iridescent metallic bugs crawling up and down the building.






Crazy-trippy neon signs on the ultra-touristy, pedestrianized Nanjing Dong Lu.

I fucking hate that street.