qingming in shanghai

this weekend was qingming jie, or tomb sweeping festival, in china. even though it's apparently only a han chinese traditional holiday the whole country gets a three day weekend. i took the chance to make what has become a once a year trek to shanghai to visit friends. based on how many people were out and about at the newly restored bund on monday, there didn't seem to be a lot of tomb sweeping going on.

i won't bore you with a detailed play by play because nothing much happened. but while throwing an elbow at some chick that was in my way on the escalator when i got back to beijing, i realised it was sort of a bizarre experience, even though i had a great time. the entire thing (brunches, easter party, picnic in a park, beirut games) could have taken place in the US. for example, on monday evening before flying back to beijing i had a giant (delicious) burrito at this restaurant packed with laowai getting drunk on margaritas. i'm having a hard time believing that anywhere you can get decent mexican food counts as china. in beijing all we have is saddle cantina, where the tortillas taste like the pancakes they use with peking duck.

anyway, too much has been written about the differences between beijing and shanghai so i won't rehash that here. i will write about the bund, which just reopened to great fanfare after two years of construction. i hadn't been there for five years, and it pretty much looks the same to me, though shanghaiiers insist otherwise. i will say there are a lot more buildings over in pudong, including the glorious giant bottle opener, an apt dedication to laowai living.

on another note, the shanghai metro is expanding at a ridiculously rapid rate as they get ready for the 2010 expo to open next month. the trains and stations, especially on the new lines, are all really nice, with fancy flat screen displays and google maps-type consoles you can use to look at the area around the station. once after brunch at a popular art gallery slash cafe area, we walked out to the street right in front of a brand new metro station that my friend didn't even know existed. meanwhile, the beijing subway is burning to the ground.