“The city of the future”

Shanghai local time Tuesday 11:47pm

I post this blog from Shanghai. We arrived here at around 3 this afternoon. Our tour bus took us to various parts of town. We saw the neighborhood where Jiang Zemin lives. We also saw Xintiandi, an area with many bars that is frequented by visitors. This evening we went on a boat ride of the river and checked out a town square-like area featured in the photo above.

One of my business school classmates was here last year and described this as the “city of the future” because of how modern it feels and Western it feels. Walking around certain parts of the city certainly makes you feel as though you are in a modern Western city instead of one in a still developing country. There are a lot of very modern looking skyscrapers. Shanghai is also the richest city in China. Not surprisingly, on the way to the hotel just now, I spotted a couple of shopping malls that resemble the ones in America.

Prior to my arrival in Shanghai this afternoon, China Mobile sent a textmessage to my GSM phone welcoming me to Shanghai and inviting me to use its services to access a wide array of information from traffic to hotel locations. Too bad I could only make out a few of the words because it was in Chinese.