Shanghai and the ride there

Our 20-hour train ride from Qingdao to Shanghai was rather uninspiring. We saw seemingly endless gray, square, uniformily drab apartment buildings, corn field after cornfield and mysterious industrial sites. Unable to communicate much with our fellow passengers we could not deterimine exactly what type of industry we were passing- it required heavy machinery, big black piles of finely ground coal, lots of construction cranes, and massive warehouses full of firey blazes. Metal work, perhaps? The corn fields were fairly interesting. Unlike Korea where all farming appears to be done on a small scale, the corn fields we passed were quite large (though not by US standards) and it was easy to see crop rotation at work. Some parts of the fields would be burning, other parts ripening for harvest, and we even saw sheep being used to munch away at the post-harvest remains.
Now we're in Shanghai, a somewhat tragic city. In Shanghai the gap between rich and poor is glaring. The Shanghai landscape is a mix of modern sky scrapers, colonial buildings (some restored and used as banks or hotels, other not restored and used as very lowclass housing), construction, and rubble. You can stroll down fancy commercial streets passing 5 star hotels, and expensive stores and restaurants then turn and walk in a different direction 3 blocks and find yourself surrounded by ancient, almost-crumbling, over-crowded apartments where whole families live in single rooms and the alleys are full of bicycles hauling assorted recyclable materials.

In Shanghai everyone speaks English and wants to be your friend. By "friend" I mean they want to flatter you and then convince you to buy whatever they are peddling- most commonly watches (fake Rolex) and bags (fake Gucci and Louis Vuitton).
The Shanghainese are more fashionable than folks in Qingdao, but still less stylish, and quite honestly, less attractive, than Koreans. It took me a while to realize why there seem to be so few good looking young people in this country, but I think part of the reason is the one-child policy. There are just proportionally fewer young people here than in Korea or Japan (where it's hard NOT to see a beautiful girl every half block). This one child policy has not helped China create a vibrant culture for youth. Unlike Korea, where the PC-bangs (internet rooms) are full of kids, and karaoke rooms cater to teens, shopping streets are full of giglly girls taking pictures of themselves with their camera phones and there are a million different pop-y boy bands on the radio; China doesn't have that youthful frivolousness. I think this is pretty interesting because in every other way Korea is much more serious and somber than China.
There is one thing we've seen in Shanghai that I truly loved: M50, a conglomeration of 4 huge warehouses divided into artist studios and galleries. All the galleries showed exclusively modern, Chinese art. We spent 2 hours exploring and could have spent 2 more if we'd tried to see it all. The warehouse complex was rambling and confusing- some studios were dingy and small. Some were huge, two-stories tall and expertly lit. Most were somewhere in between. By far most of the art work was painting- big, bright, bold acryllic paintings, at least half of which had communist themes. Only one of the galleries we saw showcased photography, while about a dozen contained prints or sculpture. There was absolutely no video or weird installation type art, so in that sense the space was very commercially oriented. I liked most of the art we saw, compared to First of last Thursday the collections were really incredible. The gallery workers and artists were friendly and very willingly to negociate prices, but no one we met was particularly hip, young or eccentric.