Shanghai today!

SHANGHAI, China – I was in Shanghai for my first visit to this beautiful city since I was here 21 years ago. That was when a few Filipino journalists (Conrad Banal, Nona Ocampo and Noel Velasco and this writer) were the first foreign journalists allowed to enter China right after the infamous Tiananmen Square incident. Back then, the All-China Journalists Association hosted our month-long stay in China. Although I was back in Beijing three times more after that visit, I have not returned to Shanghai until now.

One of the reasons, of course, is the World Expo 2010 Shanghai and no one can beat the cheap fares that Cebu Pacific had offered, which we secured more than a month ago. I was with my wife, Jessica, Pacquito and Marissa Unchuan, and Engr. Rex and Liza Carampatana. What made our trip doubly exciting is that Rex was recently in Shanghai for a business trip, hence he already had a hotel booked for us, not to mention that he knew how to move around Shanghai by Metro Transit, their very efficient subway system.

The Nanjing Hotel was doubly convenient as it was a stone’s throw away from Nanjing East Road, a long, wide stretch that Shanghai closed to pedestrian and tourist traffic in 1999 and which is one of the main attractions in Shanghai. They have train trolleys that go around for tourists to view sites in the city. In fact, one such train trolley still bears advertisements about Wow Philippines, which gives you an idea of how thorough was the tourism campaign of then DOT Secretary Ace Durano.

As we didn’t use any travel agency, we were literally on our own. No early wake-up calls and we went around on our own time. One of the first things we visited was the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, which featured a John Portman Art and Architecture exhibition. We found this facility quite amazing because you could see the growth and development of Shanghai from days past. Shanghai back in the 30s was already one of the great cities of the world, where I was told my grandfather Don Jose Avila would come to visit. One thing that immediately gets your attention is Shanghai’s slogan “Better City, Better Life.” This got me into thinking that we don’t even have a slogan yet in Cebu!

But even more remarkable was a photo presentation of famed Shanghai photographer Xu Xixian who took a lot of black and white photos in the 70s and now his son, Xu Jianrong, revisited where his father took those photos and this was placed on TV on a before-and-after scene. What pains us most is that Shanghai has grown exponentially in the last 20 years. If you consider that this was just around the time Cebu was hit by Super Typhoon “Ruping,” you would see how much we have stagnated! Thanks to stupid and ugly politics of greed and hate, they drag our development!

What was the biggest surprise in this edifice was they presented a huge model of Shanghai City in a scale of 1:500 depicting 110 square kilometers of Shanghai, including the Expo area and the Pudong International Airport, which shows all the buildings and the streets, with night lights and a few minutes later, the lights dim into darkness.

Just across this facility was the Shanghai Museum, which boasts a collection of some one million ancient Chinese art works, including 130,000 national treasures, from ceramics, bronze to lots of carvings in a special exhibit from Russia of Catherine the Great, which was to say an unexpected treat. It was like seeing them in the Louvre in Paris.

Of course, we spent a full day at the Shanghai World Expo; after all it was one of the main reasons why we went to Shanghai. But you couldn’t see all of the Expo in two or three days, so we decided to devote a full day there. Thanks to the hour-long queues, we only got to see the pavilions of Canada, Spain, Denmark, and Finland and yes, we did visit the Philippine Pavilion.

The Philippine Pavilion wasn’t high-tech at all as we are obviously only followers, not leaders in that field. But what made our pavilion worth visiting are the song and dance numbers it offered, as compared to many foreign pavilions that were so passive that they merely showed you a TV documentary of their country. Here you can feel being in the Philippines.

Sure the queues were probably among the shortest but visitors flocked to the Philippine Pavilion to hear our music and see the videos of our country’s beauty. If at all, many came to try the “hilot” where five masseuses from the Mactan Island’s Shangri-La Resort and Spa brought in from their Chi Spa that gave a 10-minute sample of what they can experience when they come to Cebu. Mikhail Camacho, our pavilion guide, did not only show Filipino politeness and hospitality, he also showed he could be tough when a big Chinese visitor wanted to jump the line and he put that fellow in his place! Kudos to you Mikhail! It was great to see Shanghai grow so much in just 21 years.

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