Today is our last day in Shanghai! So far, we’ve gotten a lot of amazing tours with so much new information about the French Concession, lilongs and shikumens, and the Bund. We had a lecture by Steven Chen, who talked a bit about the history of Shanghai and lead us around to see various types of buildings characteristic of the city. We also had lectures by Harry, who talked about housing in Shanghai, including superblocks. After Harry’s lecture, Jeremy presented to us about lilongs and shikumen buildings in Shanghai. Harry had a lot of information relevant to my group’s topic on foreign investment, so we decided to ask him for an interview for our video. Luckily, he obliged and we interviewed him today at Tongji University. Unfortunately, the battery in my camera died, as did the spare battery, so we will just be using the audio of the interview.

Of the tours we got, I enjoyed Jeremy’s tour of lilongs and shikumens the most. I’m glad that we got to have a tour by him because he was able to reiterate some of what he said in his lecture the day before, and that helped because I was so exhausted during the late night lecture that I missed out some of what he was saying. Also, it was rewarding to see first-hand what we had been talking about in our readings of Shanghai in Vancouver and after Jeremy’s lecture. The housing situation varies so widely in Shanghai. Someone could be living in a superblock and not even really be exposed to buildings like lilongs and shikumens. The narrow buildings in Shanghai reminded me of some of the buildings that we saw in our Chinatown Vancouver tour. Though I noticed that in Shanghai, people make use of the narrow buildings, developing them into small retail shops or modernizing them and making them more contemporary rather than traditional. Meanwhile, in Vancouver’s Chinatown, the push to destroy such narrow buildings and develop bigger condominiums is occurring.

In terms of food in Shanghai, I’ve not been lucky to enjoy a lot of it. Though the first two days in Shanghai I was fine with the food, I have noticed that my stomach has not been cooperating with a lot of what I’m eating here. The first meal that we got to enjoy outside of class meals, I had a horrible experience. Me and a few others wandered into a wonton shop and ate lunch for probably less than $5CAD. Right after I finished my bowl of wontons, I was immediately filled with regret for eating it. It was the kind of stomach ache that made you sweat and not able to walk properly. Since then, I’ve had bad luck with the food in Shanghai, including the class meal at the Szechuan restaurant. Possibly because of the spice, my stomach, again, did not like me after that meal. Today, I avoided eating anywhere that wasn’t a big chain restaurant like Burger King, KFC, or McDonald’s. However, the chicken I ate today from Burger King was quite questionable, as it was far too soft of a texture to be chicken.

Tomorrow, we’re off to Kaiping! Our flight is at 9am but we are checking out at 6am, so I think I won’t be going out too late today. I’m soooo happy that today is a flexible day to do whatever. My group (Ride Together Die Together), was able to meet up bright and early for the interview with Harry and to work on our presentation to HKU at the Shanghai Study Centre. We decided that we will be presenting Vancouver using videos of interviews that we conducted while we were there. Hopefully, we get more free time to work on our group project before we have to present!