The French Concession

After taking my last final, I headed to my apartment in Chengdu and spent the last of my days in the city trying to condense my belongings into my suitcases. The following morning, I headed to the airport to catch my flight to Shanghai. Webster sponsored a trip for us to go there to meet some Webster MBA students who study at the Shanghai campus and as well as to see the World Expo…more on that later. Most of my classmates were going to Shanghai from Sunday-Wednesday, but I decided to go a day early because I was departing on Tuesday morning to meet my parents in Bangkok.

I arrived in Shanghai in early afternoon and after catching a cab and heading into the city, I remembered why I was so impressed the first time I saw it. My favorite thing about Shanghai is that they have raised highways throughout the city, so you feel like you are driving through the thousands of skyscrapers that are scattered throughout the metropolis. Shanghai is huge and truly sprawled. Unlike urban centers in the US, there is no one area in Shanghai that is highly condensed with skyscrapers…..you can see them in every direction as far as they eye can see. The hotel Webster put us up in was a little outside the city center but within walking distance to a subway station and really, that’s all you need.

I recently read a book called “Shanghai Girls” by Lisa See (if you’ve read any of her previous books, they are much better) which was set in Shanghai in the early 1900s, around the time many Europeans settled there. There is an area of Shanghai that is mentioned in the book several times called the French Concession so I decided to go check it out. It’s the area where (as you can probably infer) many French people settled during that period and they built beautiful mansions in which to live. Today, the neighborhood still has many of those mansions and houses many embassies (you know you’re in a wealthy part of town when you see the US embassy in front of you). I braved the impending rain and took the subway to the Concession for an afternoon stroll. The Concession was a peaceful, clean neighborhood with tree-lined streets and lots of little boutiques. It was also full of westerners….I hadn’t seen that many white people in months!

In looking at the map, I realized I was close to the Shanghai Library so decided see what a library in China is like. It turned out that one of the sections of the top floor housed English-language books (that would have never been the case in Chengdu) so I browsed the shelves and realized that most of the books were a good 10-30 years old and there were no fiction books. I’m not sure if that had to do with government censoring or not. The actual library itself was what a library in any city in the States could look like, and wasn’t all that impressive.

After the library I continued my stroll through the French Concession and stopped at a little restaurant for an early dinner. It was designed to look like a European bistro and they gave me a cute little one-person corner table. My mouth was watering as I read all the western options on the menu! For the first time in months I had options other than noodles and vegetables. I ordered a tomato and mozzarella salad and a glass of white wine and I was in heaven.