{"id":1476,"date":"2013-04-05T09:55:27","date_gmt":"2013-04-05T16:55:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/?p=1476"},"modified":"2013-04-05T09:55:27","modified_gmt":"2013-04-05T16:55:27","slug":"shanghai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2013\/04\/05\/shanghai\/","title":{"rendered":"Shanghai"},"content":{"rendered":"

I decided to go to Shanghai this weekend, for various half-reasons, but mostly because I wanted to see more of it. We previously spent about two days here on a tour. That’s not enough time to experience a city of 23 million.<\/p>\n

Random tourist crap I did aside, I’m glad I came. It has really put my China experiences into perspective. Basically, Shanghai is a global city in a way that Hangzhou really isn’t.<\/p>\n

Sure, Wikipedia has a very in-depth definition of “global city<\/a>” but here’s my functional definition. A global city<\/dfn> is one in which the ethnicity of the food people are eating is not well correlated with their ethnicity.<\/p>\n

As an example, take Starbucks. There are a couple of Starbucks (Starbuckses? Starbucki?) in Hangzhou, but in them I get a vibe of “let’s try the coffee drinks westerners have”. In Shanghai, it feels like people got there by saying “let’s have Starbucks”. Starbucks is part of the culture here.<\/p>\n

In the same way, dim sum, sushi, Thai and Indian are part of Vancouver. To my mind, Beijing is less of a “global city” than Vancouver. Manila more than Montreal (I daresay).<\/p>\n

So I think what I’m really getting here is something I didn’t know I was missing: time in a global city. I can have a burger if I want because I fit in exactly as well as the Shanghaiese group at the next table. Same at the xiaolongbao place, or an Indian place. Damn… I should find an Indian place.<\/p>\n

It also puts Hangzhou into better perspective for me. Despite having a population of 6 million, it really is a small town. That’s not a bad thing, just a thing that’s true. The outside world is still a bit of a novelty, because the world hasn’t all come to visit yet. Some of the difficulties I have had living there boil down to that, and I think I have a better understanding of the place with that in mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I decided to go to Shanghai this weekend, for various half-reasons, but mostly because I wanted to see more of it. We previously spent about two days here on a tour. That’s not enough time to experience a city of 23 million. Random tourist crap I did aside, I’m glad I came. It has really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1476"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1481,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions\/1481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}