I’m Sara Naumann, About.com’s Guide to China Travel, and I’ll be guest-blogging on the China Culture site until About.com finds a new guide for this site. (Interested writers should certainly apply.) I’m American and haven been living in Shanghai for over five years so I’m going to try to offer a little perspective from someone living here, an eye-witness to China’s development and a student of its culture.
These days I find my witness to China’s development goes beyond my eye – to my feet, in fact – as Shanghai readies itself for the World Expo starting in May 2010. Perhaps this is what Beijingers felt like in the years and months leading up to the Beijing Olympics. We’re getting a lot of much-needed infrastructure like expanded subways and upgraded airports, but upon arriving back here after my summer leave in the States, it looks like every street is getting a facelift. To me, an avid pedestrian and biker, it seems like every single sidewalk in the city has been removed to make way for a new paving. Major thoroughfares have been turned into construction zones and massive traffic jams as workers fight bikes and pedestrians to put in new underground pipes and repave the streets. I know this will make things better in the long run but I do find it frustrating when walking, biking and driving are all equally hazardous and slow.
All that aside, it’s nice to be “home” in Shanghai in the last lazy days of summer. While I can’t hear the cicadas for the drilling, I enjoy biking around under the shade of the huge Platane trees that line the streets in the old French Concession. Sweaty kids run around the parks with their grandparents, enjoying the freedom of the last week before school starts and the malls and shopping centers have their own version of back-to-school sales.
The characters in the title of this post are 你, "ni", meaning you and 好, "hao", meaning good. Together, nihao means hello.
Comments