A Golden Holiday in Shanghai

How much I wish I could have written each evening about all things blowing my mind when staying this far to short week in Shanghai to shoot the exteriors for the Mongolian feature film I’m currently working on.

Futuristic skylines and colonial-calm quarters, turbo-capitalism and communist-propaganda-pride, German-sports-cars and tricycle-transports, vast parks and gigantic inner-city highways, with 23 million citizens almost 10 times as much population than the entire country of Mongolia with its 2,75 million people. – Shanghai definitely proved to be a city with so many different faces I had never seen before in my life.

Only: I could not write about it, since WordPress shares the faith of many other pages in China. Not that the government would block it. No. You never actually see a stop sign telling you “Dear citizen, we stopped this gambling site to protect you. Cheers, your government.” I saw messages like this in the UAE stopping over in Dubai. But China, no, the authorities would never do that. Of course. There’s only for some strange reason technical problems with certain pages “Please reload later” leaves you in uncertainty until you google for the problem and find out, the “technical problem” persists already for about four years. Sadly.

Funny things like that still happen in times of VPN clients and people smart enough to find their own private little work around.
I was too busy to do my VPN client research and to stingy to invest in a good software hiding my IP and making it look like I’m surfing from, let’s say: Switzerland whilst being in Shanghai.

All the adventures we had, amazing film making, the blast this incredible city leaves in your mind, the fantastic food, intensely great people and extremely professional work we encountered, are told from my memory now. A bit like a story from the little red book you might remember.

But than, perhaps, memories are even better than things we taste, smell, feel, hear and see right this instant? I like memories. Only sometimes it’s a shame, that we can in writing not focus pull, condense time and edit as visually as in dreams and memories. I always liked food as an expression of emotion coz it’s film-able. With writing I feel memories and emotions often fade. But colors do work and stay. I like.

Jump to adventures in China yet to come: China vs. Mongolia, Shanghai, the Pyjamas and the Curious Elderly, Shanghai Mornings

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