Towards the end of our week in Shanghai, we spent the
evening at the Bund. The Bund began to grow in the 1840s as a British
settlement and trading port. It is now an area for business and finance for
East Asia. The Bund felt like being in New York and it even had an Apple store.
Below are some photos of the Bund. We had to take our pictures fast at popular
places like this before our fans began to take pictures.
Below is another picture of the Bund with a view of many of
our fans.
I think just looking at the Bund does not give a full
picture of China. Many Chinese people informed us to see China we would need to
go to western cities. We were not able to get west in this trip, but we did go
out of the city to see some farms. The agriculture world like in the U.S. is
quite different from the big cities. Below you will see some photos of the
farms that we visited. Notice that some of the people in the photos are elderly.
We were curious why young people were not working in farms. The tour guide
explained that young people go into the cities to work at the factories leaving
the elderly people to farm. In this town, the people pay experts to come in and
help the villagers farm efficiently.
I hope you enjoy two sides of China that we were able to
see.
Drew
Even though the pictures of the country are beautiful and green, it should be noted that it was not really the country. We were only two hours or so outside of the city, but I think it was still considered part of Shanghai. Every piece of land was productive, even the driveways, which were used to dry things. On the edge of every big industrial plot you could see the farmers plant small gardens that helped supply them with fresh veggies. For areas that weren't used for food, they grew some sort of plant that they dried out and made into brooms.
ReplyDeleteThe major difference between the farm land we saw and the farm land around College Station (besides the level of moisture, of course) was the level of capital investment. Everything in China is extremely labor intensive. You don't see the huge irrigation systems that divide US farmland into squares and circles, rather many things are done by hand or with ''homemade'' systems. Some of the larger farms are starting to use more machinery, but the ratio of machinery to people is still far below that of the average US farm.