Dawn of a New Day

As a part of my assignment here, my US Company has asked me and the other US people in China to begin to put in blog entries together about our experiences in China. As such, here is one of the entries that I put together:

People would say that I am a morning person, mostly because my alarm tends to sound sometime between 4:30 and 5 in the morning and I can jump out of bed without needing to hit the snooze and leave the house wide eyed without the aid of any caffeine.

It is at this hour that, in my opinion, Shanghai is at its best. My apartment is close to Shanghai's famous Century Park so many mornings I like to get up and go for a bike ride around the park. It is at this time that I get to experience a side of Shanghai that many people don't get to see…mostly because they aren't up until after 6:30 in the morning.

As I start my ride, the air is cool and thick in early November. I pass by the taxis lined up outside my apartment complex with a group of taxi drivers all out smoking and talking with each other hoping that their first customer of the morning will give them a good fare (maybe to one of the two airports here in town). As I get going I pass by the morning street sweepers, people in orange coats sweeping the sidewalks and streets with their brooms made of bamboo shoots and tree branches. A friend of mine once compared Shanghai to Disneyland because the trash and leaves that are on the ground one day are mysteriously gone the next…I guess this friend is never up as early as I am to see the army of orange coated people sweeping away the previous day's mess.

As I approach Century Park there is a group of ladies on the side of the road near a construction site cooking up some various different breakfast foods for all the workers as they will be coming to work within the hour. The pungent smells of their cooking radiates through the morning air. As I start my ride around Century Park there are groups of elderly Chinese coming together to start their morning Tai Chi, a very traditional internal martial art that is practiced for health reasons. As I go over bridges there are old men standing at the bridges yelling out at the top of the lungs, I am not sure exactly what this does, but I guess it brings some sort of balance to that person. I also pass by elderly people who are walking backwards and clapping their hands, it almost seems like they do this because they feel like maybe they can turn back the hands of time…and in the calm of the morning it really does feel like one could.

As I round the last turn I am met by a man on a motorbike with two freshly killed pigs strewn over the back of his bike delivering the pigs to the local market to be butchered and sold later this day. As I finish up my ride, the city seems to be finally waking up with various laborers heading off to work on their bikes and the sun cresting over the horizon. It's exciting to know that in these mornings I get to experience so much of China…before most people have even opened their eyes to start the day.