JUST FOR FUNSIES

Sigur Ros - Hoppipolla

Ben Folds - Say Yes (Elliott Smith cover)

Los Campesinos! - Death to Los Campesinos!

Arcade Fire - Ready to Start

She & Him - In The Sun

i thought i should finally post some music on here since the URL for my blog is musicismymotive

IN TRANSIT: SHANGHAI

so i've been back in new york for about a week and finally sorted through/processed the photos I liked and not necessarily the ones that are the most descriptive of the Shanghai trip.

(as a note: the reason we were going to shanghai is that our school wants to set up a school there, we became the pioneers of this endeavor, and decided to integrate this process with our design studio this semester)

The first night there was already riddled with confusion and issues when we got to the hotel the school had booked for us only to find out that we had to be there at 6:00pm to be able to get our rooms...our flight landed at 9:30pm...luckily the hotel still had some rooms available and because of the need to have a place to sleep we took them and had to pay (well one of us) for the 4 rooms we got (the school will supposedly reimburse him) at a higher rate than our reservations would have been. After we were a little settled down we went off into the night to explore are surroundings...apparently most of Shanghai is closed by then. Eventually got some hot pot as our first meal in Shanghai then called it a night.

So the next day was filled with a "tour" of the city and potential sites for the studio project, which involved seeing how much better (architecturally) our instructors hotel was compared to ours, visiting hong kong university's shanghai study center and learning more about the city, going to M50 which was a precendent for "creative clusters" and 1933 which is basically a mall that used to be a slaughter house, and ending with us getting a new hotel which was significantly better than our previous one.
the next two days involved visiting architecture firms...and here is a brief synopsis of the ones we visited:

SPARCH - blobs in space

NERI & HU - control freaks (in a good way)

KUU - small.simple.inspiring

Ben Woods - santa wearing beach clothes

at some point we visited tianzi fang which was an old style neighborhood that is now mostly shops...and one of the sites for our design studio. This is where my camera started malfunctioning...it needs to be serviced or replaced now...
and on the last day we visited the world Expo...which by the way is reminiscent of Epcot at disney world...and like any good tourist attraction is relatively photogenic. Understandably most of the tourists were chinese...which is an odd thing to behold
the Dutch Pavilion had sheep that you could sit on...or carry...or heard
we also had "VIP" access to the U.K. Pavilion





and what the U.K. Pavilion actually looks like
back to the Dutch Pavilion
the Nigerian Pavilion and probably my favorite picture
Spanish Pavilion
and one of the Korea's Pavilions...i don't remember which one it was and don't really feel like looking it up right now..
so my thoughts on the trip?

the good (in no particular order):

1. once you get a feel for the conversion rate. some things are exceptionally cheaper than they are in the state.

2. good quality of food in all price ranges

3. experiencing, learning, and immersing yourself in a completely different culture is enlightening (which i guess could be good or bad)

4. i love travelling

the bad (unfortunately may outweigh the good this trip):

1. tried to get too much in in too little time

2. would have helped to know any dialect of chinese

3. taxi drivers are incompetent as in they can't read maps (or at all), refuse to pick you up (even though it's there livelihood), pick you up and not no where they are going and expect you to pay even though they drop you off nowhere near the actual location.

4. It's exceptionally humid like any other place I've been in south east asia

so that's a brief synopsis of what happened

oh

and someone moving out of our apartment gave us a new couch