America runs on Dunkin, and apparently so will Shanghai. We saw this one while driving through the city, and Dunkin Donuts has plans to put 100-some locations in Shanghai.

The Xi’an city wall

As we had a late flight departing Xi’an today, we took advantage of the extra time in the morning to pay a brief visit to the city wall — a well-known, well-preserved relic from ancient times. We had seen the wall the night before from the bus, and it was VERY long. Today, we climbed up to the top of the section around the south gate and took in the view of early morning rush hour. Had we more time, we would’ve liked to have rented bicycles and ridden along the top of the wall.

You can tell from the air where the development in Shanghai begins and ends.

At noon, we departed Xi’an for Shanghai. During the first week of our tour in China, our tour guides told us that the Chinese people have a saying: You go to Beijing to see the modern China; you go to Xi’an to see the ancient China; and you go to Shanghai to see the future China.

From what we saw along the way, the future China will look a lot like America in some instances. For example, the scenery on the way into and through Shanghai looked very much like that of a big city in America. We drove through a newly developed suburb between Pudong Airport and the heart of Shanghai, and it had very nice roads, relatively few cars, and even sparse pedestrian traffic. There were just as many, if not more, highrise apartment buildings on both sides of the road as there were in Beijing or Xi’an, yet the whole suburb had a very modern, orderly feel to it instead of the chaotic hustle and bustle one usually associates with city life in China.

A small slice of the Shanghai skyline.

A half hour’s drive later, we found that hustle and bustle as we entered downtown Shanghai. However, even this was visibly less chaotic than in the first two stops of our China tour. The drivers seemed to be a little tamer and the buildings newer. There were also many sights to remind us of America, such as designer stores and a Dunkin Donuts located on the street with all the designer stores. We even saw a sign advertising the equivalent of an Adam & Eve. There were highrises everywhere, many of them very modern looking glass buildings. In many ways, it felt like we were driving through New York.

After wading through heavy traffic in Shanghai for about an hour, we hit the interstate for Wuxi, where we are spending the night and where we’ll visit Lake Tai the next day. It was a three-hour drive to Wuxi, and the drive there felt pretty much like a drive in the U.S. — cruising down the highway through the wilderness between cities at about 70-80 miles an hour, with green highway signs and billboards dotting the side of the road. Replace the Chinese writings on the green signs with English, and I would swear we were in America.

As we spent the entire day traveling, there wasn’t much sightseeing, although we enjoyed looking at city life as we trudged along the streets of Shanghai en route to Wuxi. We got into a nice long conversation with our driver, whose last name was also Zhu (no relation, as far as we know). It was a different experience from our trip up to this point, but it gave us some nice insights into China just the same. Among some of the things he talked about:

• He called the Shanghai license plates “the most expensive sheet of metal in the world”. Because Shanghai has placed strict limits on the number of license tags it hands out in an effort to control the number of cars in the city, the plates are selling for very high prices. Driver Zhu says he has seen them go for as high as 50,000-60,000 yuan (more than $88,00).
• Compared to other Chinese cities, Shanghai’s enforcement of traffic laws is very strict, hence the tamer drivers.
• A 7-seat minivan — like the one we took today — can cost about 350,000-400,000 yuan ($51,470-$58,823) if it’s a Japanese model. My dad’s 2007 Honda Odyssey, by the way, cost $24,000.
• Like the other tour guides we had on this trip, our driver mentioned that the housing prices in Shanghai, like in Beijing and Xi’an, are dropping, thanks to the economic crisis (over here in China it’s more like an economic downturn at the moment). Aside from showing how intertwined the global economy is, this also makes us feel a bit sheepish to be from the country whose poor financial regulations and practices led to the downturn for other countries.
• The Pudong Airport, located right on the coast, was actually built on manmade land. They plan to add three more runways, which, when completed, will make Pudong the largest airport in the world.
• We came across several toll stations on the interstate, yet the driver said we didn’t have to pay because “at this time of the day, they can’t make you pay because if they did, it would back up traffic and cause a big jam.”