My latest professional adventures hurled me through a whirlwind of cities, cultures and experiences...all jam-packed into a week of tireless travel, meetings and explorations.
DubaiFinally, I meet Dubai!
Again I find myself filled with expectations and piqued with interest. Dubai was a city filled with myth mystery and hype...and being able to wrap my head around this rapidly growing desert metropolis was both a pleasure and disappointment.
Cranes, cranes everywhere...the city is undoubtedly undergoing a massive boom. The amount of construction is beyond imagination and when combined with the vast, colorless landscape truly is surreal to take in. Full streets, neighborhoods and islands all from scratch. There is no denying the impressive scale of creation.
One highlight was a tour the Palm Jumeirah, the first of the acclaimed man made island communities, which is not yet open to the public. With little sense of arrival, all of a sudden we found ourselves surrounded by densely packed condos and townhouses, each with its own strip of beach...we traveled up the 'trunk' of the Palm until we reached Atlantis, an absolutely massive hotel complex with an impressive aquarium as the piece de resistance. The scale of this building is in keeping with the rest of development in Dubai...there is no sense of human scale or personal experiences, merely grandiose gestures that overwhelm and only sometimes impress.
In terms of business, everyone is in a rush to build. Bigger, better, faster, now. The amount of hotels already built is impressive and the thousands of planned developments is absolutely staggering. There is a huge sense of pride in what has been created and the precedents that are being set in Dubai but to me the greatest disappointment was the true lack of culture and history.
No matter how impressive growth is, development based purely on capitalistic endeavors will never resonate with me in the way that a city building itself in the name of preserving its unique qualities and characteristics can. Overall, I was quite taken with Dubai, but probably more as an intellectually challenging place to truly grasp than a place that I would want to visit, explore and enjoy in greater depth.
MumbaiWe arrived to an dark and hushed Mumbai airport...there was a power outage. Welcome back to India!
I took great pleasure in returning to Mumbai and experiencing it as something of a familiar city. After overcoming the massive barrage to the senses that I had in my first trip, I was able to discover new details and delight in new layers of the city that had been overpowered by the impact of my first visit.
Despite the absolute clamor that characterizes Mumbai, I was able to find slices of peaceful moments amidst the chaos...
Things I noticed, loved, soaked in and will always remember:
-the fantastic elegance of the way Indian women nod their heads 'yes'
-sunrise over the Gateway to India and watching the city rumble to life
-the ritual in every experience
-barefoot waiters dishing spoonful after spoonful of brightly colored pungent foods to the only foreign diners with a smile and a shy curiosity
-watching the dabbawalla's washing all of mumbai's laundry in open air
-weaving between rickshaws in heels laughing at the irony of my attire
-sipping cocktails on the official cricket greens and reveling in potency and nostalgia of the old world british influences
DelhiWith less than 24 hours to spend in Delhi, I managed to pack in a power meeting, a visit to three homes, a night on the town, and a rather intimidating thunderstorm.
After our morning meeting, I met up with a friend who invited me to join her for the afternoon. After boardrooms, hired cars, hotels and business meetings, I welcomed the chance to finally go to someone's home and enjoy a family experience.
We started at her aunt's in Gurgaon, a city just outside of Delhi that is rapidly rising from the dirt as a community centered around a strong core of technology and corporate campuses. I was immediately welcomed as one of the family and six of us curled up in the air conditioned bedroom where we joked, drank tea, and shared stories.
Afterwards we went to another home where the man of the house had prepared Indian street food, something of an indulgent guilty pleasure of his. I sampled every delicious dish and marveled at their complexities. My absolute favorite was what I coined 'Indian nachos' - Chat Papri. Delightfully crispy puris are smothered in fresh yogurt, decorated with red and green chutneys and sprinkled with corn and pomegranate. Delicious!
Finally we went to her beautiful home, grabbed her bathing suit and headed back to the hotel for a swim. Just as I dipped my toes, a fierce wind stuck. It had picked up all the dust of Delhi and tears were streaming down my face as I ran for shelter. The sudden ferocity of the storm and the big, fat drops of rain were quite impactful. Extrapolating on that short experience, I imagine monsoon season as a tempestuous time filled with the uncertainty of nature's power. Quite intimidating.
We dried off and were off to enjoy drinks and dinner at a lounge before hopping a 4am flight, all the while sharing exciting plans for life and plotting carefree roadtrips to the Indian countryside...
ShanghaiMy first corporate job was as an intern at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago. They had just completed the Jin Mao tower, which was at the time to me was not only a sign of the impending growth of Shanghai but also the awakening of China as a world power. From my first day on the job, I dreamed of visiting Shanghai and witnessing the birth of a new global city.
Almost ten years later, that dream was finally realized.
As I entered the elevator in the Jin Mao Tower to check into the hotel I had seen in slides, articles, company presentations and imagination, I was filled with anticipation of the breathless skyline and broad shoulders of urban Shanghai. To my utter disappointment, however, both smog and the rainy day never allowed me the full impact of that imagined scene.
We whisked off to explore the city immediately, as it was Sunday and we had the afternoon free. Shanghai, like any city, has its highlights as a visitor, but I was immediately struck by how necessary it would be to have a local guide to truly help me unearth all the city had to offer.
We wandered the French Legation and visited Xintiandi, a wonderfully charming collection of shikumen houses that have been restored and renovated into lovely cafes, shops and galleries. The mix of french colonial architecture with Asian influence is a true pleasure and the civility of all the complex and growing surrounding neighborhood has to offer was impressive. We ended the evening wandering the Bund, highly lauded as a fantastic destination due to the renovation and repurposing of the waterfront as an entertainment district.
Following a day of meetings on Monday, I desperately wanted to visit the Taiking Lu area and Bridge 8 to satisfy my art and culture curiosity. Those last few hours of our ceaseless travel were filled with fantastic discovery. Taiking Lu began with the renovation of a factory into studio spaces for artists and design business and has very organically grown with the opening of galleries and cafes. Very casual in nature and intimate in scale, a turn in one direction will pull you into a design shop filled with the latest books from around the world and a turn in the other will bring you face to face with a 70 year old man stirring his noodles in his kitchen, laundry drying overhead. We chatted with shopkeepers, stocked up on design magazines, bought art, and packed ourselves, canvases in our laps, into the car for the airport.
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