Shànghǎi is a giant construction site, with 20 million people living in the middle of it. All the earth-moving raises a fine clay dust the color of cement, and it gets everywhere. Street cleaners are all over, pushing the stuff around with bundles of twigs tied to long handles, like witches’ brooms. All they seem to succeed in doing is evenly spreading out a thin layer of dust. If you’re outside for a while, you can feel its grittiness in your mouth.  My black shoes were the color of slate by the end of the week.

The snaggletoothed bastard that picked me up at the airport pushed his rattly Chinese VW Santana down the highway at about 100-110 km/h, though it felt like he was going faster: this was my introduction to the particular Chinese attitude to lane discipline. You kind of drive wherever, and if there’s room to squeeze through two vehicles – even if it’s inches – you just go.

The city starts not far from the airport, and just goes on being a city for miles and miles. There are fungal blooms of mid-rise apartment complexes everywhere – and I do mean everywhere, in wads of ten or fifteen hulking identical towers. Every so often there’s a busy extrusion of skyscrapers in wild, Jetsons-style designs, all sweeping curves and spheres and spires. And what really surprised me is that almost every sign – from billboards to company names to car nameplates, and every street sign – was written in both Chinese and English.

My customer’s office was in the financial district of Lùjiāzuǐ, so I had booked a hotel there. Right up by the river near old Shànghǎi, Lùjiāzuǐ is where all the money piles up. The towers are bigger and shinier here, and the stores sell real Gucci and Dior. Most of it is newer than ten years old, and the pace of construction is slower, if only because almost every inch is totally built out.

Snaggletooth dropped me off, and charged me about twice what he should have. Traveler FAIL. I hadn’t felt like comparison shopping, haggling or arguing: I had just got done with thirty hours of travel, and I was charging this back to my company. Sixty bucks. Not the end of the world.

My hotel had a total retro swanky vibe, with little egg-shaped chairs in the lobby and downtempo electronica in the halls. It was called the “H” Hotel, with H apparently standing for “Happy, Healthful, Hip, Hong” (beautiful)… the slogan, depicted on the wall behind Registration was “Diversity Without Borders.”

The room was pretty tight for $40. Nice big bed, glass shower, HDTV. I just wanted to get cleaned up and go look around a little bit.

The difference is pretty stark between Pǔdōng – dong means “east,” so the name is “east of the (Huang)pu” – and old Shànghǎi or what is called Pǔxī. Pǔdōng is new, relatively tidy, and fully planned and organized. Old Shànghǎi is… old: organic, messy, chaotic. I loved it.

I didn’t have time or energy to really explore it: I just figured I’d head out on the Metro and wander a little. I didn’t have a map or anything, but I have a pretty good sense of direction, so I started walking in the general direction of the Metro station and figured I’d see what I saw.

First: the city is going crazy getting ready for the 2010 Expo. Like the Olympics was for Beijing, this is going to be for Shànghǎi, or so the central government believes: a coming-out party, a chance to show off Shànghǎi’s status as a world city. The whole area along the river is being completely revamped, and older buildings along all the major streets are crawling with bamboo scaffolding as they’re getting their facelifts. The little cartoon mascot, a waterdrop or something named Haibao, is everywhere.

The “main drag” of Pǔdōng is Century Avenue… a six-lane-wide boulevard that cuts through the heart of the money part of the city and runs from the big supertall skyscrapers to the start of the sprawl. The metro station is right by, and I am not making this up, the Shanghai GM dealership. With a bunch of Buicks on display.

I have never seen a subway as nice as the Shànghǎi Metro. I like trains, and I still ride the T in Boston sometimes even if I have a better way of going, just because I like it (even though the T totally sucks). Shànghǎi’s metro trains are superfast, new, and the stations have glass walls separating you from the tracks. Digital displays above the gates have the wait times for the next train, and the thing shows up on the dot, like every 4 minutes at rush hour.

I wandered around Xuhui, looking for the Metro City electronics mall, which I’d heard was the place to go for your score. I got lost in the home improvements neighborhood – Shànghǎi’s commercial life is pretty rigorously organized – which is approximately the size of… oh, the Bronx. And I do mean it literally: every store sells furniture, appliances,paint, tools… I saw Stanley logos everywhere, which was humorous.

Eventually, through trial and error, I found Xujiahui. Once the kitchen shops turned into electronics stores, I knew I was headed in the right direction. I kept my eye on a looming Best Buy in the distance, and I rounded a corner to see the massive glass globe.

You go through a pretty familiar mall environment – eyeglass shops, cosmetics shops, a food court – to a manic bazaar deep in the building’s guts. The activity is neatly subdivided into neighborhoods: second and third floors are mostly laptops and game gear, but what I wanted was on the first floor in the back, down an escalator you have to reach from the Playstation Pro village on level 2: camera equipment.

I worked the different vendors, trying to see who had the best price: the Canon EOS 450 I wanted ranged from ¥7400 down to ¥4350. I started haggling at ¥2000 but wasn’t able to get anyone down below ¥3500, which was way more than I wanted to pay for questionable hardware without a warranty valid in Boston. I bailed.

Walked back to the Metro Line 2 stop I had gotten off at, even though I could have caught Line 1 right there in Xujiahui and tranferred (or ‘interchanged’ as the robot voice says in English). It was worth it just to wander, even though I was getting pretty tired. All the voices, the sights and smells… old Shànghǎi was definitely where I wanted to be. And I saw my first expat: tried to make eye contact, but he was too city for that.

I went back to the hotel and crashed. Work night. I didn’t know what I’d be walking into, so I slept as much as I could.