Smoggy Shanghi

Well, David said he was going to post on my blog. Sorry to get you all excited about China.... Although here's an email and pics he sent me:

Take a look at these that I took on our walk during lunch on Thursday. And the haze you see doesn't go away. They even have smog over here, although in a city of roughly 20 million people, are you surprised?

In the first picture we are looking northwest down Century Avenue,
and you can see the famous Orient Pearl tower. This serves as a television
transmitter as well as a tourist attraction. You can go to the top and take a
tour for 100 RMB. The conversion is roughly 8 RMB to $1, so it costs about $13.

The second picture shows the view looking the other way down Century Avenue. You can just barely see our office building (called the Pufa Tower) all the way to the right. It is not the big tall one, but a smaller 34 story
building right next to it.

The building being constructed in the picture is called
the Shanghai World Financial Center and will be the second tallest building in the world when it is complete in 2008 at roughly 492 meters (1614 feet). See this website to see what it will look like:
http://www.skyscraperpage.com/cities/?buildingID=7609. It will be shorter only to Taipei 101 (located in Taipei, Taiwan) which is 16 meters taller at 508 meters (1667 feet). Oh, and the other building you can see in this picture creeping in on the right is the famous Jin Mao Tower, which is right across the street and happens to currently be the fifth tallest building in the world at 421 meters (1381 feet). They like their buildings big over here.

We can see this construction from our office window, although when I took the picture I was on the sidewalk out in front of the construction site. And there are 6 other buildings under construction here in Pudong that will be over 75 stories tall when done. Yes, I said 6. The joke is that the construction tower crane is the national bird of China.

DC