Dream Trip 2009

Great Travel Moment

On a recent trip to Shanghai I spent a great deal of time walking along Puxi's edge, i.e. the Western Bank of the Huangpu River. As an aspiring architect interested in rapid urbanization, standing on the shore of the century-old Historic Bund while overlooking Pudong, Shanghai's 20-year-young "City of the Future," the city seemed to all-but-collapse into a single image of past and future. On the day I took this photograph, what brought me back to the present tense was the bizarre image of tourists looking into a pool of water near a monument. Rather than gape at the city's new skyline or be moved by a historic landmark, it seemed the visitors found a gaping hole in the ground to be far more captivating.