Colonials and Locals - Past and Future

Yesterday, in the space of 10 hours, we experienced Shanghai's colonial past on the cricket pitch in Pudong and it's Olympic future on the athletic track at Shanghai Stadium in Puxi. Two sporting events. Two Shanghais. An old game, cricket, in the new economic zone. A new game, the Olympics, in the old town.

Here's the story. After a leisurely morning including breakfast on the balcony, an attempt to pack for our upcoming Japan trip, and a lemonade lunch, we hoped on the metro and headed over to the Shanghai Ruby Football Club in Pudong to spectate at the Shanghai International Cricket Sixes 2006 tournament.

I had never seen a cricket match in person. We saw the movie Lagaan several years ago which does a pretty good job of explaining the game, but I was interested in seeing a live match. It turned out to be quite the colonial affair. A mostly expat crowd with folks from the UK and the former British Colonies: Australia, India, South Africa, etc, either sitting under white tents next to the pitch sipping cold drinks or sunning themselves practically on the pitch as northern Europeans like to do. One could imagine a Merchant and Ivory scene. See photo below.

There were 16 teams in the tournament from all over Asia. I had corresponded via email with the captain of the CBB team (Colonials Behaving Badly) who graciously invited Sun-Ling and I to stop by the tent and have a beer or three. So we did.

There was a Chinese team in the tournament - the so-called China Women's Team - who played the Scotland Women's team in the marquee match of the day, complete with national anthems. The Chinese team was surprisingly good even though they lost. Their bowlers were capable and their fielding was strong. The first two batsmen were impressive, but the rest of the lineup was not very savvy and was "run out" to end the inning.

We don't usually get over to Pudong, the new-development zone of Shanghai, but it's noticeably different with wider streets, newer and cleaning building, and certain areas with lots of businesses catering to foreigners.

Then it was back to Puxi for the Shanghai Golden Grand Prix 2006, a world class track and field meet featuring the 2004 110 meter hurdles gold medalist and Shanghai native Liu Xiang. We grabbed a quick dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant and then bought 2 tickets from a scalper. These tickets had a face value of 1888 RMB each, about $250 US, but we bought 2 of them for 200RMB, 10% of their value.

The track meet was great. Lots of action in 14 events. The highlight of course was the penultimate event, the Men's 110M Hurdles which was won in dramatic fashion by Liu Xiang who came from behind to nip Alan Johnson by two hundreths of a seconds. The crowd went wild. Liu Shan collapsed in either joy or exhaustion or relief or all three.

Here are the photos.

On the way out of our apartment we ran into the Pizza Hut delivery guy. Cool logo on helmet. And cool electric bicycle.



The Chinese and Scottish teams line up for the National anthems.



The pitch of the Shanghai Rugby Football Club.



The women's polevault before and during the competition.