Brown Blog Films

I was recently in Shanghai for a week as part of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year annual retreat. I was nominated last year and as one of the alumni I attended  the World Expo in Shanghai with over 70 Irish business people, and spent some time meeting local businesses and networking with each other.

Shanghai is an incredible city and no amount of googling will prepare you for it. It is a cross between London, Dubai and New York all rolled into one. Where once paddy fields lay 20 years ago, now stands Shanghai’s magnificent skyline of skyscrapers. Standing underneath these modern tower blocks is like standing on the set of Blade Runner.

The scale of the World Expo is almost impossible to describe. It cost $50 Billion dollars (yes, that’s Billion!) and it will last just one year before it will all be demolished other than the Chinese stand. It looked busy when I was there, but I didn’t expect there to be 500,000 visitors on the same day as me. Chinese people are really wonderful but they must be more patient that the Irish; in 28 degree heat they queued for 3 and 4 hours to get inside each pavilion. Over 17 million people, 97% Chinese, have visited the Expo to date.

The Irish Pavilion was a wonderful example of modern architecture but the inside of it lacked punch and didn’t match up to many of the other country’ pavilions.  Having traditional music or Irish dancing every hour for the many millions of visitors would not have cost the earth and would have breathed some life into the place. We saw a very kitsch example of an old Oirish kitchen where I expect Darby O’Gill would have been proud to have had his breakfast. Technology Ireland was not so well represented!  The best room featured a video wall which featured a short clip of Granny O’ Grimm as well as hundreds of other clips from Irish films.

I was surprised that Shanghai was so westernised and ‘Communism Lite’ came to mind as I passed the enormous shopping malls selling only the most exclusive of labels. While the markets peddled fake handbags, Prada, Hermes and Louis Vitton all maintained prime real estate on a scale I haven’t seen in other capital cities. I found that Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are all banned websites, but other than that there was little to indicate that I was in a communist country.  (I was able to tweet using my own account via my mobile phone)

The president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, gave an inspired talk to the Irish/Chinese business community and what felt like a weekend turned out to be  a week and I was back on the plane headed for Dublin. In case you’re wondering, some of the photographs I’ve attached were taken using my tilt shift lens