Learning to Embracing Change

Welcome to Shanghai. If this is your first stop in China, it’s likely that the distinct lack of a drab, repressively communist aesthetic may come as some surprise. Instead, feast your eyes upon the Jetsons-esque skyline in the center of the city, opposed by neoclassical heritage buildings on the other side of the Bund, and give in to that East-meets-West, old-meets-new observation that each and every international visitor has made before you.

Since flowering into a trading post at the end of the 19th century and a postmillennial manifestation into China’s ultimate economic force, Shanghai has been a place where the ostentatious, the highfalutin, and the unashamedly ambitious settle down. Part of that legacy is thanks to the French Concession area, which from the mid-19th to mid-20th century contributed tree-lined boulevards, decadent villas, Art Deco residences, and a not insignificant dose of civic pride that pervades local and expat residents to this day.

Whereas Beijing is a city of craft beer and camaraderie, Shanghai is one of cocktail bars, internationalism, and Louis Vuitton stores. Compared with the down-to-earth, preconception-shattering friendliness found in other parts of China, you’d have every right to call Shanghai’s denizens guarded at best and snobbish at worst. But so help us, this is Shanghai, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Shanghai is a breakfast city and an early one at that, so we’ll rise with the dawn to visit one of the last remaining breakfast markets, which have been in gradual decline because of municipal efforts to tidy up the city’s ramshackle street food sellers. This part of the city is an intersection studded with specialty food vendors powering white- and blue-collar workers alike with Shanghai’s four heavenly breakfast kings: fried dough sticks (youtiao, 油条), stuffed sticky rice balls (zifantuan, 粢饭团), fried pastries (dabing, 大饼), and the revelation that is freshly made soy milk (doujiang, 豆浆.) If we arrive early enough, we may catch the cooks boiling and straining great steaming vats of the stuff right on the streets.

My favorite combination of Shanghai’s morning monarchy is a bowl of savory douhua (豆花), a softer-than-silk set tofu topped with salty Shanghai-style pickled cabbage, chopped scallions, and rice-grain-size dried shrimp. After that, I’ll pry you away from ordering a tempting plate of Shanghai’s second-favorite dumplings: pan-fried pork and soup-filled shengjian buns (生煎) and guotie potstickers (锅贴). Really, I promise we’ll try them later.

YOU CAN MAKE GREAT VIDEOS, EVEN BY YOURSELF.

Finally, it’s time for coffee, and seeing as we spent a grand total of $5 on breakfast between us, I think we can treat ourselves to a luxury DiDi ride (China’s equivalent to Uber or Lyft) to the oddly named % Arabica Shanghai Roastery, our next destination.

Despite being a Hong Kong export, this cavernous homage to caffeine and minimalism has two advantages: It is perfectly demonstrative of Shanghai’s love of all things photogenic, and its location on the Rockbund—a frozen-in-time street perpendicular to the Bund and filled with British architecture.

After a walk along the Bund, we’ll make our way north to Hongkou, a district seldom visited by tourists that offers a glimpse of slower-paced local life. Our stops here will include a stroll through the complicated history of the former Jewish ghetto and a visit to 1933 Laoyangfang, an M.C. Escher–worthy Art Deco complex with a grisly past. You’d never guess it used to be a cattle abattoir. The building was completed in 1933 by the Shanghai municipal government, and the complex combined cutting-edge functionality with distinct architectural motifs of the period, which were slowly making their way into Shanghai. It has long since changed use, and today the complex contains a number of shops and restaurants.

How to Make Travel Videos for YouTube

One of the greatest things about making travel videos yourself is that you’re the producer, and you can decide what you want to do, how you want to film your story, and you don’t have to let anyone else approve your video before you publish it.

This first section is going to cover a quick formula for how to make travel videos, and we’ll then go much more in-depth about each of these topics below.

4 Basic Steps:

1. Define Your Story: According to the Harvard Business Review, our brains naturally love stories and are attracted to following them. Think about what story you’re going to share in your video.
2. Film Your Video: Once you have your story, it’s time to start filming your video. I would recommend getting lots of both close up detailed shots, and long wide shots. And get some extra shots for post editing too.
3. Edit Your Video: Editing your video is the process of taking the raw clips you filmed, and making them into a flowable story, where you can cut out parts you don’t need, and keep everything in sequence. Editing a video is sort of like doing a puzzle, you get to fit everything together.
4. Publish and Promote: Once you’ve created your video, it’s time to upload it to YouTube or anywhere else of your choosing, and optimize and promote it so you can share your video story with others.