A Drone in the Shanghai Demolition Zone

On our last trip to Shanghai we had 2 wishes:

a) to see a different, new side of Shanghai that we hadn’t discovered yet in our numerous previous visits to the city, and
b) to fly our new Phantom 3 DJI drone.

Find below the story of our drone adventure in Shanghai’s demolition land!

JonOne colourful Art Exhibition: MD Gallery

We started our day with a visit to Graffiti artist JonOne’s art exhibition in MD Gallery . This gallery is in Yangpu area, northwest bund; we hadn’t ventured there before, so it seemed a cool area to explore. All JonOne’s art works for this exhibit are created on the spot inside the gallery in Shanghai, and reflect a lot of the transition / contrast of the city. The pieces are colourful and abstract, and the gallery itself is pretty stunning. We asked whether it would be possible to fly the drone inside the gallery, but the giggly, sweet gallery girl kept saying: ‘you are kidding me, right?’ and subsequently trailed us all the way throughout the gallery to make sure we wouldn’t do anything stupid when she would be out of sight :)

the LOCAL HOOD

The area around MD Gallery is full of life, it reminded us a lot of the Hutongs in Old Beijing, with bustling marketplaces, small alleyways and lots of people chilling out and chatting with each other.

DEMOLITION ZONE

Wandering a bit off the main track surrounding the Gallery, we stumbled upon an area that’s currently being demolished to make way for new apartment buildings. Though most of the houses had already been torn down, there were still a few standing, and we had some nice encounters with the local inhabitants who are still residing there. We even exchanged wechat addresses and clicked some photos together :)

DRONE TIME

Our 2nd wish for the day (flying the drone!) stemmed from the fact that, well of course, the drone is a super cool toy to play with, but also because it’s pretty hard to fly this guy in Beijing, the city where we live, due to government restrictions: Basically, pretty much anywhere within the city limits is a no fly zone, and even if we would be tempted to be a little naughty and try it out, it won’t work: the firmware has an embedded GPS system which nicely displays ‘No Fly Zone’ on the RC interface and prevents you from even taking off.

Sooo.. the demolition grounds were a good place for us to take this baby out of its box and play around! Though the weather wasn’t great (dull, overcast day), we had a good time piloting through the area and we clicked some snaps from above.

Kung Fu Warrior

To top off our great day out and about, we bumped into this little Kung Fu warrior while playing with the drone. He was super impressed with our drone (and Uday’s piloting skills) and eager to demonstrate some of his warrior skills to us! Also, his mum and sister were really sweet and brought us bowls of water (it was roasting hot in the sun, so we were getting pretty dehydrated out there).