I know I've declared that I would never post a photo of the abominable Pearl Tower, Shanghai's most famous and painful eye sore. But turns out that I was celebrating the return of the sun to our Shanghai lives after 2 weeks of rain on the terrace of one of Shanghai's dining institutions (M on the Bund) and had my camera with me and was in a brilliant mood, and I did point my camera at the flag on the terrace, and the eye sore happened to be in the background. When I saw it on my computer screen, I liked the color contrast, the unusually blue sky, and the tiny bit of Pudong visible at the bottom of the image... So despite the Pearl Tower, I decided it was worth keeping.

This long-winded introduction is just to explain my contradiction and to admit that, for once, the eye sore didn't make me shudder.
 

The view from M on the Bund