Today was my first day of teaching at the big, new campus of Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) in suburban Songjiang: A cloudy day threatening rain that never came. Depending on traffic conditions, the bus ride to Songjiang from the older and smaller Hongkou campus in the city center where I live can take from 40 minutes to an hour or so, the Songjiang campus itself a spacious collection of buildings in international styles depending somewhat on what lies within.

The town of Songjiang is much older than Shanghai of which it is now a mere outskirt, and features an eleventh-century pagoda, a fourteenth-century mosque, and a hilltop Roman Catholic church built by Jesuit missionaries in the style of an Italian basilica in the 1920s on the site of an earlier church. Songjiang's historic cosmopolitanism, if not its age, is reflected in the diverse architectural styles of the SISU campus, which was completed in 2003 as one part of an even larger "university city" of satellite campuses for Shanghai institutions of higher learning.

Pictured here on the left is the library and on the right is one end of my building, the College of English Language and Literature (these, like previous shots below, are courtesy of my Nokia cellphone camera; better shots to come once I've purchased a proper digi-cam; click on pictures for larger image in new window): 

Here is the Italian-style law school as seen across a grassy plaza from the window of my classroom in the English college above (I'm not sure why Italian style was chosen for the law school - I might have gone for English neoclassical, or even Babylonian in honor of Hammurabi - but there you have it):

A little more evident in this building's Islamic style is Arabic and Middle East studies in addition to other Asian studies:

And finally here with onion dome is Russian studies (interesting factoid: back during the era of Mao and Stalin SISU was founded as Shanghai Russian College):

These are only a few of the buildings located at SISU's Songjiang campus (which I'm told is ten times the size of the Hongkou campus), but they are among the most distinctive. There are also Tudor-style "mini-villas" for faculty who live or stay at the campus: much larger and more luxurious than housing at the Hongkou campus where I live, and a tempting proposition were it not so far from the far livelier city center. Lovely and spacious though it is, the Songjiang campus does strike one as a little sterile compared to bustling Hongkou, where I think I'll stay put at least for the time being (see also previous posting below).