SMP, Shanghai's Barren Skatepark

So, you'll scarcely be able to find any information online about this place, although it does have its own website. Shanghai is home to the world's biggest skatepark, supposedly. Considering how there's no information on it on wikipedia, and its own website seems to have been updated last a couple years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if the record has since been broken.

Nevertheless, its still huge, and I've been there several times. Never even close to a regular, I still visited at least a half dozen times, and pushed my skating limits in ways I never thought I would, even if I didn't do anything that crazy.

I went there a couple days ago just to take some pictures of it to share with y'all, so here is a smattering of some of the photos I took:

Obviously, a pretty big place.

They also have a huge half-pipe... here's two pictures of that, one with me in it (first time I've ever taken a timed picture ever!) for reference on the size of the place. Remember, I'm larger than life, so scale to that.

Clearly they had bigger plans for this place. As you can see in the next picture, there's a flat area that was clearly intended to be used for some sort of performances, and was surrounded on three sides by these overgrown-with-weeds benches. Kind of sad its come this.

I actually came here once last semester, I think it was in October, and there was a skateboard and bmx competition going on at the time. Even then, no one was sitting in these things, although the open area in between the bleachers was being used for sponsors and the like.

The place seems to have some sort of deal set up with Mountain Dew and . . . Pizza Boy, and through some of these pictures you can probably see an advertisement or two for them. Pizza Boy delivers to the location, and its pretty bad.

The sun was setting at this place, and time was running out on my thirty minutes visitors' pass, so I took one last self timed shot, as well as a picture of the abyss:

This monstrosity here is a huge full pipe, in the back end of it. A guy I once knew told me that there was only a few people in the world, as of the official account, that could actually complete a full spin around the whole thing. I tried to get a reference shot of this too, but the slope leading from the right side of the photo down into the pit of the thing was just a bit too tricky to rush down in flip flops if I didn't want to injure myself. Nevertheless, just keep in mind that the passageway on the left is still high enough to have a few feet above my head while walking through. For a skater such as myself, this was a pretty scary place to see the first time I visited the park.

On my way out, though, I had to take one last photo:

In the bottom of that refrigerator is beer. Yes, they sell beer at the skate park, and they certainly don't check ID. Now, keep in mind that the park has never had more than maybe eight people in it at a time at most (except for that competition), but still, skating while drunk is dangerous enough on the streets, skating while drunk in a skatepark is a deathwish. It's not unique here, either; there's a go kart track downtown where they sell alcohol too, so you can go kart drunk. Yayyy! China's all about the safety.

Anyway, its a pretty cool park, and though I wish I had taken advantage of its existence here over the past year, I'm glad I still did spend the time that I have there. I only hope that the skating culture here can grow a bit more and lead to some more people enjoying it.