To a kid growing up viewing the small (but lovable) skyline of Philadelphia, New York City seemed bigger than life. On the train into the city, seeing the skyscrapers of uptown and downtown stretching to cover the island, I felt awe at the idea of just how much life and energy Manhattan held. Then, last week, I rode the train into a different city, in a different country, and learned a different meaning of the word “massive.” Welcome to Shanghai.

Shanghai wasn’t my first introduction to large cities in China; I had just come from Nanjing and had visited Beijing on a previous trip. Foolishly, I thought that Shanghai would measure around their size; mind-boggingly expansive at first, but not to the extent that you can’t wrap your head around it eventually. The joke was on me.

I can only imagine what the aerial view of Shanghai might be like; perhaps from 30,000 feet in the air you could see an end to the city. From the ground you can’t. If you enter the city via rail, your first introduction to what’s ahead are sprawling apartment complexes lining the tracks in clusters of 20, 40, 80 — each building exactly like the one next to it within its complex and each building holding upwards of 200 families. Try doing that math in your head: If each apartment holds three people, then each building houses 600 people; 600 per building times 20 buildings equals 12,000-plus people in the smallest complex. And these were only the suburbs.

Once you cross into the actual city, there is nothing but city. I took a taxi from (what I thought) was one side of the city to the other and still couldn’t find an end to the skyscrapers. Mind you, that taxi ride took 15 minutes on a superhighway, without traffic. If you took the same ride through NYC, you’d zip through from one side to the other in no time flat.

Shanghai is the only city thus far to completely baffle me, and I love it for doing so. I hope so much to encounter an opportunity to return and try once again to find my bearings amidst the insanity, although I think it would take living there for at least six months (probably more!) to actually say you know Shanghai. Then again, to know Shanghai is probably a fleeting feeling, because every day it stretches a bit closer to the horizon and to the sky.

Dear Philadelphia, I still love you. To New York, you gave it your best shot. But Shanghai’s the future, and America, we have a lot of catching up to do if we expect to be a part of it.

— Kate Gallagher, advertising and editorial coordinator