Shanghai
Trip Start
Aug 31, 2008
1
47
Trip End
Apr 30, 2009
Shanghai,
Shanghai,
China
Friday, September 5, 2008
Lisa is sleeping now and I've just started watching my fourth full-length motion picture, 88 Minutes. September's movies are playing on here already, so I got to watch a bunch of movies I had not yet seen: Indiana Jones and the Crystal Stall, Iron Man, & Just Married. I am surprised didn't fall asleep during Just Married.
I haven't been able to charge my laptop on the plane; it just doesn't seem to provide power. The optical mouse also did not want to turn on for more than 3 or 4 seconds at a time. I hope this trip isn't going to start like the last one, where all my important electronics got fried on the first day. Anyhow, 88 Minutes is starting to pick up now, so I'll continue this later.
First Day in Shanghai
The first night of Shanghai is behind us now. We both slept very well and long, even though the bed was perhaps the hardest mattress I have ever seen. The hard mattresses are really about the only negative aspect about our room and hostel: The Shanghai City Hostel (Utels). The room cost us $26/night and we are to stay here for a total of three nights. The room is more like a hotel room than a hostel room.
We didn't do too much on our first night here, as we were both still exhausted from the plane ride to get here. The most exciting thing was probably the maglev train ride from the Shanghai Airport to the downtown area. The train cost 50 Yuan each and made short work of the commute into town. It takes the train a few minutes to build up speed, and then it only goes full speed for about 30 seconds before slowing down again. The top speed was by far the fastest I've ever traveled on land though: 430 km/h.
After the maglev ride we had to use the Shanghai subway system. All the signs included English so it wasn't too hard to figure it out. We only had to transfer once to get to the right stop, but when we went to exit the subway station, our tickets did not allow us out. Apparently we did not pay enough, so we had to pay another 5 Yuan each to get out of the station.
Our first night in Shanghai included a quick walk around our hostel and a trip to McDonalds. We shared a BigMac meal which cost around $4 and it tasted just like it does at home. Neither one of us wanted to tempt our stomachs to turn on us for our first night of this trip.
Nanjing Road
After McDonalds, we were both exhausted and went to bed around 7PM.Lisa woke up the next morning around 2 AM. Fortunately this hostel has 24 hour Internet access and they provide decent workstations. This kept Lisa occupied until I finally got up around 5AM.
After the sun came up, we walked around the side streets surrounding our hostel. The first thing we noticed is that people seemed to be staring at us a lot. We are not really sure why, because when we say "hello", they just keep staring. It is sort of like they have never seen white people before, even though we're in a tourist area of a former English colony.
The hostel provided a free breakfast of toast, jam, and cereal (along with some weird Asian breakfast dishes). The hostel also facilitated purchasing our train tickets to Beijing, it cost 220 RMB + 40 RMB commission for each overnight ticket in a hard-sleeper. Following this we caught a free shuttle bus that the hostel also provided and rode it to the People's Square in the downtown area.
From the People's Square, we did a lot of walking and taking pictures. People still seemed to be staring at us a lot, but now they would approach us to make some polite conversation. Everybody seemed to know a little bit of English, and most of them even knew about Toronto. We ended up walking down to the water to take some pictures of the famous Shanghai water-front. It includes the tallest building in China, which was only finished a few weeks ago, and the coolest looking radio antennae/observation deck I've ever seen.
The vendors were rather relentless in trying to sell us watches, shoes, t-shirt, pens and purses, but I guess we had better get used to that. Shanghai is quite a clean city considering it has over 17 million residents and we enjoyed walking around the Bund and through the People's Park especially. Walking street (Nanjing Road) wasn't so impressive during the day, but some of the locals told us to check it out at night.
Shanghai PJ party
The heat, humidity and pollution made walking quite laborious, but we still managed to walk the entire distance back to our hostel. All together we were walking for nearly five hours, not including breaks. We just got back to the hostel now, and I think it is soon time for me to try one of China's finest brews: Tsingtao.
Sept 4, 2009
The Tsingtao tasting went remarkably well. The hostel we are staying at charges 10 RMB for a 600 ml bottle, and the first one went down so well I ended up having two more afterward. We hung out front of the hostel and chatted with a couple from Antwerp. It still ended up being quite an early night for us, as both Lisa and I were exhausted from the early start of the day.
The next day we woke up quite early again, around 6AM. We wandered over to the local McDonalds to grab a coffee (9 RMB) and then we noticed a community centre in the back where hundred s of older people gathered for organized exercise. There were groups using different types of apparatus, which included flags, racket & balls, swords.
While we were watching the excising, a cat wandered by; one of the first we had seen in Shanghai. All the cats we had seen earlier fled for cover when approached but this one was quite friendly. I was also surprised to see a young woman stop and feed the cat....she actually carried cat food in her purse for such moments. It seems as though the people of Shanghai love cats and dogs every bit as much as the people back home in Canada.
Soon it was 7:30, so we headed back to the hostel for the free breakfast again. Following that it was off on the free shuttle bus again, but this time we got off at the Yuyuan Park in the old part of Shanghai. The old part of Shanghai is more of what I expected this city to look like, but was it ever crowded with tourists and tourist related stores. It was hard to walk for more than a few seconds without having watches, bags, tshirts, pens and art work being pushed on us.
The Yuyuan Park itself didn't look that entertaining, so we decided to save the 40 RMB/each and head to the Shanghai museum instead. It took about an hour or two of wandering through the streets and we ate lunch at a place called "Steak King" on the way. Lisa had some spaghetti, while I had Shanghai noodles and an Asian soup with a Reeb beer. Considering we were eating in a place with English menus and servers in the heart of the tourist district, I was shocked at how affordable everything was. Our bill came to about 35 RMB and that included a 630 ml bottle of beer. I was also amazed at how delicious the soup was, but I didn't note what type it was.
There was no lineup at the museum this time and it was totally free, even to have your bags checked. I was a little concerned while entering the museum, as security was rather intense with metal detectors and all. I had a lot of stuff on me, including all of our electronics and my pocket knife. I figured that the knife would be a problem, but apparently they only took issue with my little laptop. Not a big deal though, as I simply had to check my bag.
The museum was quite large and took us several hours to explore. I especially liked the little pavilion on the history of Chinese currency, but other areas were also very interesting. The collection of ancient Chinese furniture and pottery was stunning and beyond priceless.
After we left the museum, we toured around a local park and again met a local Chinese girl. She was an English teacher from Xi'an and meeting her turned out to be very fortunate. We were looking for a subway station and heading in the totally wrong way until she set us straight. She also told us what she had been doing in Shanghai and mentioned a tea festival that many people had talked about. She said she was disappointed that she couldn't understand anything because it was all done in a Chinese minority language. She said that she only knew her local minority dialect and Mandarin.
I asked her how many languages were used in China today and she said 56. Since she was speaking in English so well, I told her that I was surprised she didn't know all 56 languages of the country. She laughed and tried to convince us not to take the subway home quite yet. However there was no choice really, as we only had about an hour to get back to the hostel to pick up our train tickets for the following day.
After we got home and picked up our train tickets, we got cleaned up and headed out on the streets of Shanghai again. We went to a local variety store and were surprised to find out that the excellent Tsingtao beer was only 3.20 RMB for a 600ml bottle there. After some quick enquiries, we found out that it is acceptable to be drinking beer in public in China. We are not 100% sure it is legal, but the rules here only seem to be enforced on a rare occasion. An excellent example of that can be seen in the traffic. The traffic lights are really only there to add color and excitement, as nobody really follows them. Even when police tell cars to stop, sometimes they do, sometimes they point and continue, but rarely do they get a ticket. When I do see a ticket being handed out, it is regarding an accident and the policeman is mostly there to take pictures and document the event. I am not sure what happens after that.
Anyhow we ended up travelling a few times between the hostel and the local variety store to stock up on beer and spent the evening on the hostel porch with a few other travelers. By 10 PM we were both ready for bed again; I'm still not quite used to the 12 time zone difference between China and Toronto. It gets dark in Shanghai before 7PM. I figure that is mostly due to the fact that China only uses one time zone for the entire country, so places in the western China probably have quite a late sunset. Of course we are quite a bit south of Toronto too, so that would contribute to the early sunsets we are seeing.
We have seen many locals walking around the city in their pajamas during the day. We read in Lonely Planet that this was a Chinese tradition to indicate affluence and a life a leisure. It still seems funny to watch somebody drive a motorbike in their PJs. It is funnier still that these same people stare back at us with even greater intensity and curiosity.
The early bedtimes also make for early rises, which is a great time to take pictures in Shanghai. This morning we wandered out to the same area of the city where we watched hundreds of people exercising the day before. It is very relaxing to watch 100s of people doing Tai Chi while sipping on my McDonalds coffee in the morning and nobody seemed to mind that we watched. In fact almost everybody was watching us as we watched them.
We watched a little girl, whose life could be measured in months instead of years, just learning to take her first steps with a proud Mommy and Daddy on either side. One thing we noticed is that this girl was not wearing any type of diapers but instead just had a large slit in the crotch of her pants. It was wide enough that her bum would peak out and I guess if she had to go to the washroom that it would probably not get her pants dirty. I just have to make sure that I tread carefully if I am walking behind a Chinese toddler, because the ground must get dirty instead of the pants.
I have pretty much caught up to where we are in this adventure now. We just finished another breakfast at the hostel and packed up our bags because this is our last day in Shanghai. We have to check out of our room by noon and we catch our train at 8:30 PM. I am not sure what we are going to do for our last day in Shanghai, but I will write again once I know. It is a long overnight journey from Shanghai to Beijing, so I have a feeling I will continue the story then. I am sad to report that I have had my first equipment failure of the trip....RIP optical mouse. It will be buried in a Shanghai landfill for all of eternity.
Later Sept 4th, 2008
Today we got introduced to some of the darker elements of Shanghai. We had read about some of the scams involving tea houses/ceremonies and the art scams, but today we got experience them...well without actually getting scammed.
Since our train does not leave for Beijing until 8:40PM, we decided to spend another day in the downtown area of Nanjing Road. As always, we were offered watches, pens, purses and shoes but we were also approached by a group of 4 young Chinese "students" that quickly tried to befriend us and take us to a tea ceremony. Although they stated that they were from out of town, and had only been in Shanghai for 3 days, they were able to navigate to a tea-house situated on the 2nd floor of a mall. There were no real indications that the place we went to was a tea house, and they had to knock on the door to get let in...which is when we decided to go elsewhere. Within two minutes of leaving that teahouse, Lisa caught a girl trying to pick through her purse. We caught her and pointed her out and she fled the scene. I was very near a police officer, so I went to point her out, but he was busy and we figured it wasn't worth getting too involved....after all they didn't get very far with us.
We had read about tea ceremony scams before leaving Toronto, but we had also spoken to another Chinese girl the day before who actually attended one of these tea ceremonies (as I wrote about earlier in this journal). The girl from the day before did not try to scam us in any noticeable way and only "seemed to be trying to help us and practice with her English. I believe that the two scams that were only minutes away from each other were unrelated, but perhaps the scamming in Shanghai is more advanced than I anticipated.
I have come up with some ideas on how to have some fun with these scammers. Next time they offer to take us to a tea ceremony, I will cooperate and play along, and take some pictures of our new friends. After we get to the tea house, I will ask to see the prices. At this point, I should know whether or not we are being scammed and if I am sure of a scam then I will inform the "students" that they will soon be famous. I will let them know that their faces will be posted on a website dedicated to the "Scam Artists of Shanghai" (or Beijing, Xi'an, etc). Another idea is to state that I prefer beer and to invite them to join us for a beer or coffee instead.
At least I had quite an interesting conversation with the students on the way to the teahouse. The one male told me that he was the fourth child in his family and that he had two older sisters and an older brother. He mentioned that was born in 1984, the same year China's one-child policy came into place, so he felt very lucky to be alive. He said that his father had to pay government officials a large bribe or else he would've been killed. I did not ask whether this meant before or after his birth, but I guess he is a lucky guy either way.
Anyhow, after Lisa caught the pickpocket we decided it was better to just relax the day away in the People's park. We found a place near the rockery over looking some lotus flowers but it didn't take long until we had some new Chinese company. It started with 2 young males and a young female, but soon we had quite a crowd gathered around us. We talked about a wide range of topics, from basketball and the Olympics to Norman Bathune and Mao Zedong.
One of the older Chinese guys, that couldn't speak much English, was able to guess that I was of German ancestry and that Lisa was of English ancestry. He didn't know the names of the countries (in English anyhow), so he said "Adolf Hitler" and "Karl Marx". I found that quite amazing as most people in Canada would have trouble in determining that information accurately. Once these young folks started asking us about our tea drinking habits though we figured it was time to move on, so we came back to the hostel. That is where I am now and it is nearly time to leave for the train station. We are about to go out and find some dinner before we are stuck on the train.
I will likely continue this story in the following days when we are in Beijing. The Beijing scam artists will be waiting for us and this time I will be ready to have some fun with them. We have heard about people being intimidated with violence but I am not too concerned about this. Fortunately Lisa and I are much bigger than most of the people here..
Park in the city
