Shanghai, June 12-18, 2008
Trip Start
Jun 05, 2008
1
3
18
Trip End
Ongoing
Shanghai,
Shanghai,
China
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
June 12-18, 2008
We got to Shanghai very, very easily on our plane from Qingdao. Intra-China flights have proved to be ridiculously speedy and convenient. The Chinese seem to have bureaucracy down pat: check-in was a breeze, luggage carts are free, and we got our bags almost instantaneously. We headed straight for another Couchsurfer's apartment--Zack, who is from Guam, and lives in a high-rise apartment with a Colombian student studying Mandarin at the nearby university. Zack, like us, was traveling itinerantly around Asia (having come all the way from Europe without taking a single plane!) until he stopped for six months in Shanghai to work as a structural engineer. Fortunately for us, he enjoys giving back to other travelers and was ridiculously generous and willing to help other Couchsurfers. We ended up staying on his fold-out couch for nearly a week, giving us a comfortable and friendly base for our stay in Shanghai. We spent every night staying up late, talking and plotting our next adventures (also like us, Zack plans to continue traveling down into Southeast Asia once he leaves China). Hopefully we'll have a chance to return the favor if we find a place to set up shop anytime soon.
The first thing anyone new to Shanghai notices is the absolute chaos in the traffic patterns. It's pretty crazy all over China, but Shanghai definitely takes the cake as the most hazardous place to be a pedestrian (or cyclist, or driver for that matter). Cars barely follow the traffic signals, and the hundreds of thousands of motorcycle and bikes definitely do not. Pedestrians don't really have much of a choice but to step off of the curb and pray that you don't get mowed down. The funny thing is, drivers in China act as if it were an utter impossibility that someone might actually get hit if you barrel down the road without regard for anyone else. If a pedestrian charges across the street with enough confidence, they might just take you seriously enough to stop--but you're always taking chances. Even New York had not prepared us for this type of street crossing. The way we coped was just trying to stick as close to the locals as possible, taking our cues from their senses of timing. At least we're alive to tell the story!
We happened to hit Shanghai during its brief rainy season, so we didn't see the sun once for the whole week we were there. Fortunately, this also meant that the temperature was mild, and we were able to avoid the sticky-hot summer that Shanghai is known for. But the mosquitoes, which come out at night in droves, ate us alive anyway (we're still scratching). We stayed in town for nearly a week, so we kept a pretty slow pace seeing the sights, which was nice because we got to sleep in and relax at Zack's in between wandering the city. Originally Dave and I had intended to live in Shanghai and teach English, but because of the Olympics the Chinese government has made it nearly impossible for foreign nationals to obtain work visas within Asia, and neither of us were willing to sign a contract that solve that problem without first visiting China and checking out the schools. So it turns out that if we want to teach in Shanghai, we'll have to wait til at least September, and after four years in New York I'm not at all interested in the city's cold winters. Thus that plan has been tabled, and we're in the process of seeking a new place to live outside of China.
The highlight of Shanghai--well, all of China really--was definitely the food. It was all Dave and I could do to stop ourselves from tasting every delicious treat we passed on the street (and at a price of about 25-75 cents each, it's especially difficult to restrain ourselves!). Dave can't go a morning without a baozi (bow-tzuh), a steamed bun filled with pork and cabbage. Our most memorable meal was our only splurge, a night at a Japanese teppanyaki restaurant for Dave's birthday (June 17). All over Shanghai they have these teppanyaki joints, where you pay $15-20 for all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink Japanese food. We ate in front of a gorgeous view of the city, literally stuffing ourselves with sashimi and steak and all sorts of wonderful things cooked on a Benihana-style grill, in between the beer, sake, fresh-squeezed juice, and glass after glass of tea. We arrived when it opened and stayed for five hours--Dave actually took a nap in the middle of dinner while we waited for our hunger to return! If there's anything I love more than Chinese food, it might be Japanese food, so it was an extremely pleasant experience.
Some of the top things we did in Shanghai included a trip to the Shanghai Sculpture Space, which was half a block from Zack's apartment and featured some really interesting sculptures. We also enjoyed the Shanghai Museum, which features Chinese painting, furniture, ceramics, calligraphy, and official seals. It was really interesting to see the calligraphy exhibit in particular and observe the ways that Chinese writing can be played with. Being here has really forced me to reconceptualize how I think about words and writing, because I've come into contact with such an utterly different way of communicating ideas on paper. For one, even simplified Chinese characters have an unbelievable number of strokes, so it's incredibly confusing when you don't know any Chinese. But also just the way people conceptualize art and words when they are intertwined in such a way must be very different than how we English-speakers think of them. Without knowing Chinese, it's hard to pinpoint exactly, but it's interesting to muse about, as we have throughout our time in China.
Next stop is Kunming, capital of the Yunnan province in the southwest corner of China. It should be a big change from the east coast--we're looking forward to seeing another side of China!
