Shanghai - More Skyscrapers than New York (Maybe)
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2008
1
125
145
Trip End
Aug 17, 2009
Shanghai, China
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
When we arrived at the train, we found our seats and had a difficult ride to Shanghai. Not at all what we had hoped for. I will detail the experience in the future.
Arriving in Shanghai at last, we spent several hours hotel hunting in the area of the train station with packs on
Pagoda
. We found three hotels which didn't allow foreigners and one that did but was full. We gave up after that and called a cab to a Hanting Express budget business hotel—a Chinese chain.Unfortunately, this particular hotel was in one of Shanghai’s "dead zones" with no commercial activity and no convenient public transportation around. The sector had originally been part of the Shanghai old town, but was being torn down and renovated to host a mixture of high-end boutiques, chef “schools” and western restaurants. Because we had not eaten for nearly a day, we settled for one of the lunch specials in one of the empty restaurants. All the businesses in the area were empty, because—as I mentioned—it was located in a dead zone with no city activity.
We moved to another Hanting Express after one night.
During our time in Shanghai, we visited the Bund—an area of historic buildings along the waterfront of Old Shanghai. Now cleaned and sterile, just like most of Beijing and the rest of inner Shanghai. We found it terminally boring, but perhaps someone with an interest in architecture would care more for it. We rode the “sightseeing tunnel” from the north end of the Bund under the river to the Pudong financial district. The weird tunnel consists of an overpriced railcar which is towed under the river through a series of seizure-inducing flashing lights to 1960’s style electronic booping and beeping with Chinese and English narration along the lines of “Paradise and Hell…” or “Meteor Shower”. There were also a pair of arm-wavey inflatable figurines in the tunnel
Shanghai Expo Mascot
. Creepy. We were glad we didn’t get the round-trip ticket. Coming out of the tunnel into Pudong, we marveled at the poor taste of whoever decided to put “red” windows in the space-age Shanghai TV tower—the blue sky turns them a deep shade of pink so the thing looks like a maroon tinker-toy. We walked to the FICM or whatever it’s called building—the 2nd tallest skyscraper in the world and rode up to the 100th floor observation deck. The view was fair, but smog obscured the full extent of Shanghai’s sprawl. It was obviously bigger than Chicago’s as viewed from the Sear’s Tower, but possibly smaller than Taipei as viewed from the 101. Again, the smog made it hard to tell. We were looking down on the something-or-other building, and glad we had bypassed the sign directing all tourists to it’s 88th floor observatory.
We wondered why they would put a huge sign next to the shorter building and no sign next to the taller one until we realized that anyone who ascends the tallest building first will have no desire to go to the observation deck in the shorter building. However, if you happen to be tricked into going into the shorter building (and they look about the same height from the ground) then you might want to cough up the extra money to get into the taller skyscraper you see next to you when you’re on the 88th floor of the shorter one. Makes sense.
The financial district was another dead zone except for the chain stores in the bottom of the towers, so we wandered around looking for the subway back to our part of Shanghai. We followed a large crowd, thinking they were office workers headed home
Tower 1
. They headed into the mall and up several flights. We followed, certain that so many people couldn’t just be flooding into a mall to go shop or hang out at the food court after work. We were wrong, of course. After leaving the mall, we wandered for longer than was necessary, hunting for the unsigned underground station. We saw plenty of signs for the sightseeing tunnel, but eventually we found the metro, tucked away in a hidden corner. Probably secreted away from the tourists in the hope that they would give up and take the 40 RMB sightseeing tunnel back rather than the 2 RMB metro.
During our time in Shanghai we also visited the famous shopping streets and a large complex dedicated to tailor-made clothing. We were quite excited about the tailored clothing until we reached the building itself. Though we had not seen a one on the metro or on the street on the way to the tailor shops, we found the complex filled with westerners. As a rule, where there are lots of westerners, haggling is nearly impossible. The shopkeepers know that even if they don’t make a sale to you, some other foreign sucker will be along shortly for them to rip off. We made a half-hearted attempt to get them down somewhere reasonable and gave it up as a lost cause, annoyed at the gaggles of foreigners exclaiming over the “low” prices of custom clothing. News flash, people; it’s not designer clothing! It’s knocked off seam-for-seam and poorly at that! If you pay anything more than USD 40 for anything made there, you are a rube. Unfortunately, plenty of fools were willing to be parted with their money the day we visited, so we took our business elsewhere.
Shanghai Metro
We did find a local clothing market with nary a foreigner in sight. After walking out on a few more shopkeepers who (not entirely without reason) mistook foreign for “stupid” we found a smart and motivated seller and negotiated a fair price on some things we wanted.
We also visited a local club “Shelter” which received rave reviews for it’s mix of underground music and an underground location (in a bomb shelter). True to the name, the place was behind a nondescript door on a nondescript street, down a winding tunnel. The tunnel was neat. The shelter just looked like someone’s basement with two bars in it. The music was good, the lighting was poor. I never thought I’d say this about any asian club, but it needed MORE flashing lights. It really looked just like a basement. The look was not helped by lines of shirts for sale being strung across what might have been a dance floor, making it look like laundry night in the basement. Lame. Also lame was a 10RMB cover. That’s like charging $1.40 to get in. WTF? That’s just annoying. At least the drinks were cheap. We had also meant to check out a top-of-the-line club in a new shopping center, but we never got around to it, perhaps the 200+ RMB cover charge had something to do with that.
We tried to see Transformers 2 in the Peace Theater IMAX on People’s Square, but the screenings were only in Chinese while we were in Shanghai
Okay...
. We had already seen a censored version of the new Terminator movie. Apparently even saying the word “kiss” is a no-no. But a digital Arnie’s butt is A-OK I guess. Enough chunks were missing that the entire movie didn’t really make sense, but we enjoyed the zooming and shooting parts that we were allowed to see.We had scheduled a flight from Shanghai to Guangzhou. Unfortunately, domestic flights mostly leave from the Hauphauong terminal and not from Pudong. Between Shanghai and Pudong airport is a 430kph maglev rail line. Even though we weren’t flying out of the airport, we decided we had to try the maglev out. It may well have been our fastest train ride ever. The ride was actually fairly shakey for being on a train that was floating over the track. At 431kph, you are moving much faster than a plane on takeoff or landing and the scenery whizzes by at an amazing rate. Check out the video I will upload. The roar of the wind outside the car is loud. The train was much more comfortable than the K, Z, or D trains we have ridden in China. It was also empty with maybe 20% of the seats filled. We got some odd looks from security when we arrived at the airport only to turn right around and board the next train back to the city. Apparently not too many tourists ride the train just for fun. We were glad we did, though. It was pretty darn fast.
Finally, we caught an early-morning cab from our Hanting Express hotel to the other airport. Arriving well ahead of the rush, we checked in and waited for our flight to the southern city of Guangzhou. While there are direct flights to Hong Kong from Shanghai, we found we could save more than 100 USD by flying to Guangzhou, catching a bus to a hotel, then another bus into Hong Kong. It was a complicated process, but it turned out to be a very good thing that we chose the route we did.
