To the Topmost. All Too Pricey and Too Overrated
Trip Start
Jan 10, 2008
1
20
26
Trip End
Feb 06, 2008
Shanghai,
China
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Nothing much doing today. Slept in then sat up in bed listening to my MP3 player. The shower room is freezing cold, and the hostel cleaners leave the window open, so decided to give having one a miss.
Thought I'd pay another visit to the Shanghai Museum bookshop and buy a copy of From Emperor to Citizen, the autobiography of Aisin Gioro, Pu Yi.
Making my way round to the museum, I was stopped by a Tibetan street seller dressed in a leather trilby who held out a a small religious brass basin. With a kind of tubular-shaped instrument, he tapped on the inside base of the bowl and turned the instrument around the bowl which modified the metal ringing sound:
"Tibet....Tibet!" he calmly beseeched. "I'm a student with no money."
I silently gesticulated my refusal.
"Tibet....Tibet." Here is Buddha." He brushed the instrument around the metal engraving of the religious icon.
"I could give you a discount. Tibet...Tibet...I'm a student with no money."
I refused, not wanting the ornament, and moved on to the museum. A stern assistant at the till said "forty-eight" in an impolite unfriendly tone. Demoralized, I left the museum and hurried back to the subway and went to Lujiazui station.
I proceeded to pay the hefty 135 RMB to visit the lower and topmost balls of the Pearl Tower.
I must admit, I wasn't very impressed when entering: security guards ready to check your baggage among avenues of ugly steel barriers. The interior of the building was badly designed in my view; typically Chinese, with smooth floors. The walls were marked and smudged, some of the plaster had flaked off. It was close-on grotty, and not worth the entrance fee. It would have been better giving the money to the Tibetan.
The female uniformed assistants who manned the elevators, spoke like puppets, and weren't that friendly. The only redeeming feature about the building was, of course, the views; very astonishing and outstanding; the whole of Shanghai laid out like a map, although wasn't immensely clear. I lingered in the topmost ball until after nightfall, experimenting with photo captions. The lights from the traffic on major freeways down below streamed extraordinarily, and gleamed like bullets. Pudong stretched and stretched into a jungle of tall and flat buildings.
When I felt it was time to go, I was immediately accosted by a seller out on the street. She opened up and demonstrated how a perspex or glass model of the tower worked when lighted"
"Fifty..Fifty!" She haggled in a quick, frenetic and desperate tone.
I indicated my refusal.
"For ten dollar."
I resisted:
"Forty! OK, twenty."
I left her and her countdown haggling hanging in mid-air
How does one let these people you know you're not interested in their products when they need the money.
Back here, I ordered a bowl of seafood soup and two large baozi buns with a tasty brown filling; quite cheap, from a clean modern restaurant across the road.
As for the Oriental pearl Tower; it's interior is bland, sterile, unfriendly, not worth the price. It does, however give an impressive view of neighboring tall buildings. If you can give the birds-eye views a miss, just view the tower itself from the outside and save your money. It's much better. It is, after all, Asia's tallest building.
