9/24

9/24 7:35am CST

http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_24?authkey=Gv1sRgCJaU_OqEzK3MIg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dJysT_KFTg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj7VLMiBI3w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWOrRvniXtM


The train glides without drama into Shanghai's Hongqiao train station. My mom places a call to one of our contacts in Shanghai, the sister of one of our Chinese friends in North Carolina. She wanted some stuff brought back from China, so the sister is going to meet up with us to give us some packages. We take a fairly long trip along the subway to our planned hotel room. When we get there, we find out that the travel agency that booked the room for us basically lied about the hotel accepting foreigners. Tourism is a carefully regulated business in China. Obviously, there are plenty of hotels that China doesn't want visitors to see. These are simply not allowed to reserve rooms for people without domestic resident permits. The staff wholly refuse to take us. The nicer hotel next door is much more expensive and only does checkins after noon. Without any other recourse, my mom calls the sister again. She promises to book a nearby hotel and to come pick us up. We end up sitting for a while in the first hotel's lobby. There's a bathroom that locals seem to know about, so people wander in off the street and use it at will. One of these is a really strange lady who asks what my mom's name is, and when she's getting off work, and how much money she has, all the while with an earnest stare on her face. It's pretty clear she's mentally unhealthy and begging for money. Kinda spooky. Actually, this whole trip back to China, I've only seen a few beggars on occasion. Nothing like in my previous trips.

Eventually, the sister, Bao Gongjing, pulls up. We manage to square ourselves and luggage into her work car, which has its own driver. So the five of us make it through some crowded Shanghai streets to our new hotel, which is not only cheaper, but clearly much nicer than our intended stay. Signs of the ongoing World Expo are everywhere, on every corner and evidenced in the masses of tourists flocking around. Bao Gongjing helps us into our room and we agree to meet later. The courtesy she's extending us is incredible, considering that hours earlier we were complete strangers. When we told her of our plight, she called up her personal driver and had him pull around to come get us. Then, because of my ongoing gut aches, she did us a favor and called the local hospital director to arrange a direct appointment with a GI specialist. Instead of working our way through the hospital, we got driven pretty much to the office door of the doctor. Within 30 minutes we had some minor anti-bacterial meds and were outta there. Obviously it's a bit easier to be welcoming when you have a work car at your disposal and a high enough position in the local administration to personally know the director of a hospital, but we were still very grateful.

With the boarding situation behind us, we set out to walk the pedestrian avenue of Nanjing St., a major tourist spot. It was lined with a variety of shops and we stopped in a few of them just to check it out. Mostly it was food and tourist type goods, but still fun to be looking around. It helped that indoors were heavily air-conditioned. Because of all the tourists, it was the heaviest crowds I'd seen since I'd arrived. More elbowing and jostling here than anywhere else. It hasn't bothered me as I'm one of the largest people out there and can't get pushed around, but I guess it might bother those who have private space needs.
We step into one of the places where we were told to go eat -- the Tai Kang steamed bun restaurant. They have a very special steamed crab soup bun, where the soup is inside the bun. My gut ache has ebbed to a low, so I am pretty hungry for this meal. The food is incredibly slow in arriving, but different and delicious. We stumble back out and keep gawking around like the tourists we are.

In the late afternoon, we return to our hotel and wash up to prepare for dinner. We're inviting the daughter of some friends of coworkers of my parents from when they lived in Beijing. Dinner is going to be at another restaurant recommended to us. The subway is slow and not a very good way to view the city, so we have been taking the taxi around. We taxi to the restaurant and meet up with her. My gut bug is back, so that may be coloring my perception of the dishes. Both of the must-try items are busts. The first is lion's heads, which are simply huge meatballs. They don't have a lot of flavor and the meat itself doesn't seem to be high quality. The new acquaintance seems to be eating hers up, so it must be an acquired taste to some degree. The other thing is a sliced jellied meat dish. Nothing to write about.
After dinner, we ask the daughter to walk around with us. I get the sense she'd rather be elsewhere, but she's sporting enough to give us a tour of the city. She grew up in the US just like me and has only been back in China for five years, spending the first three learning Chinese in Beijing, and these last two at an ad agency where she can work mostly in English. So her Chinese is predictably loaded with English phrases and manners of speech. Doesn't affect our understanding, but I wonder if it catches her out on the streets sometimes.

First, we went to the Bund. I don't know much about this place, and seeing it in person made me acutely ashamed of that. I know it was the area colonized heavily by foreign entities back in the day, but I don't know how the Bund buildings came into being or what purpose they served. At one point, it was a capitalist oasis in an imperialist land. Then it was a relic in a communist land. Now, some of the buildings are being used as bank branches and such. So now a capitalist oasis in a semi-capitalist regime. It makes you think a bit.

Thanks to Ou-yang Dan's guidance, we get to see tallest building in Shanghai. She takes us to the back entrance where there's no ticket price. The elevators only take you to the 87th and 91st floors, but that's all you'd want to see anyways. The restaurant is predictably patronized by the rich and fashionable, so you see foreigners having meals, high class hookers plying their trade, etc. We very bluntly ask to just check out the scenery, and the staff let us. The view out the windows is really breathtaking. Despite some vertigo, I managed to take a picture of the landscape. Even from the ground, it was obvious that Shanghai is simply beautiful the way it is lit up at night. But from this height, it's almost surreal. The city is beautiful in a way Beijing could never be. Beijing's central districts are still pretty stubby, thanks to the historical sites and earthquake paranoia. It doesn't have a real river splitting the city in half. It doesn't condone miles of neon advertising that Shanghai shares with Tokyo and New York City. So it can never really look modern in the same way. I begrudgingly have to admit that there's real reason why Shanghai is such a destination. With that epiphany, we get the heck outta there and back down to the ground. We make a very brief trip over to the broadcast tower and look around. At this point, Ou-yang Dan splits and we repair to our room.