9/26

9/26

The weather is horrific. Cold blowing sheets of rain pepper us as we weigh our options for getting to Shanghai Pudong Airport. We could take a bus shuttle, which is slow. We could try to borrow a ride from Bao Gongjing, which would be asking a huge favor. We could try to squeeze our full compliment of luggage into a taxi, which seems tricky. The first thing we do is go to check out some possible eating situations for lunch. I'm still not 100% and very crabby. I regret taking it out on my folks, but I did snap at them a few times as we wandered aimlessly without deciding hard on one of our options. As you know, I can't stand that sort of uncertainty. In the end, we decided to eat at the hotel's restaurant, which was terrible, and to get a taxi. Our luggage when packed very tightly, all fit. The cabbie flew down the incredibly well kept Shanghai highway toward the airport. The only thing I remember seeing that really intrigued me was this giant blue sphere in a mostly glass cube building. It must have been a few stories tall at the smallest. Wonder what it was.

Once we got to the airport, we relaxed and said our goodbyes. I flew back to Boston, and my folks to Greensboro. I managed to stay up for all 3 meals in flight. Switching back over from the jet lag wasn't too bad.

9/25

9/25 9:30am CST

http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_25?authkey=Gv1sRgCM-P_NXq1p7jGw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkBKimV06KE

After a breakfast that my gut pains do not welcome, we hit the pavement for the second day of our lightning visit to Shanghai. Today it's another tourist area called Xinghuang Temple in the morning. More shops hawking their wares. My parents manage to buy a couple of things as souvenirs. One place smelled so incredibly weird. This fry shop was selling various fried meats on a stick, and I guess the meat plus spices plus cracked oil made for a very acrid smell. It bothered me but it nearly made my dad hurl it was so strong. We hit noon and got over to the restaurant where Bao Gongjing invited us for lunch. She brought her husband this time. We had a very pleasant chat about various things, over a quite good meal. I think this was the second best meal we had in China, next to that place in Beijing. Again, refinement really makes a difference. I had problems following parts of the conversation because her husband's accent was really unfamiliar to me.

After lunch, we made it official -- we were full on tourists tackling the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. This is a thing that's been the cause of all the buzz in Shanghai for the past 5 months. Over Mid-Autumn Festival, traffic through the expo peaked at 630,000 on the day before we arrived. In all, some 300 million have attended. I think I did argue that it would be weird to go to Shanghai while the expo was running and not even check it out. Bao Gongjing handed us 3 tickets and would not hear of our paying for them. So of course we would go.

The Expo is many things. It's a way for China to show off one of its premier cities, and it's a way for countries to show off who they are to Chinese visitors. The Expo organization and infrastructure is outstanding. Everything was clearly well planned and executed. The expo area is virtually spotless and really attractive. All across the city, volunteer stands are stationed to help tourists get to where they want to go. The Shanghai people, according to our lunch chat, are generally pleasant and have really gotten behind the expo. Of course it's delivering gobs of money to the city, but even so, it must be hard to tolerate the tourists. Many have to adjust commute schedules to deal with the loads of people clogging the subway and the streets, to give you an idea. I'm sure everyone's had to point to the same obvious landmarks over and over for the past months. But still, most of the volunteers and extra city staff (cleaners, traffic guards, police) were exceedingly cheerful about helping out. Compare this to the atmosphere in Beijing for the Olympics. Beijing people can be compared to New Yorkers -- rather grumpy about it all. The prevailing attitude during the games was "let's get this over with and all yous people leave." So in comparison, touring around Shanghai has been an absolute pleasure.

The Expo pavilions themselves are interesting. I suppose each country gets to decide how to design the exterior of the building and how to populate the innards with an introduction to the country. All the big countries had immense lines to go into the pavilions, so we agreed not to try any of those. Instead, we sampled such obscure gems as the Czech Republic, Armenia, Hungary, and Norway. Heck, even Norway had a 20 minute line. Norway's was very well made, and the Czech one was very bizarre and intriguing, but overall it didn't feel worth it to try to go into a big country's pavilion, based on the contents of what we saw. It was nice enough to see that each country was executing their ideas differently and to their own standards. Oh, we saw these guys sneaking into the exit of Hungary, so my dad tried that with Montenegro, but some Montenegran caught him and shooed him out in Chinese. The Expo had this clever idea of selling you a toy passport for fairly cheap. When you get into a pavilion, some clerks can stamp your passport for that country. The goal of course being to get a full passport. We actually saw a guy selling fully stamped passports, and people fliping through them to confirm. I can't imagine anyone really wanting that. But yeah, I suppose if we'd bought those passports, we'd be banned from Montenegro for life. We swung by the US pavilion to see if they had special treatment for citizens. We got this idea from the UK urchin pavilion, which gave priority access to UK passport holders. The guard told us that, with the US passport being such a common thing in Shanghai, that they couldn't do it. The US Diner sold such awesome food items as hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, and pulled pork. They, sadly, did not have a Philly cheeseteak or Boston creme pie or gumbo or fried chicken. Come on!

We got to ride the ferry across the Huangpu River to the other half of the Expo, which had technology and theme exhibits. The lines were also very long here, so we gave up and went to dinner. The Expo actually hired its own fleet of VW Touran taxis, which are much nicer than the normal taxi fleets. Only these guys are allowed to deliver people out of the Expo. I suppose when the Expo ends in October, they'll join the normal fleets.

For dinner, we hit up a roast duck joint. It claims to have roast duck as good as Beijing's best places. After back to back testing, I can safely say that Beijing has nothing to worry about. The basting flavor was good, as was the quality of the local duck. But this place was nowhere close in terms of rendering out the fat and getting the skin to a crisp perfection. Add on top of that the godawful service (truly worse than the place to which it aspires, Quanjude) and you have an experience that is passable but not worth repeating.

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.