9/12/07

shangwho?

(Author's note: although this posting technically covers only exploits in Shanghai, I have found it necessary to include a few extraneous details from my previous location. Please bear with me, and I promise we will get to Shanghai soon enough.)

In Qingdao, people drink beer. Lots of it. You would expect this, it being a brewery town and all, but even at lunch time all the tables at a restaurant are littered with pitchers of beer. It's also (in retrospect) an extremely pleasant place where people are incredibly kind, friendly and generally good natured. I just have to make sure we understand where the score stands on Qingdao before we start talking about Shanghai, namely, good.

We boarded our sleeper to Shanghai a little bummed out that the dudes in the upper bunks had made themselves at home sitting on our lower bunks with us. This was not the optimal situation, but luckily they later moved up top. Around supper time, the older and rounder of our bunkmates scampered down from his perch and produced a bag full of food and two bottles of Tsingtao. He promptly laid this all out on the table and offered me one of the bottles of beer (all done with hand gestures). He also invited us to sample some morsels of his dinner (a whole roasted chicken, and some delicious buns served with condensed milk). We moved up to one word (pretty much all in English) sentences catalyzed with copious smiling. When there was one piece of chicken left, he offered it to me. That piece being the head, I politely declined, and he promptly stuck the whole thing in his mouth, retrieving only the beak. After dinner, we had more halting conversation mostly revolving around looking at different pictures in our China guide book. Our second bunkmate made no attempts at contact with us.

It's good that the company on the train was somewhat interesting, because the scenery certainly was not. If you could imagine combining the two fantastic American landscapes of midwest cornfields and Utah desolate weird chemical industrial plants, you would have exactly what we saw for twenty hours. Oh shit, that's not quite right, I forgot the sprawling uniform government housing/dorm buildings that were interspersed.

For better or worse, we arrived in Shanghai around lunch time, and promptly took the subway in the wrong direction (are we detecting a theme here?) and so wandered around back and forth for about 4o minutes trying to find our hostel. We finally taxied to the "Captain's Hostel" right in the ritzy part of town. This is one of those classic large scale city-center hostel affairs. About five floors of dorm rooms are seemingly packed to the gills with a mix of 78% German, 8% Scandanavian, 13.5% Asian, and .5% (us) American backpackers. All in all, its a pretty nice place.

Shanghai is a city of stark contrast. The main tourist drags are lined immediately on either side by dark streets and alleys full of smelly water and hanging laundry. Half of the city is seemingly spurting right up out of the ground in great glittering geysers of development, while the other half seems to be being torn down in dusty dingy destruction. There are more foreigners here than any city I've been to in Asia, many of them businessmen, and a lot of them tourists (can't seem to find too many teachers). There are about three main tourist traps, and we've hit all three of them hard. They are mostly worth it. One is the area along the river, which highlights views of the impressive exploding skyline on one side, and classic European architecture on the other.

The other worthy candidate is a classical Chinese garden dating from the 1600's. It's pretty spectacular, but they've engineered the stupid thing so that you have to fight your way through a labrynth of shops, fast food, watch, bag, shoe and sunglass peddlers, and art students for what seems like hours before you can even find the entrance. (The exit is cleverly placed at a different location in the same mess, so you can't retrace your steps out.) But the garden is quite special, you can really feel the oldness of the place, and it's as if the stone, rocks, wood, carving and plants have all kind of grown and melded into each other to become one single unit. It's also interesting to catch the odd glimpse of a sky scraper or hanging laundry or have the silence (brief periods of which exist in between the barking of megaphone mass tour guides) pierced by the honk of a scooter careening around outside.

Possibly the best piece of Shanghai we've seen was an interesting complex of art galleries near the train station. It was cool to see, and there was some good work there, but I'll let Taylor fill you in on the details of that.

Though people generally wear clothing over their torsos, and children don't generally run around in assless pants (unlike Qingdao), I would say the level of manners is generally lower here. This is, of course, kind of a big city phenomenon, but it is very strong here, and most apparent on the subway. Even in the biggest, rudest cities I've been to, the people understand the rule that you have to let those on the train get off the train before you can shove your way on. That's not even manners, it's just the way that things need to happen in order for the system to work. Well, in Shanghai, that's not how it works. You fight your way on, and the people getting off be damned. This is not the only example of rudeness, of course, but it is the most visibly obvious. The rest is mainly just that indifferent face and lack of smiling or acknowledgement of your existence that is common in other locations as well.

Overall, Shanghai is about what I was told it would be: not that exciting a place to visit. I'm certainly glad I came, and I think that living here could be pretty cool, but I don't live here, and I don't have time to search out everything that is cool. That being said, the coolness certainly doesn't jump right out at you. Tomorrow we'll be heading out for Suzhou, about an hour west of here, for some even more outstanding gardens than the one here. We may or may not return to check out Friday nightlife in Shanghai before moving on to the western mountains.

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