Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2053196&l=94f31&id=1101094
My flight from Zhang Jia Jie was delayed three hours, so once again I found myself arriving in a foreign city after public transportation had stopped running, and once again I had to take a long taxi ride from the airport into the city. This time the journey ran me ¥200. Can I bill that to the airline?
I had the cab driver drop me off in front of Ming Town Youth Hostel, which had cheap dorm beds and was located just off the main road. Of course, it was also full. Just as I was getting the address of another hostel across town, two American guys about my age walked in, clearly drunk, and said, “Don’t we know you?”
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “I just got here.”
“No, no, you look familiar, who are you?”
“Um… I’m just a guy who needs a place to sleep, but unfortunately this place is full so now I have to trek across the city in the middle of the night.”
“Full? No way. You can stay in our room. No problem. Just follow me.”
The woman behind the desk started to protest, but we were already headed up the stairs. Thank God for good-natured drunks.
The two guys, as it turns out, were both from San Francisco, and they didn’t actually have an extra bed in their room. But they told me that I could take one of their beds, and they would just sleep together. Strangely enough, only one of the guys was gay. But at this point I was just grateful for a place to sleep, so I didn’t ask any question—just climbed into the top bunk and went to sleep.
I spent the following day wandering around Shanghai.
I spent most of the day in Puxi, walking down the Bund (the fashionable strip of colonial-era buildings adjacent to the river), strolling East Nanjing Road (the main commercial thoroughfare), and wandering around Renmin (People’s) Square (home to several museums and fine arts centers). The city is quite attractive, especially given the horror stories I’d heard about Chinese cities. But what I quickly realized is that Shanghai is not much of a Chinese city. Constructed mostly by foreign powers that were granted tracts of land on which to conduct trade, Shanghai is more of a western concoction than a homegrown Chinese success story. Plenty of foreigners live in the city, nearly all signs are translated into English, and the city has a genuine Cosmopolitan feel to it. Apparently, I’d have to wait until Beijing to get the real Chinese experience.
But one thing I did experience was Chinese people who wanted to learn English. Nine or ten times during my walk through Puxi, I was approached by people who asked where I was from, and then proposed going to a café, having tea, making friends, and practicing English. The speech was always the same: “We go to café and have tea, we make friends, we practice English!” It was like they had all taken the proposal out of the same book. I agreed to talk with the first couple people who asked, but a quick cup of tea turned into nearly an hour of talking in painful broken English. I politely declined invitations for the rest of the day.
That evening I went to the top of Jinmao Tower, in Pudong, to get a view of the city. Jinmao Tower is the tallest building in the city, and one of the tallest in the world, and views from atop it were spectacular, especially once the sun went down. As with Hong Kong, the daytime view was cluttered with smog, a seemingly unavoidable feature of Chinese cities.
That night I had my first real hostel experience since the beginning of my trip. My accommodations in India and Southeast Asia had been mostly cheap hotels and guesthouses, so I hadn’t had much interaction with other travelers, at least not at night. But my youth hostel in Shanghai was a real party, and I spent most of the night playing poker with people from all over the globe. Apparently, nothing brings people together quite as well as Texas Hold ‘Em.
The following day I checked out the parts of Puxi that I hadn’t seen yet, namely the French Concession and the Old Town. The French Concession was as posh and gentrified as I had expected—as I wandered through the streets of Xintiandi, a ritzy shopping/dining area, I could have sworn I was in Europe.
While in the French Concession I checked out the site of the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party. Originally just a small house where Mao and his associates held secret meetings, the place is now a museum filled with old photos and Communist propaganda. My personal favorite was a plaque that read, “The founding of the Communist Party of China is the inevitable outcome of the development of China’s modern history.” Whatever you say.
The walk from the French Concession to the Old Town was particularly interesting, simply because of how fast the landscape changed. In the span of about two blocks, modern high-rise condominiums and classy shops turned to run-down shanties, food stalls, and chickens running around in the road. Suddenly, I was back in China.
I visited the Yuyuan Gardens in the heart of the Old Town, which were supposedly a major tourist attraction but which I found disappointing. Perhaps the presence of bus loads of Japanese tourists was what detracted from the experience.
I took one last stroll down the Bund and then headed back to my hostel to check out. The journey to the airport, normally a forgettable experience, was maybe the highlight of the day, as I got to ride the Maglev Express train. The train peaked out at 431km/h and got me to the airport in seven minutes. As we flew past a highway, the cars actually looked as if they were going backward. When we got to the airport, I was surprised to see that only a few of the passengers actually got off the train; for the rest of the people, the train was apparently just one big tourist attraction.
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