I just hopped off my flight, which was upgraded to first class. At first, I thought all the fancy seats, gadgets and champagne wouldn't even put a dent in the misery of a trans-pacific flight, but boy was I wrong. My seat folded flat for sleeping and I passed the waking time eating good food and watching movies.
Overall, it was a terribly civilized way to cross the globe, I even had a glass of port with my cheesecake. In the Tokyo airport, I met a nice expat family living in Shanghai who helped me figure out how to get to my hostel via public transport. Armed with their advice, I found my way to the maglev train and I am now waiting to be whisked away into the city proper so I can catch the metro to my hostel (I hope).
7/31/2010 10 pm
Last night I found my hostel just fine, thanks to my kind friends in Tokyo and good walking directions. After arriving, I found out I had caught the final metro of the night, I guess Shanghai goes to bed early. I wandered down to the common area and made a few friends, chatting over a couple beers and trying to speak mandarin. Before I knew it, it was four in the morning and I had to get to bed.
Today, my plan was to meet Noah at the maglev station when his flight landed. He had told me his flight was supposed to land around noon, but I slept right through that and didn't make it to the station until around 1. I waited around for an hour or so, then figured I must have missed him and went back to the hostel (our backup meeting place). Well, he was not there either, so at this point I wasn't really sure what to do. I didn't have his flight information (neither did he since its all in mandarin), and with no way to call him, I just waited around at the hostel. A couple hours later he called the hostel and said he was at the maglev station and had been waiting for a while. I told him to come to the metro station and we would meet there. Finally, while walking around in the underground shopping mall that is the station, we found each other. Whew, meeting up is hard without cellphones.
After we met up and dropped off his backpack, we went out for some food. We found a place selling fried dumplings and soup, and proceeded to blow our faces off.
We attempted to buy train tickets but the office was closed by the time we showed up. Well, there were people inside, but when we asked them if we could buy tickets they just shook their heads. Oh well, Noah is going to try in the morning.
After failing at that endeavor, we set off for the Bund, an area of Shanghai which overlooks the modern skyline of the "new" city.
It was basically wall to wall people, and we got a little claustrophobic. Escaping to a rooftop bar proved to be a great idea. We had a couple beers and ate a pizza (my stomach is not quite settled yet).
The heat today was almost unbearable, it was around 101 degrees with max humidity, just like the midwest but hotter. Being in such a big city, it doesn't get cooler either when the sun goes down. Hopefully we will find some comfort when we head out into the countryside.
8/1/2010 9 pm
Last night the hostel was up and drinking beers again, so we joined them and I didn't make it to bed until the sun came up. This morning Noah found some train tickets, but the trains today were full so we don't leave until tomorrow. Everything is pretty busy in Shanghai with the world expo happening, so transit is booked up. There were not really any other options for us though, since you can't book tickets from outside of China, and you can only get them a couple days in advance.
After I dragged myself out of bed, we got some breakfast on the street. It consisted of some sort of a pancake type wrapper around a fried egg and some cheese and hot sauce. It was pretty crappy, and I felt like hell for a couple hours after eating it. While laying in bed and generally being a waste of space, I tried to think about what Christie might do in this scenario, and then I remembered my pepto bismol, popped a couple of those and I was right as rain within a half hour. Since we didn't really have anything planned, and it was even hotter today than yesterday, we visited the Shanghai museum to leech some free government air conditioning and see some old stuff. As you can see, we were not the only people with this idea:
We checked out a bunch of really old weapons, jade carvings, and other artifacts. The best exhibit though was one that featured what different ethnic groups clothing historically looked like.
After the museum, my stomach was feeling much better and I was real hungry. We found a vegetarian restaurant and ordered up a delicious dinner. We had a mushroom stir fry dish and then a fake meat dish too, both were very good and the fake meat one was spicy. It seems like the people here have a different view of vegetarians than we do. Most of the menu was things like "fried whole sparrow" which I assume was wheat protein formed into the shape of a sparrow and fried. It seems more like a novelty thing, since most vegetarians I know would rather not be tricked into thinking they are eating meat.
After dinner we strolled through a park and I found a convenience store selling Chu-hi. I have a soft spot in my heart for this canned Japanese lemon drink, as we drank them quite a bit in Tokyo. The ones here don't have as much booze as the Japanese style, I believe all the beer and malt drinks are 3.2 percent, or close to that. Still, it was extremely refreshing on a hot evening.
Time for bed, our train leaves in the morning for Hangzhou (pronounced Hung-Joe), and then we are going to try and climb the yellow mountain nearby and camp on top of it.
Here are all of the pictures from Shanghai:
1 comment:
Vegetarian or Meat eater who doesn't want to be tricked into eating a full song bird? Did it include mock nest and eggs too?
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