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First days in China, 2015 trip
Apr. 21st, 2015 06:52 pmVisiting China when I have so many friends and colleagues here posed something of a problem, since it would be rude to visit without at least trying to see anyone. Despite that, in the end, I decided it would be best not to try. The only place where there would be significant numbers of people to see was Shanghai, and we simply didn't have enough time in the gaps around the itinerary planned by Sinorama Tours. To anyone who might have been available to see me, please accept my apologies. Next time I'm traveling on my own or with a more flexible itinerary, I'll try to arrange a time to see you.
Travel to China is 12+ hours, which is tedious. Nothing of note about getting here... huge Air Canada Boeing 777 with 300+ people, but very efficiently loaded. Decent food, and much of it, and adequate if not profligate leg room. Spent a lot of time hiking up and down the aisles, stretching, and doing leg exercises at the back of the cabin to keep the blood flowing, and managed some napping if not any actual sleep. Chatted a bit with a pleasant young Chinese woman returning home for her first visit in 4 years after living in Toronto. She was very kind about my Mandarin, but I think that's definitely the whole "dog who sings opera" thing happening: it's not the quality of the singing so much as the fact that it's happening at all that impresses. The enthusiasm of locals always reinforces my desire to always learn a bit of the local language before traveling, but it takes so much time to cram a new language into my aging brain, and there's so little time and energy left over after work these days.
Chinese airports are quite efficient, so other than a long wait for our bags, completely uneventful. The best kind of travel. We hooked up with the other people from Sinorama, who'd been patiently waiting for our flight to arrive, met the rest of our small group (probably about 20 in total), and then off to the hotel on our bus. Arrived just as night was falling. Handed over our passports for scanning, to be collected later, on our way out for our first walk around.
Dumped our bags in the room, retrieved our passports, changed some dollars into renminbi/yuanj (one of our guards is running a private bank, and seemingly not making any money on the transaction despite our willingness to pay him for his trouble), and went off for a walk and in search of food, but mostly just wanted to exhaust ourselves and get onto China time. We're staying at the Wyndham Shanghai, a couple blocks from the Huang Pu (Yellow River), which flows right past old Shanghai, separating it from Pu Dong ("east [bank of the] river"), which is the Shanghai suburb of several million that didn't exist in 1990 and then emerged overnight from a rice paddy, like Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, minus the falling down part. (Though there's some concern about stability of the skyscrapers given how many of them there are. It's enough weight to significantly deform the bedrock, so engineers are keeping a close eye on things.) Pu Dong has more architecturally unique buildings than you can shake a stick at, including the Shanghai Tower, which is currently China's tallest building, at ca. 130 stories. If you've seen any tourism photos of China, you've undoubtedly also seen the Shanghai Pearl, which is Shanghai's first true skyscraper. It's a broadcast tower for CCTV, kind of like China's CN Tower. It's the building with a tripod for a base and two purplish globes on the main shaft*. We don't have view of the really interesting buildings from our room, but do have a nice view of the river and an elegant cable-stayed bridge crossing the river.
* having all kinds of Internet trouble here, so photos to follow when possible.
On the way out the door, we came across the local women's dance aerobics club, doing their evening thing. (They were back again the next mornning.) The music reminded me of a cross between traditional Chinese and something from Bollywood, only slower. Pleasant, and we watched for a while before starting our walk, aiming for the river in the hope of seeing Pu Dong lit up by night. Unfortunately, there was no easy or obvious access to the river. Instead, we took a relaxing stroll through an older and poorer community just south and east of the hotel, with public rather than private bathrooms and streetside sinks and water supplies. Lots of people out taking the air, eating at tiny restaurants, and walking their kids and dogs. (Eating dog is apparently a Cantonese thing; here, having a small dog seems to be the fashion. Mostly little guys, like Pekingese and Pomeranians, but also the usual assortment of Heinz 57 mongrels. One poor sweltering Samoyed. (It wasn't really "hot", but still warm and humid by my standards and definitely by hers. Lots of places we could have tried for a snack, but we're not street food eaters in China. Mostly it should be safe, but the tour buses don't have toilets, so better safe than sorry. Don't know what the Chinese equivalent of Delhi Belly is, but best avoided.
Continuing on our way, we headed back the way we'd come in from the airport, and hit the big shopping district. Considerably more affluent, and by the evidence of all the peacocks out for a stroll,, the place to come see and be seen: neon signs, riotous explosions of color,, building-high TV screens displaying all the latest consumer bling, and seemingly half the city's young folk out to share the night with friends. Fun people-watching, and we did finally spot a likely place for dinner, in a multi-story mall at the heart of the district: "Bifengtang" (sp?) was remarkably like the last place we ate in Japan, with a large menu of snacky-type foods on a spiral-bound flipchart and matching menu, all sold à la carte. We had a lovely Chinese broccoli sautéed in sesame/soy/ginger (?) sauce, barbeque pork buns dusted with cinnamon sugar, and washed down with Tsingtao beer (a slightly sweet lager style which is good at being what it is, but otherwise unremarkable). My Mandarin isn't fine at the best of times, and jetlag didn't help, but we did manage to make ourselves known somehow.
Staggered home, had a quick and icy shower (the tap didn't seem willing to turn to the warm side of things, though Shoshanna got it working the next day by applying judicious force I hadn't been willing to try), and fell exhausted into bed. No luck getting online to send e-mail, but Shoshanna managed to tell everyone we were safely here.
Next morning, down to the hotel breakfast buffet. Acceptable but not great, as there were no dumplings (jiaozi) or buns (bao), but good noodles, soup, and veggies. The Western food was better, but we mostly avoided that. It's not why we came to China. Good coffee, though, which is vital for restoring life and gettting one onto local time.
Our national guide is "Nick" (He Yeungpyong,near as I can tell phonetically), and our local is Alex (Bien ???). Alex has better English, and the expected encyclopedic knowledge of his home town. I spent a lot of the day chatting with him. We started out with a stroll of the Bund, the European part of town where the Brits and French placed their colonial boot after the Opium Wars and placed it again more firmly after the Boxer Rebellion. (Right up to the point of building a bridge across a stream flowing into the Huang Pu with a sign "no dogs or Chinese past this point". Ah, colonialism, how we've missed you... NOT!!!)
The Bund is more interesting for what it represents historically than for itself, since it's basically the kind of architecture you can see in any Western city older than about 75 years. But it does give you a nice view of the big buildings on the Pu Dong side of the river. Sadly, it was a misty day (not pollution, since my eyes weren't burning, just your basic subtropical humidity), so the effect was more grey on grey*/atmospheric than beautiful, but we had a nice stroll, with lots of good people-watching.
* Yes, I made the inevitable "50 Shades of Shanghai" joke.
Next stop was the Shanghai Museum, which is spectacular. It's shaped like an ancient urn, rounded and with four coin-shaped handles at the cardinal points. Spectacular 4-story atrium in the center, flanked by art galleries on all sides on each floor: statuary, ceramics, paintings, calligraphy, jades, coins, etc. etc. They only gave us an hour and a bit, which is far too short. I could easily spend a day there, and would rather have done so than spent time on the Bund. Instead, we used what time we had to prioritize the paintings, jades, and folk art (mostly clothing), which I hadn't seen on the last visit. (Khofi Anan, president of the United Nations, was visiting the last time I was here, and his security guards wouldn't let me into the paintings gallery because he got there first, much to my sorrow. I love Chinese watercolors.)
From the museum, off to the first of what would be many table lunches. This one was a Mongolian barbeque: you load a bowl with raw meat and veggies, douse it in your choice of several sauces (I went for a mixture of hot chili and garlic), and then bring it to the cooks. These are three guys who stand around a 4-foot-diameter griddle, and pass the food around counterclockwise as it cooks. Each has a pair of chopsticks 2 to 3 feet long, and uses them to stir the food around until it's sufficiently cooked to go to the next guy in the chain, then they start up with the next bowl, assembly line style. The last guy uses the chopsticks to fling the food off the griddle and into the air, then deftly plucks it out of the air with your bowl. Didn't see him miss once, though a few scraps undoubtedly escape here and there. You get a free drink with the meal, but it's not much bigger than a shot glass, so we ordered a pint of Tsingdao with it. Will try more local beers as time permits.
After lunch, we visited the traditional "fleece the tourist" shops. The standout was a museum of "paintings" made of silk, which were spectacular. From normal viewing distance of a few feet, many could not be distinguished from photographs and paintings; I particularly admired a snow leopard that Robert Bateman would have been proud of, a maple with flaming red fall foliage, and a golden field of wheat. But up close, you can see that they've been stitched with threads of colored silk, like the world's thinnest brushstrokes. Amazing artistry. We also briefly stopped in upstairs at the cashmere outlet. Cashmere makes for spectacularly soft and warm fabrics, but as Shoshanna noted, we weren't going to drop $200 plus on a sweater, no matter how nice.
Back to the Bund for a river cruise, for about an hour. It's always nice to be on the water, and we had a pleasant idle upstream and back again, enjoying the view and chatting with a few people from our tour. A few herons fishing; cargo ships recently emptied and thus floating so high you could almost see the keel, and shepherded by harbor tugboats; barges loaded so heavily that their decks were nearly awash; and other tour boats making the same trip.
Off to dinner at a nominally Sichuan restaurant, but the food was frankly poor: not an awful lot of spice or meat, and even the best of the food was unremarkable. Also, homeopathic doses of beer again, but in the interest of getting a good night's sleep, we opted to pass on buying our own. Idle conversation, but nothing of any import. We haven't really been awake enough to really make an effort to get to know our fellow tourists.
Highlight of the day was the final scheduled activity, a visit to the theatre to see the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe. I've seen them before, and they're excellent. Our guide described them as China's Cirque du Soleil, but unlike Cirque, they don't have any overall narrative thread, just a bunch of separate performances. That being said, they have spectacular tumblers, balancing acts, female contortionists with rubber spines, jugglers (including one hypnotic guy who kept 7!!! balls in motion simultaneously), and the pièce de la résistance, motorcyclists doing loop-the loops and orbits inside a 30-foot-diameter spherical metal cage. The one guy who started off was good enough, but by the time they finished, they had 6 bikers simultaneously weaving in and out of each other's trajectories. The slightest lapse of concentration would have been disastrous, yet they somehow managed to pull it off. Amazing performances, to the point that a 90-minute show was over before I noticed, and my hands were sore from clapping like a madman. Highly recommended if you're in Shanghai.
Shanghai, 18-20 April
Travel to China is 12+ hours, which is tedious. Nothing of note about getting here... huge Air Canada Boeing 777 with 300+ people, but very efficiently loaded. Decent food, and much of it, and adequate if not profligate leg room. Spent a lot of time hiking up and down the aisles, stretching, and doing leg exercises at the back of the cabin to keep the blood flowing, and managed some napping if not any actual sleep. Chatted a bit with a pleasant young Chinese woman returning home for her first visit in 4 years after living in Toronto. She was very kind about my Mandarin, but I think that's definitely the whole "dog who sings opera" thing happening: it's not the quality of the singing so much as the fact that it's happening at all that impresses. The enthusiasm of locals always reinforces my desire to always learn a bit of the local language before traveling, but it takes so much time to cram a new language into my aging brain, and there's so little time and energy left over after work these days.
Chinese airports are quite efficient, so other than a long wait for our bags, completely uneventful. The best kind of travel. We hooked up with the other people from Sinorama, who'd been patiently waiting for our flight to arrive, met the rest of our small group (probably about 20 in total), and then off to the hotel on our bus. Arrived just as night was falling. Handed over our passports for scanning, to be collected later, on our way out for our first walk around.
Dumped our bags in the room, retrieved our passports, changed some dollars into renminbi/yuanj (one of our guards is running a private bank, and seemingly not making any money on the transaction despite our willingness to pay him for his trouble), and went off for a walk and in search of food, but mostly just wanted to exhaust ourselves and get onto China time. We're staying at the Wyndham Shanghai, a couple blocks from the Huang Pu (Yellow River), which flows right past old Shanghai, separating it from Pu Dong ("east [bank of the] river"), which is the Shanghai suburb of several million that didn't exist in 1990 and then emerged overnight from a rice paddy, like Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, minus the falling down part. (Though there's some concern about stability of the skyscrapers given how many of them there are. It's enough weight to significantly deform the bedrock, so engineers are keeping a close eye on things.) Pu Dong has more architecturally unique buildings than you can shake a stick at, including the Shanghai Tower, which is currently China's tallest building, at ca. 130 stories. If you've seen any tourism photos of China, you've undoubtedly also seen the Shanghai Pearl, which is Shanghai's first true skyscraper. It's a broadcast tower for CCTV, kind of like China's CN Tower. It's the building with a tripod for a base and two purplish globes on the main shaft*. We don't have view of the really interesting buildings from our room, but do have a nice view of the river and an elegant cable-stayed bridge crossing the river.
* having all kinds of Internet trouble here, so photos to follow when possible.
On the way out the door, we came across the local women's dance aerobics club, doing their evening thing. (They were back again the next mornning.) The music reminded me of a cross between traditional Chinese and something from Bollywood, only slower. Pleasant, and we watched for a while before starting our walk, aiming for the river in the hope of seeing Pu Dong lit up by night. Unfortunately, there was no easy or obvious access to the river. Instead, we took a relaxing stroll through an older and poorer community just south and east of the hotel, with public rather than private bathrooms and streetside sinks and water supplies. Lots of people out taking the air, eating at tiny restaurants, and walking their kids and dogs. (Eating dog is apparently a Cantonese thing; here, having a small dog seems to be the fashion. Mostly little guys, like Pekingese and Pomeranians, but also the usual assortment of Heinz 57 mongrels. One poor sweltering Samoyed. (It wasn't really "hot", but still warm and humid by my standards and definitely by hers. Lots of places we could have tried for a snack, but we're not street food eaters in China. Mostly it should be safe, but the tour buses don't have toilets, so better safe than sorry. Don't know what the Chinese equivalent of Delhi Belly is, but best avoided.
Continuing on our way, we headed back the way we'd come in from the airport, and hit the big shopping district. Considerably more affluent, and by the evidence of all the peacocks out for a stroll,, the place to come see and be seen: neon signs, riotous explosions of color,, building-high TV screens displaying all the latest consumer bling, and seemingly half the city's young folk out to share the night with friends. Fun people-watching, and we did finally spot a likely place for dinner, in a multi-story mall at the heart of the district: "Bifengtang" (sp?) was remarkably like the last place we ate in Japan, with a large menu of snacky-type foods on a spiral-bound flipchart and matching menu, all sold à la carte. We had a lovely Chinese broccoli sautéed in sesame/soy/ginger (?) sauce, barbeque pork buns dusted with cinnamon sugar, and washed down with Tsingtao beer (a slightly sweet lager style which is good at being what it is, but otherwise unremarkable). My Mandarin isn't fine at the best of times, and jetlag didn't help, but we did manage to make ourselves known somehow.
Staggered home, had a quick and icy shower (the tap didn't seem willing to turn to the warm side of things, though Shoshanna got it working the next day by applying judicious force I hadn't been willing to try), and fell exhausted into bed. No luck getting online to send e-mail, but Shoshanna managed to tell everyone we were safely here.
Next morning, down to the hotel breakfast buffet. Acceptable but not great, as there were no dumplings (jiaozi) or buns (bao), but good noodles, soup, and veggies. The Western food was better, but we mostly avoided that. It's not why we came to China. Good coffee, though, which is vital for restoring life and gettting one onto local time.
Our national guide is "Nick" (He Yeungpyong,near as I can tell phonetically), and our local is Alex (Bien ???). Alex has better English, and the expected encyclopedic knowledge of his home town. I spent a lot of the day chatting with him. We started out with a stroll of the Bund, the European part of town where the Brits and French placed their colonial boot after the Opium Wars and placed it again more firmly after the Boxer Rebellion. (Right up to the point of building a bridge across a stream flowing into the Huang Pu with a sign "no dogs or Chinese past this point". Ah, colonialism, how we've missed you... NOT!!!)
The Bund is more interesting for what it represents historically than for itself, since it's basically the kind of architecture you can see in any Western city older than about 75 years. But it does give you a nice view of the big buildings on the Pu Dong side of the river. Sadly, it was a misty day (not pollution, since my eyes weren't burning, just your basic subtropical humidity), so the effect was more grey on grey*/atmospheric than beautiful, but we had a nice stroll, with lots of good people-watching.
* Yes, I made the inevitable "50 Shades of Shanghai" joke.
Next stop was the Shanghai Museum, which is spectacular. It's shaped like an ancient urn, rounded and with four coin-shaped handles at the cardinal points. Spectacular 4-story atrium in the center, flanked by art galleries on all sides on each floor: statuary, ceramics, paintings, calligraphy, jades, coins, etc. etc. They only gave us an hour and a bit, which is far too short. I could easily spend a day there, and would rather have done so than spent time on the Bund. Instead, we used what time we had to prioritize the paintings, jades, and folk art (mostly clothing), which I hadn't seen on the last visit. (Khofi Anan, president of the United Nations, was visiting the last time I was here, and his security guards wouldn't let me into the paintings gallery because he got there first, much to my sorrow. I love Chinese watercolors.)
From the museum, off to the first of what would be many table lunches. This one was a Mongolian barbeque: you load a bowl with raw meat and veggies, douse it in your choice of several sauces (I went for a mixture of hot chili and garlic), and then bring it to the cooks. These are three guys who stand around a 4-foot-diameter griddle, and pass the food around counterclockwise as it cooks. Each has a pair of chopsticks 2 to 3 feet long, and uses them to stir the food around until it's sufficiently cooked to go to the next guy in the chain, then they start up with the next bowl, assembly line style. The last guy uses the chopsticks to fling the food off the griddle and into the air, then deftly plucks it out of the air with your bowl. Didn't see him miss once, though a few scraps undoubtedly escape here and there. You get a free drink with the meal, but it's not much bigger than a shot glass, so we ordered a pint of Tsingdao with it. Will try more local beers as time permits.
After lunch, we visited the traditional "fleece the tourist" shops. The standout was a museum of "paintings" made of silk, which were spectacular. From normal viewing distance of a few feet, many could not be distinguished from photographs and paintings; I particularly admired a snow leopard that Robert Bateman would have been proud of, a maple with flaming red fall foliage, and a golden field of wheat. But up close, you can see that they've been stitched with threads of colored silk, like the world's thinnest brushstrokes. Amazing artistry. We also briefly stopped in upstairs at the cashmere outlet. Cashmere makes for spectacularly soft and warm fabrics, but as Shoshanna noted, we weren't going to drop $200 plus on a sweater, no matter how nice.
Back to the Bund for a river cruise, for about an hour. It's always nice to be on the water, and we had a pleasant idle upstream and back again, enjoying the view and chatting with a few people from our tour. A few herons fishing; cargo ships recently emptied and thus floating so high you could almost see the keel, and shepherded by harbor tugboats; barges loaded so heavily that their decks were nearly awash; and other tour boats making the same trip.
Off to dinner at a nominally Sichuan restaurant, but the food was frankly poor: not an awful lot of spice or meat, and even the best of the food was unremarkable. Also, homeopathic doses of beer again, but in the interest of getting a good night's sleep, we opted to pass on buying our own. Idle conversation, but nothing of any import. We haven't really been awake enough to really make an effort to get to know our fellow tourists.
Highlight of the day was the final scheduled activity, a visit to the theatre to see the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe. I've seen them before, and they're excellent. Our guide described them as China's Cirque du Soleil, but unlike Cirque, they don't have any overall narrative thread, just a bunch of separate performances. That being said, they have spectacular tumblers, balancing acts, female contortionists with rubber spines, jugglers (including one hypnotic guy who kept 7!!! balls in motion simultaneously), and the pièce de la résistance, motorcyclists doing loop-the loops and orbits inside a 30-foot-diameter spherical metal cage. The one guy who started off was good enough, but by the time they finished, they had 6 bikers simultaneously weaving in and out of each other's trajectories. The slightest lapse of concentration would have been disastrous, yet they somehow managed to pull it off. Amazing performances, to the point that a 90-minute show was over before I noticed, and my hands were sore from clapping like a madman. Highly recommended if you're in Shanghai.