Shanghai

Well, I'm back from Shanghai anyway. Interesting city, totally different to Beijing! Reminded me a lot of Hong Kong in some ways. Defintely a commercial city, the main activity there seems to be shopping!

Getting there was fun naturally. Managed to get out of work on time, and got to the airport with no problems. Even got through security without difficulty, didn't even set off the metal detector (which is unusual). After that tho, things got fun. Like a good little airline passenger, I was at the airport 2hrs in advance. the whole check-in process tho, from queuing to get the boarding pass to being through security and walking to my gate, only took 15mins tho - way faster than at home! Then tho, things got fun. Maybe China Eastern Airlines are twinned with Aer Lingus or something, 'cos 10 mins before we were supposed to take off, our plane landed on the inward leg, so we were about an hour late taking off. That got me into the airport in Shanghai around 10:30. I thought I'd be able to take the Maglev train into town as abit of a bonus (50km in 8 minutes!) but what I hadn't realised when I was booking my tickets was that the maglev went from Pudong airport, and I was landing at HongQiao, the other international airport (which is probaly why I got it cheaper). so, taxi time! Naturally there were some drivers in the arrivals hall trying to pick up/rip off gullible tourists, so I got approached by a guy saying "taxi rank no good, too slow, you come with me". I asked how much, and when I heard 150 kuai, I headed straight for the taxi rank! 30 mins and 55 kuai later, I was in my hotel.

Once the nice buzz of staying in a plush 5-star famous historic hotel wore off (i.e. 5 mins after i checked in), I decided to see what was around the area. The answer? At 11pm on a friday night? Nothing! It seems as a city that Shanghai shuts down around 10:30 - all the lights in the skyscrapers in Pudong were off and the streets were deserted. The only people I saw were beggars trying to get money off me and shady guys in suits wanting me to go into "beer bars" where "beautiful ladies" would give me "massagee". Not exactly the most inviting first impression of shanghai!

Well, things looked better the next day anyway. I headed out on the Bund (the old riverbank area) to start my sightseeing. it reminded me a lot of the promenade on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong strait, except for one thing - every 10 feet or so I had some guy trying to sell me a rolex, and one guy tried the tea ceremony scam on me! That pretty much set the tone for the next few days anyway. Seems the ppl in shanghai are a lot more pushy about selling stuff than they are in beijing. And "selling" is the opersative word there - if you're not into shopping, then there's not a whole lot to do in Shanghai. Once I'd finshed sightseeing on the Bund, seeing all the big impressive buildings by day that I'd seen the night before, I decide to see what the whole shopping lark was like.

First port of call was Nanjing Road. This would be Shangai's answer maybe to Oxford St, except add 2 or 3 stories more onto each building and add a whole load of signs that you can't read. Different enough in the type of shops to be interesting, but western enough to be fairly familiar. As a non-shopper, nice to look at but not much there for me. I decided to try out a more "traditional" type of shopping, and headed down to Yuyuan market.

Oh. My. God. Talk about packed! I'd thought the marketplaces in Beijing were bad, but this was something else! You lierally had to fight your way through the crowd to get anywhere, especially around the food stalls. IN terms of the shopping, again I was abit disappointed. I didn't really see anything much there that I couldn't haggle for in Beijing.

I spent the rest of the day wandering around ther eand the other big shopping street (Haihuai road), and as soon as it was dark I headed back to the Bund to do the river cruise by night. Prety impressive stuff, I finally saw all the sights lit up. after that I decided to see he view from the top of the Jinmao tower. This is the tallest building in china and the 4th tallest building in the world, 88 stories and 420m high. I wanted to get to the bar on the 87th floor, but to do so I had to take 3 differnt elevators. One (for some reason) to the 2nd flor, then one ot the lobby of the Grand Hyatt hotel ont he 54th floor, then a 3rd to the 87th. I knew the bar would be expensive, but I figured I'd get a drink there for the same price as the admission to the viewing platform one floor up - 50 kuai - and at least I'd have a drink. Only thing was, when I got there I realised it was 60 kuai a beer and a 2 drink minimum!

So, 120 kuai to the poorer but after having a nice chat with some germans I met in the bar, myself and one of the german guys decide to hit the bars. Unfortunately we got to the Metro station at 10:42 to be told that the last metro had gone at 10:40, so we had to take a taxi to the other side of the river. It had also started to rain - the first rain I've seen in 2 months! So, we ended up on Maoming Rd, in a bar called Windows which one of the guys in the Beijing office had told me about. Nice enough place (10 kuai a beer!), but not much action going on so we decide to bar-hop our way down the street. By 2am we'd pretty much seen all there was to see, so we called it a night.

Most of sunday was spent wnadering around in the French Concession part of town, all old buildings and stuff, then I decide to hit another market. I think the stall owners were shocked at the haggling skills I'd picked up in the Beijing markets, they were used to foreigners opeing at mayb half what they said, but I started at my usual 1/10th and always ended up much closer to my figure than to theirs. Sun nught was pretty relaxed, I stuffed myself in a Henanese restaurant I found (beef chilli hotpot, mmm) and then headed back for a while to a abr in a hostel we'd found the night before near my hotel. Monday then was a bit of a loss, I was planning on going to teh Science museum, but i forgot that museums he world over close on mondays! Ah well, at least it looked impressive from the outside...

I could possibly have dome with only the weekned in shanghai rather than taking the monday as well, but there we go. Not being a shopping person, I missed out on 90% of what Shanghai has to offer. One definite thing I'd recommend for any westerner heading that way tho is to get a badge or a t-shirt maybe that says in chinese: "No watches. No bags. No shoes. No DVDs. No massagee. And no, I am not your friend". It will save so much time in the long run!