Shanghai

This long awaited trip begins quite typically – with me being nearly late for the plane. I check in around the time boarding started, and very fortunately the security line is short. The flights pass without many problems, though the airplane food is particularly soul sucking - I ask the flight attendant for a recommendation and he says not to eat it. I have lots of stuff in my ‘busy bag’ – books, crossword puzzles, an MP3 player loaded with Chinese lessons – but opt to watch the onboard movies and save these treats for the train.

Shanghai’s Pudong airport is modern looking and gorgeous – a very nice place to land. I was advised by Wang Jian Shuo’s excellent blog that I could get cash easily there, and also change my Canadian bills. I've been dreading getting a taxi here, since I've heard that in Shanghai you literally have to push other people away – but it is really orderly; I just have to wait in a line. The driver does not understand the address and asked me for a di hua – I have no idea what this means, but it was just a phone number. It cost 115 kuai to get to Jane’s, which is a really beautiful apartment in an area close to a park. Seeing her again is great.



The next day Jane takes me around some of the sights in Shanghai. First thing is a little Xinjiang noodle shop for breakfast. We get bowls of hand pulled noodles for 4 kuai each (about 60 cents). I'd been looking forward to eating Uighur food (from the northwest corner of China) so am pretty happy to do it on the first day. We later go down near the Huangpu river, a great place to see some of the older and newer architecture in downtown Shanghai.



Next stop is Chénghuángmiào, a very neat area with traditional looking architecture and lots of great little shops - touristy, but not suffocatingly so. We also go into some big wholesale buildings nearby. I am really impressed with the fashion sense of Shanghainese women, though am wondering where the look of knickers and tights over high boots is coming from. We eat lots of Shanghai specialties: xiao long bao (soup dumplings), bo cai fan (vegetable rice), and some pan fried pork buns (don't remember Chinese name, but very good.)



By the evening we wander down Nanjing lu, one of the brightest lit streets I've ever seen. We go into a bookstore and I spy a little notebook with Snoopy comics. Snoopy is 史努比 in Chinese which I think is really cute so I want to buy the notebook. However, this is not so simple as paying at the register - the man tells me I have to go back where I got the book and get a ticket. So I return the notebook and get the ticket written, then take it to the cash register to pay. (I'm not allowed to bring the book with me to the cash register.) Then I take the receipt back to the notebook display and collect my notebook. Then, on the way out of the store a man checks the receipt and gives me a bag. Very complicated, and good thing Jane is with me to translate all the steps.