Trip to Shanghai
It's a cliché to say that but I just love traveling, because it is always an adventure. This time I flew to Shanghai on a business trip, which is a mere two and a half hour flight away from Tokyo, but it's a flight into a quite different world. It was my third time to visit China and my second time to visit Shanghai. Last time I was in Shanghai was ten years ago.
Upon arrival, the adventure started with me not knowing how to get to my hotel. So I signed up with the eager taxi lady behind some desk just in the arrival area what made her look official. She spoke only rudimentary English but seemed to have her stuff together and produced a block of paper and jotted down a price. She asked for 450 yuan, which seemed quite high to me, but I didn't know what else to do at that moment, after all it has been ten years since my first Shanghai visit.
Instead of leading me outside, she dragged me one floor up to the departure lobby which I found a bit odd. She shouted into her phone all the time and I wondered who took care of her desk now. Well, maybe she got replaced the moment she left.
Some five minutes later a guy arrived in a private car and she shouted at him and he kept waiting with me while she hopped into the car. This guy spoke a bit better English and asked me to wait a few more moments. Then it was his turn to shout into his mobile and we waited another five minutes.
The guy turned around to me suddenly and said "It's gonna be a Buick" and prepared to leave. I didn't want him to, since I had already paid at the front desk and how was I supposed to know they wouldn't totally screw me and leave me standing there for good. So I told him I don't know what a Buick looks like and he said "Oh" and stayed.
Another few minutes later some guy and the woman from before appeared in a Kia, not a Buick … And they loaded me into the vehicle. I was already wondering where the hell they'd be taking me.
The young male driver spoke a few words of English but not many and dived into the Shanghai traffic, which is loud, chaotic and comes with an incredible amount of honking. Well, Jakarta was even louder and even more chaotic.
Somewhere along the way the driver made a U-turn and I wasn't at all sure that he knew where he was supposed to take me. The car had no taxi sign on it by the way. I showed him the address again which I had printed out in Chinese luckily and this time around he made it and brought me indeed to the Marriott Changfeng Park.
While stopping, he quite openly asked me whether he can have a tip. Well okay…I offered him 20 Yuan, which was probably not enough and he said he wanted money from my country. Well, the only thing I had on me was Japanese Yen otherwise and they come along in bills of 1000 and up only, so I ended up giving him a thousand yen, which is about 8 USD or 100 Yuan. Anyway, I was just glad he hadn't taken me to the red light district or something. Later on, I found out I had been diddled big time. The regular taxi ride to the airport costs 60 Yuan from my hotel…
The hotel was nice and my room on the 18th floor had a good view. Till the first work duty, dinner at night, I had some five hours of time left on my hands and since the other days would be filled with work and no time for sightseeing, I decided to quickly head for the Bund (that's Shanghai's main tourist spot where the Huangpu river separates Pudong from Puxi) and at least briefly sniff some tourist air.
Armed with a map, I walked from the hotel to the nearest subway station, which turned out to be a 25 minute or so march along residential high rises. A shopping street with familiar shops led to the subway. Kentucky, MacDonald's, Baskin and Robbins, you name it, Shanghai has them all. When I had been here last time some ten years ago, the main mode of transportation had been bicycles. Now it's cars and some scooters, a surprising lot of them are electric scooters, which is a bit spooky, since they are so quiet, but at least they don't stink.
In the subway an interesting scene happened. A "beggar", an old man, was walking through the subway with a much younger guy with a flute in tow. The guy with the flute was equipped with a microphone, amplifier and a speaker somewhere in his bag, meaning potentially "rich" stuff. He directed the old man by jabs in the ribs hither and tither to where some people offered him a coin. I felt sorry for the old man, who looked not very healthy and as if he was being press ganged into this "professional" begging and I am sure that the guy behind him took all the money from the poor guy and would give him only leftovers to eat.
I made a little mistake by getting off at East Nanjing Road station instead of West Nanjing Road station. I walked towards the Bund and walked and walked and it just wouldn't want to come up. Not that the walk had been uninteresting. A man on an e-bike passed me who wore a red velvet hard riding cap instead of a helmet, well, better than nothing, since 80% of the bike riders don't have helmets at all.
When I arrived at a subway station called People's Square I started to wonder where the heck I was and pulled out my map. While doing so, two Chinese people asked me in excellent English to take their photo, which I did. Then they walked with me, saying she was visiting from somewhere, he was a Shanghai native. They asked where I was from, where I worked, where I was going. I finally noticed that they were up to something when they wanted to drag me to an "original Chinese tea ceremony". I bet that their scheme of Chinese friend visiting Shanghai native was a scam. Whatever a Chinese tea ceremony is I do not know, managed to leave them, and kept on walking towards the Bund.
I hit the main shopping street and man… Such masses of people. I will not complain about Tokyo being loud and hectic ever again. Tokyo is a place of tranquility compared to the busyness and noise of Shanghai. The photos I took don't really manage to convey the noisy chaos. Finally, after walking for two subway stations, surely some six or seven kilometers in total, I reached the Bund and it was as impressive and pretty as I remembered it and again masses and masses of people.
After the Bund photo session, I returned to West Nanjing Road subway station, rode back towards the hotel, hit an elegant super market and a bakery and returned to the hotel. After a short rest I met my first colleagues and the official part of the journey started. Our work dinner consisted of international cuisine in Shanghai's French quarter. It was outside in a garden and the weather was just perfect for spending an evening outside. The next day, the nice weather was over and heavy rain and fog accompanied a temperature drop of ten degrees Celsius, which made the place colder than Tokyo.
During the work seminar I attended in Shanghai, we were given the opportunity for quite an unusual experience: the "dialogue in the dark".
I had rudimentary heard about a dinner in the dark, where you have dinner in absolute darkness, and this dialogue in the dark is indeed organized by the same institution. It lets people with normal sight experience blindness. Our group was led into a completely dark room where there was really not even a shimmer of light left. We were given a blind person's cane and that was it. An instructor told us that there were 3 tables in the room and enough chairs for the 20 of us and we had to find a chair first of all in complete darkness. After that was accomplished with much noise and bumping into tables and chairs and each other, we found out that there are trainers with us at each table and we were given tasks.
As a warm up we were supposed to write a poem onto a piece of paper, each of us one word. After about five people, someone finally noticed that the pen was not switched on… Then we (tried to) constructed a rainbow from different sized wooden pieces. Next we had to stand up and attempt to make a square with a piece of rope and last but not least, back at the table, we tried to have a cup of tea or coffee and a biscuit, which we had to distribute to the table members.
We spent two hours in complete darkness and they went by like nothing. It was quite an adventure to rely on sound, touch and smell and nothing else and communication – to be forced to speak and work with the people around you in such an extreme environment was an awesome experience.
One of our members quit one minute into the exercise suffering from claustrophobia. I was astonishingly fine and not afraid at all, the knowledge that this was happening in a controlled environment with experienced teachers helped me to persuade my subconscious to be not afraid of the dark.
I had not really expected our teachers to be blind people, but it didn't surprise me to find out that they were after all. The leader and three instructors, meaning 4 blind people coached us through our two hours in the dark and their calm and experience and tricks helped a lot. They told us that there are 280 million visually impaired people on the planet and that China alone has 12 million blind people. Quite a number. I have yet only briefly checked the Tokyo homepage of the organization and I am hoping they also offer dinners in the dark. I'd be very interested in experiencing that! By the way, our teachers were all Chinese and they spoke excellent English… Amazing people.
On my last day I had not much time before I had to return to the airport, just enough to go into a huge Tesco supermarket next to the hotel. I love going to supermarkets in foreign countries and again I knew why. In the middle of the fresh produce section huge tables with raw meat on ice stood around for self service. Meaning you can shove the dead chickens and half a pig's leg into a plastic bag yourself… I bought some crackers and a bunch of exotic teas. People with microphones shouted through the whole shop praising some goods. I can't help it, even that sounded aggressive to me. At the cashiers' desk some real aggression was going on. One guy before me was not happy with his receipt and complained about something being too expensive. He shouted at the clerk lady and I am sure he used not very polite expressions. She remained tough though and with a last insult the guy dashed off.
I threw my purchase into my suitcase and went off to the airport. The traffic on the highway is just amazing. One fat truck after the other, almost scraping your car. People driving like there was no tomorrow and no seat belt on the backseat. I grabbed the handle and had some horror versions of awakening in a Chinese hospital with an arm missing after a traffic accident…
Luckily, I arrived all in one piece to witness the next scene of conflict. Some woman surrounded by police men and two cars was shouting like mad in front of the terminal building. I have no idea about what but it sounded horrific. This time I had taken a regular taxi to the airport by the way and the ride indeed cost me only 60 Yuan. Though I had to remind the driver to turn on the meter and then to give me a receipt. To make him friendly, I gave him a twenty Yuan tip, which finally put a smile on his face.
The trip was short and mostly business, but even so some five days to remember. And it looks like I am going to get to China a little more often from now on due to my new assignment. I'm looking forward to it, Shanghai is a thrilling place, a broiling metropolis and you can feel the bubble mentality, people suddenly have money in this town compared to ten years ago and they are spending it, just look at the masses in the Apple store…
