Shanghai Old and New

Thanks to another business trip I went to China again for a few days and travel always means adventure

If there is a mentality comparison possible between Europe and eastern Asia it would be this: the Japanese are mid-northern Europeans and the Chinese are south Europeans. What I mean by that is:

Before even setting foot on Chinese soil, waiting at Narita airport for my flight to Shanghai, it was fascinating to watch the behavior of Chinese and Japanese travelers. The Japanese travelers are quiet and mindful of their surroundings (at least most the time) whilst there was a group of Chinese travelers who were spread over several rows of waiting seats and were full-throatily chatting with each other without a care in the world about their noise level. Quite a different temperament

Japanese people can also be very noisy, but they usually are so in an environment or context where that is socially accepted by their society. They are totally noisy and drunk and rude and loud in izakayas = drinking holes, they are totally noisy at rock concerts and scream their guts out, but not for example at the airport… Simply waiting for the flight to Shanghai showed a cultural difference and the restrictions that the Japanese seem to so much like to put on themselves

The plane ride was rather bumpy due to thick rain clouds over Shanghai but when I arrived the rain had stopped, though the clouds still hung threateningly over the island of Pudong. Last time I had flown via Haneda in Tokyo and Honqiao in Shanghai, this time, due to a different hotel, I flew via Narita and Pudong. The latter being Shanghai’s more modern airport on the “new half of Shanghai”, the island of Pudong where all that new development of Shanghai is going on.

This time I was determined not to repeat my previous blunder of letting ridiculously expensive limousine services take me to the hotel and I followed a sign first leading to “hotel shuttle buses”. Arrived there, unfortunately there was no bus to my hotel as one guy told me, immediately offering those ridiculous limousine services. I declined and asked whether there is a train and he reluctantly pointed back at the building. The next guy offered me limousine services for 300 RMB but by now I know that this is pretty ridiculous and declined.

I went back into the airport building and headed for the subway and the so called Maglev, which is a high speed magnet train and the subway the normal subway. Unfortunately there was no explanation or map whatsoever that I could find around the Maglev entrance and asking the ticket sales guy didn’t help much either, he threw a name at me that told me of course nothing. Then I tried the subway, which I had taken a couple of times last autumn as well and yes, familiar things seem more reliable and easier to use.

I showed my printed out hotel map to a lady behind some counter and she spoke decent English and told me to take line 2, then line 7 and to get off at some station that looked reasonably close to the hotel on the map. I bought a subway ticket for a ridiculous 6 RMB… nice comparison to 300 for a limousine.

I boarded the subway and found the station where I was supposed to change some 10 stops down the line. Of course, after two or three stations an elderly lady boarded the train with a harmonica playing blind boy behind her. Much like the old man with the flute from last time. The lady mounted herself in front of me because I am a foreigner but I pretended not to have Chinese money yet and she left me alone.

After 8 stations everyone got off the train, which I found a bit suspicious, but did not think much of it yet. The train filled up again and a Chinese man sat down next to me and told me in perfect English. You should get off, you need to change tracks here if you want to go downtown, this one goes back to the airport. Oh thanks!!! I thanked him very much and rushed off the train. Very nice of him to help the lost foreigner!

The ride to the station where I was supposed to change took a total of 45 minutes and it was starting to get dark outside. I felt a little less adventurous looking for my hotel in the dark and it wasn’t as if the subway station would be right next to the hotel. The map I had printed was not very detailed and at my last visit the hotel was about a 20 minute walk away from the next best subway station. So I decided to grab a taxi at the station where I was supposed to change trains, fearing that if the other station was “too close” to the hotel, a taxi driver wouldn’t want to take me.

So I got off at the change over station and fought my way through the masses outside. I grabbed the next best taxi and showed the driver, a relatively young guy, maybe in his late 20ties, my map. He seemed to understand where to go and babbled to me in Chinese. I heard “Pudong” and a question and presumed he asked me if I had come from Pudong airport. I said yes and he laughed.

I speak about 10 words of Chinese and two of them are “bu hau” which means “not good” and I asked him that and he went on “bu hau, bu hau, … taxi!”, lol, meaning obviously I should have taken a taxi from the airport. Because I had said “bu hau” he seemed to presume that I kind of spoke Chinese and babbled on and looked disappointed that I didn’t understand him. At a red traffic light he turned around to me again and tried to start a conversation, then asked “no Chinese?” and I answered accordingly and he pointed at himself “no English” and we laughed and he drove on.

He brought me safely to my hotel (which I always find kind of amazing, since you are so at the mercy of these taxi drivers, they could take you bloody anywhere and could do quite some horrible things to you if they wanted to). The taxi ride cost 25 RMB, plus 6 for the subway = 31 RMB = ten times less than the limousine thing! I was so proud of myself that I gave my taxi driver a 20 RMB tip because I had no other bills available

I liked the hotel on this trip much better than the one on the last, mainly due to its excellent location at the Huangpu river (which features in Dome Child by the way), facing the town’s core – the Bund. Check out the hotel room with a view pics during the night and during the day. Also, this was my first hotel ever I believe that provides gas masks (in case of fire) for its guests.

This having been a business trip, there was of course again not really any time for sightseeing, but since one of our task was actually outside, we did see a little bit of the city. Our task led us to the … Part of town located in Shanghai’s “old” half, Puxi, where I had the time to snap some nice pics (I think) of the atmosphere. The contrast between new and old is quite extreme in Shanghai

Next to the Shanghai World Finance Center with its lighted corona and the building with the hole at the top, the Jinmao Tower, let me call it the bottle opener, the construction of a new skyscraper has started, tentatively dubbed Shanghai Center Tower. The bottle opener building is 490 meters tall and the new one is supposed to become 620 meters high… Wow… Another 130 meters higher and that should make it the second tallest building in the world after Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. Since I expect to be traveling to Shanghai more often in my current job, I hope to be able to witness the development of the Center Tower a bit. I haven’t noticed or heard anything about it during my trip to Shanghai last October. On the back of the “to be” postcard I took a picture of it says the thing is set for a 2014 completion.

On the way to the airport I took a normal taxi (not limousine service), which costs 150 RMB and drove in bright sunshine through all of Pudong. It’s quite a sight: not much green anywhere, nothing but high rises (some 20, 30 floors or so) with nothing but apartments and apartments. While Puxi is a city and has grown and changed over the ages, Pudong is nothing but new and seems rather monotone but it is also a symbol for the incredible speed of development of China and its rapid urbanization. Puxi is more like Tokyo, old and full of diversity and contrasts, Pudong seems like something out of and SF movie.

I’m looking forward to my next trip to Shanghai, which might already happen in autumn.