Survival of the Fittest
There is always stuff happening while traveling. On my flight to Shanghai for yet another business trip it was like in the movies. Suddenly a flight attendant made an urgent announcement: is there a doctor or a nurse on board? If so, please contact the staff.
A few rows in front of me a man was apparently violently sick. They do not seem to have found a doctor or a nurse, though several people were hovering around the man. The head purser reseated the two other people in the guy’s row. Luckily the plane was only 95% full and there were a few seats left. They made the sick guy lie down in a three people row of the A321-200 we were flying. The man seemed to recover a bit during the flight and left the plane with us like everyone else but for a moment everyone was a bit shocked.
With tensions between Japan and China flying high it was a bit awkward on the plane. It might be my imagination, but there seemed a forced “let’s be business like and down to earth” atmosphere.
My looks of course do not reveal where I live, nevertheless it feels awkward. When I was in Shanghai the last time, a mere four months ago, there were no such concerns yet.
With some recently gathered Shanghai experience, I now know what to do when getting off the plane 
A year ago I fell victim to a much too high limousine service, in June I made the mistake to take the subway, which did not bring me to the hotel and I had to find some taxi at some train station to complete the journey. This time I knew I had to find a normal taxi and succeeded I waved my formerly printed out map to the hotel around and the taxi driver got it where he has to go. (little China travel advice: you really do need a map (in Chinese) or you need to be able to speak Chinese (Mandarin) otherwise you are lost and do need a limousine service where people speak English. None of the normal taxi drivers speaks a word of English).
So I sat there on the backseat of the taxi, looking for a safety belt. There was a belt but nothing to buckle it into … I ended up holding on to that seat belt completely uselessly of course while my driver slalomed at 150 kmh over the highway to Puxi at 18:00 local time, already in the dark and in evening rush hour.
This is one challenging adventure, the distance to the car behind you or in front of you is a few meters at 150 kmh. My driver knew where the police’s radar traps are and slowed down before each trap, though once he did not make it and was flashed and ended up cursing. Each and every driver is reckless and ruthless, this is very much survival of the fittest, nobody takes care of what is around him or her, time is money, the faster he brings me to the hotel, the sooner he can have another customer.
Promptly we got into a bit of a traffic jam and drove past an accident involving three cars. Rear-end collision accident. One car was half spun and blocked a lane, the one behind him and the one after that both had their noses squished. The cars owners stood in the middle of the street, each one of them on the phone. So apparently nobody got seriously hurt, or was even worried. They mostly looked angry and were shouting into their phones. After some more traffic jams downtown, I arrived safely at the hotel, sort of glad to be alive.
I rewarded myself then with a dinner buffet including a fun episode.
A Chinese waiter with perfect English (Marriott hotel) explained to me where what was and pointed out the dishes. “And over there we have special dishes, like goose, or ostrich or wild rabbit, for those who like such stuff, I wouldn’t eat it.” Big laugh, what a weird sales pitch, first of all he is Chinese and they are famous for eating “everything”, second, why does he sort of apologize for serving unusual dishes and tells me he wouldn’t eat it?
Just out of interest I had a tiny bit of wild rabbit. It tasted pretty much like whatever other meat and I could find nothing amazing or special about it.
Having actually a rather bad cold, I went to bed after the rabbit adventure.
In the morning a honking and hooting concert woke me up. My hotel room faced a crossroad and even through the window the amount of noise was just staggering.
I rode with a company bus from the hotel to the company, which picks up people from there every morning and the road adventure continued. Rough driving everywhere – who is strongest wins. Only some five percent of the many people on bikes and e-bikes drive with helmets. I don’t want to know how many people die every day on China’s streets.
On the way to the office, which is in a newly developed or developing business area, the bus passed some real slums. I would have liked to snap a picture but with Chinese colleagues on the bus and the Chinese driver in front that did not seem appropriate. In a field of literally rubble and buildings that are half collapsed and that looked 60 years old, laundry hung out to dry. I am pretty sure this area, encircled by a river, does not have running water and I doubt it has electricity. The half collapsed buildings look like they will be flattened soon by whatever new high rise construction program. I wonder where the people living there will go when that happens. Across from the river, modern high rises were already looming over the rubble area.
This was a short trip and it offered no room for sightseeing. On the first night, we had dinner at a place called the Shanghai Brewery with international food and an OK if not overwhelming Wiener Schnitzel. On the second night, we drove for an hour again through Shanghai traffic to a Chinese restaurant downtown Puxi relatively close to the Bund but not close enough for getting a look at it. The Chinese dinner was excellent with countless different little dishes whose names of course escape me.
On Friday it was already time to go back and for reasons unknown to me the last flight with Air China from Pudong to Narita leaving at 17:00 local time was canceled and I had to take the 14:00 flight and had to leave the work conference already at 11:30 to go through half the town back to Pudong. Since it was on a work day and in the middle of the day, traffic was relatively smooth, if busy and again slalom at high speeds on the highway.
The town seems to sprawl endlessly, some 20 million people live there after all. It looks much more conform than Tokyo despite the similar size. First of all Tokyo is mostly flat but not completely and second Tokyo has grown slower and is much more diverse. Flat Shanghai sprawls with high rise apartment blocks that look pretty much alike, while in Tokyo hardly one building resembles the next.
From afar I could see downtown and the new center tower which is supposed to reach 600 meters or so is yet only half as high as the “bottle opener” building whose official name I don’t know. Actually, I had expected it to grow faster within the past four months since I have been here last.
Arrived at the airport and after the whole check in procedure I found myself searching for the gate for the flight to Tokyo. Of course it might just be coincidence, but the Nartia flight left from the remotest gate of Pudong airport, downstairs tugged away from the pretty gates and we had to go to the plane via bus. In June I flew back to Japan via gangway. It might of course be an airport technical or airline technical matter that we were on the bus route, but it smacked a bit of those before mentioned tensions between Japan and China at the moment.
In a mere month, I will be back in China, next time to attend a seminar in Wuxi, which is 170 km west of Shanghai. I’m looking forward to that trip, since it will bring me into another city than Shanghai and also into one which is not on the usual tourist agenda. Let’s see what will happen during that trip
