China: Shanghai

What a week we had. Longer than expected, but I'll get to that. I'm going to divide it up in two posts, Shanghai and Beijing, so you can spread it out over two coffee breaks, if you want.

When people ask me how our China trip went, I have been answering "wonderful and terrible." What an amazing amount of history that civilization has. Great palaces and walls were being built hundreds of years before any white people even conceived of "discovering" my young country (of course, the natives were there long before, but that is not my civilization and they left no permanent record of theirs before we killed them off/concentrated them in pockets as shells of what they were --I'll shut up now) .

My first overall impression of modern China? Dirt and chaos. Sorry, but it's true. That isn't to say that there isn't a lot to off-set that, because there is some amazing stuff. But right off, I noticed the spitting I read about.




















It's rampant. It's not even considered rude in the middle of a conversation. People loudly hawking up---ugh. I'm not a squeamish person normally. I'm a mom, I've dealt with every bodily fluid. But something about mucus really gets to me in a very visceral way.

Moving on.

If I had to pick between which city I preferred on our visit, I'd have to say Shanghai, where we went first.

Shanghai has always interested me because it hit its fame during the 1920s and 30s, an era which, as anyone who knows me knows, has a dear place in my heart. This is when the Western world came into Shanghai and the expat community had a huge influence on the architecture, the government, and the culture (there is a lot of negative connotation here, as it was rather forced on the Chinese, but I'm going to stay away from politics in here as much as I can, aforementioned Native Americans notwithstanding, because it is complicated and confuses me. No, I'm lying, it's going to come up and I know it).

Anyway, on our first full day, we took a subway




















and did a wander through Old Shanghai. If you squint and imagine away how people are dressed and anything plastic, looks as if it hasn't altered a bit since the 1930s.









































We also walked through a park that had this crazy exercise equipment instead of the normal playground stuff














and thought "how unusual to have a park full of exercise equipment," but we ended up seeing these things all over China. Maybe it's a Communist thing: the people must be fit.

We also spotted this fun scene: a guy getting a shave on the street, right by the shoe-shine guys.















There was a huge shopping street, whose name escapes me because Chinese names are really hard to remember, but we did it backwards from the tour-book way and so went to this lady's place first. She was great, with her kinky hair and nose ring, and I saw no one else like her in the rest of our trip. I think she's my Chinese sister.















Her shop had a sorts of cool stuff and pseudo-antiques in it.















After her shop, the mind-boggling number of stalls selling the exact same watches, figurines, toys, and pseudo-antiques as each other wasn't as exciting. That isn't to say we didn't buy anything. The stuff was unique to us and quite cheap. We did the whole haggling thing, which is both kinda fun and rather aggravating, and did better at some times than others, but hey, it was still cheap.




















We walked by this place, but didn't go in. This picture brings me to relate my first public toilet experience in China. Public bathrooms around the world are always fascinating. (They are, just trust me) In Italy, you can go into any cafe and use theirs (in the US, you have to be a customer). In Japan, you can use the nice Western-style ones in any combini (like in gas stations in the US), or in the more public ones like train stations or touristy sites, they have the slipper-shaped squat hole that I'm totally used to and sometimes prefer for hygienic reasons.

I was prepared for a hole in the ground, but this one was a whole new experience. 3 stalls, with no doors. A tiled gutter to squat over, communal to all 3, that was flushed out periodically. Otherwise, all the waste matter is sitting there waiting for the next flushing. The no-door thing wouldn't have been so terrible, except the next waiting customer stands there and watches you do your business. The women after me didn't even wait until I had done up my pants before she pushed her way into my space to take her turn. I had to laugh. A nervous, kind of horror-filled sort of laugh, but humor was required for the situation.

So. We visited the Bird and Flower Market, which is a giant warren of a pet shop with every kind of small animal you can buy and take home. This ain't no Pet Smart. Utter chaos, people shoving around tiny alleyways and a cacophony of Chinese voices and animals sounds.















These guys were obviously popular. Crickets.














I guess a lot of guys buy them and carry them around in their little houses. When they are cold, they don't chirp. When they warm up, they do. They chirp when in a pocket, giving comfort and companionship to the owner, and when they want them to shut up, they expose them to the colder air outside. Kinda cool.

We had some famous Shanghai dumplings for lunch. I was underwhelmed by them.















We walked some more, down a lane that was tree-lined, with birds in cages to sing and cheer strollers. A very ancient practice, I bet. And weird.















We were really over-stimulated by the time we got the Yu Gardens, so all we saw was the big, foreigner-thronged shopping area and the odd store-front-looking temple compound where you could worship your gods-under-glass. Missed the "garden" part completely due to being so overwhelmed by the amount of foreigners crammed in the Starbucks. I left before I could use the bathroom there. Too many damn people.





























As the sun started to go down, we were heading toward the famous Shanghai skyline. I have never seen buildings like they have in Shanghai. So modern. I guess most of it was built in the last 12 years. Isn't that nuts?















We had to go up into the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. How could we not?




















We had dinner up there in the second ball, a decent buffet including all kinds of weird Chinese stuff and the universal tater-tot, and got a view from above (it's 468 m or 1,536 feet high and the third tallest TV/radio tower in the world). I always thought parts of Tokyo were the inspiration for Blade Runner, but this skyline, with it's neon and crazy architecture and haze of smog, surely was inspired by the movie. Unbelievable.















(Incidentally, while we were up here, as our kids were borrowed for many group shots, we were acquainted with the fact that the Chinese thought that M was a girl. The long hair and the long eyelashes, I guess. This impression was universal, too, including the hotel worker in Beijing who refused to let him into the boys' bathroom.)

They also had a Space Center in one of the balls, and a much-more-extensive-than-expected history museum. Creepy-wonderful wax figurines about Shanghai's opium dens and Western influenced culture, and lots of propaganda about the noble farmer and the Anti-Japanese War, which is what they call WWII.


































That was all in one day, can you believe it?

The next day was a lot more low-key, at least for us grownups. We stayed around the hotel. We had discovered this park the day before by the subway station, but didn't go in. It was a total low-rent kiddie amusement place, the highlights of which were the jumbo slide















and the Most Awesome Bumper Cars Ever. Fast, sparky, hard to control, whiplash-inducing collisions and just like they used to be before America got so sue-happy. Also notice on the right the cool pre-videogame shooting game (reminded me of Magic Shot). It had great recorded noises of dying animals.





























If you ask the kids, tho, this might have been the best part.



They were in there for twenty minutes. The guys running it were so amused that they were taking a bunch of pictures with their cell phones and everyone walking by had to stop, until they had drawn quite a crowd.

The park was a lot more extensive than it looked from the entrance. Beyond Doraemon Kid Paradise, there was a sand beach where we stumbled across some kind of photo-shoot for a wedding magazine or something.















There was also a big lake with paddle boats and lots of paths through different kinds of landscapes. It was huge.





























That night we went to Shanghai Circus World for an acrobat show called ERA: Intersection of Time. Multi-million dollar production with some of the craziest acrobatics I've ever seen. Apart form the usual flying and contorting, they had this huge ferris/hamster wheel that made me cover my eyes in terror of witnessing a horrible fall.














And you know those motor-cycle Ball of Death things like they had in The Simpson's Movie? They had one of those. But not just with one guy on a motorcycle. Not 2, or even 3. EIGHT riders, male and female, were zooming around at high speed inside this round cage. It shouldn't be possible. Amazing show.














Our last day in Shanghai was spent at the aquarium, the highlights of which were: The Scariest-Looking Alligator Ever, the ultra-creepy (to me) Giant Salamander, various weird-looking fish, and the World's Longest Underwater Viewing Tunnel. D was in heaven taking pictures, and decided he is going to be an animal photographer for National Geographic when he grows up.

























































It was then time to catch the overnight train to Beijing! I've done it once, Brussels to Prague with Karla, but a first for the rest of the family, so it was exciting. Before we got on, tho (after nearly missing it due to ignorance and station chaos), I manage to finally snap a picture of this kid. I was trying for like 20 minutes, because he had on the pants I had been seeing on toddlers all over Shanghai.















I guess they don't bother with diapers or training pants, and the bodily functions of toddlers fits in the same category as spitting and old men urinating on the walls: Eh, whatever. What city smell? Oh, watch where you're stepping...











Off to Beijing!








Lots more pictures of Shanghai here and the aquarium, where wonders abounded, here.