Home Again, Home Again

The Bund at night from a small cruise ship.

Martina, a Danish student, and I infront of the Pudong skyline.

A busy intersection near our hotel, more motorcycles than cars in Shanghai due to the narrow and winding streets.

Nanjing Road, ten points to the first person who can pick out the McDonald's sign.

I will begin my post by saying that my spring break was one of the most interesting and empowering experiences I have had yet. It was my first time really arranging all of my own travel, from what I packed all the way up to making my own plane reservations in Chinese. Of course it didn't hurt to have four good friends along for the ride. All that said, I will try to give a brief rundown of our time in Shanghai. Tomorrow I will post on our experiences in Qingdao.

Five of us decided to go on holiday together, but Tanya and I did NOT want to take the 15 hour train ride. Tai ma fan (too much trouble). So we booked some pretty good discount tickets and flew into Shanghai early last Saturday morning. It went well and we managed to get a taxi driver who knew exactly where our hotel was, so it was quite nice. Our hotel was beautiful however upon arrival we found out that they no longer have a hostel section, so we had to pay a little more for the first night while we searched for another hostel where we could stay. We met up with our fellow travelers who looked a little rough after their long train ride.

First few days were basic tourist fare, walking around the Bund, night cruise along the riverfront, People's square, Nanjing Lu, museums of all sorts...you get the idea. Once we got into a hostel we met some pretty interesting people. Monday we went to the Shanghai museum with our roommates, a Brazilian girl and her Slovakian friend. We were quite a group. On Tuesday we met up with a 19 year old Danish girl who was traveling alone in China. The amazing thing about all the people we met while staying in hostels is that NONE of them spoke a word of Chinese, and they were having something of a difficult time getting around. But they could all speak excellent English...interesting.

The next few days we spent most of our time walking and just trying to get a feel for different parts of the city. We made it over to Old Town and the French Concession. It was a lot of fun to be harassed by people selling fake Rolex's wherever we went. Even more fun were the vast amount of tour groups comprised of retired Chinese. I definitely got body checked by a sixty-five year old woman. It was awesome. We also did our best to figure out public transportation, which was an entirely different adventure. At the end of four and a half days I felt like we saw a good bit of Shanghai.

It was an interesting place to see. I won't say that I didn't like it because actually I found it to be a beautiful world-class city. However, it lacks the character and community oriented nature of a city like Beijing. It is a purely Western conception of Asia, and it can feel very cold and consumer oriented. This is not to say that the people were not nice, they were actually very impressed that we spoke Chinese and were extremely helpful. I don't know if they would have been as kind and patient if we had not tried to use Chinese, other foreigners lead us to believe that this was the case.

I am looking forward to when the family comes to see Shanghai. This trip gave me a chance to really plan what we are going to do. But it is already so crowded, I can only imagine the amount of tourists that will be there come June. The upshot of all this is that Shanghai was amazing in it's own right and it was nice to make friends there, Chinese and Westerners alike.