Shanghai Surprise
August 17-24, 2002
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I arrived in Shanghai at about 5:30 PM. This was my third trip to Asia. My other trips had been to Taipei, Taiwan, and Osaka, Japan. On the trip to Taipei I had arrived later at night and the trip to Osaka was in mid December so night fell early. It was dark by the time I landed on both of those trips. This time it seemed a little bit stranger because it was still light out. It had been light for the entire trip. I left LA at 11 AM and connected that afternoon in San Francisco for the 11+ hour flight to Shanghai, and stayed ahead of the terminator the whole way.
What always amazes me is how quickly immigration goes in Asia. This trip, for example, I passed by this one station where I handed them a little entrance card that I had filled out on the flight. They don’t read the card, they just take it and you keep on going. Then there is a station where they check your visa and passport and stamp it. Then there is a final customs thing. I dropped my bags on the conveyor thinking they needed to be checked. As they went through the x-ray machine some other people went right on passed me though, and the guards behind the machine kind of gave me a weird look, as if you are only supposed to put bags on the conveyor if they stop you for inspection. Anyway, it took me less than 10 minutes to go from the gate all the way through customs and into China, which has been typical of my other trips to Asia.
Mike Lauer, our Asian sales manager, had arranged for a car from the hotel to pick me up at the airport. The car was the finest in Chinese luxury, a Buick. Pu Dong airport, where I arrived, is brand new, and so is most of the freeway going out to it. It was strange going down this brand new, beautifully landscaped 3 to 4 lane freeway that had hardly any traffic on it.
There was a lot of other new construction going on along the way. Other new freeways, and also a double magnetic levitation monorail system that will provide mass transit to the airport when completed. One of the things that struck me was all of the billboards. For a communist country, there sure were a lot of commercial billboards.
I was not sure what to expect from Shanghai. Taipei had turned out to be a very old looking city, and the outskirts of Shanghai were a little like that, but as we got closer there began to appear all of these modern looking high-rise buildings. There is not really one central downtown, either. The high-rises really spread out for a long way. We passed near the center of the city on the way to the hotel. The only thing I could compare it to was Manhattan. The freeways are interesting through there because they are elevated. In some cases you are as high as a 10-story building, and get a great view.
After checking in I went for a walk. I went about a mile in each direction from the hotel. A few blocks to the north there was a major intersection where the elevated freeway went overhead. There were pedestrian bridges going each direction and that gave a good vantage point to look things over. South of the hotel there was a park and a lot of people were gathered there for music and dancing lessons. I watched for a while but did not join in.
Monday Morning I met Mike for breakfast, and Johnny Sun, a contact we have a local university, also met us at the hotel to serve as interpreter. We took a taxi to Sodick Corporation, where I was to teach software training for the week. Monday we actually took the elevator to the 4th floor, which I found out later was not the norm. The rest of the week the elevator was off and we walked up. It was good exercise, at least. There were other Chinese traditions like taking shoes off by the door and wearing slippers around inside. All of us ate lunch together, too. There was a thin, watery (but usually good) soup, a couple of small meet dishes, some vegetables, and sticky rice served every day, and a piece of fruit for desert.
Monday night Mike and I were on our own. There are three very well known shopping areas in Shanghai, and we took a taxi down to one of them and walked around for a while. We passed by this Vietnamese restaurant that looked good, and I probably should have picked that one. Instead we went to just a regular Chinese place that happened to have a menu in English. It was OK, but we had Chinese the rest of the week, so it would have been nice to try something else.
Mike had me order a couple of dishes, so I picked sea cucumber, to be a little daring, and broccoli. Mike picked some other dishes including duck and fish. The sea cucumber was so-so, just hot and slimy with not much taste (and hard to get on the chopsticks). The broccoli turned out to be cauliflower. Something got lost on the menu translation there.
Tuesday we had dinner at a very nice restaurant with some of the executives from Sodick. I don’t recall any of the dishes in particular, though.
Wednesday we had dinner with Cliff and his wife Caroline and Johnny. Cliff and Caroline are a local reseller team that is doing very well. They have sold many seats of our software. Anyway, I guess when Cliff and Mike get together they traditionally have snake, so that is what they ordered. It was called King Snake, and they brought it out to the table (fresh, i.e. alive) for inspection. It was black and yellow dotted and about 4 feet long. A little later they brought it back, cooked and cut up. It tasted good, but is not the easiest thing to eat. Basically there are ribs running the length of the snake and you are picking the meat off of all of these rib bones. Another tradition, though, is to put the raw snake gallbladder in a shot glass of liquor. Yes, I drank it and swallow the gallbladder whole.
Thursday night we were originally scheduled to have dinner with Johnny and his professor Dr. Li and her husband. But Dr. Li was sick so we went out with Cliff and Caroline again. We took a taxi down to the Bund. This is the area of Shanghai where all of the foreign banks were located prior to the 1949 communist revolution. There are a lot of older buildings with various beautiful architecture styles there.
The Bund sits along the waterfront of the Huangpu River, and on the other side is the big new commercial area of Shanghai. There sits the tallest building in Shanghai and the Oriental Bright Pearl Tower. Cliff was very nice and had gotten me a single use camera, so I started to take some pictures. The ones I took of the waterfront and building turned out way to dark though. Fortunately Mike also took some pictures and sent them to me later. I have both sets of pictures mixed together here.
From the Bund we walked up Nanjing road, which is the most famous of the three shopping districts. Some people call it Pepsi road because of all of the neon Pepsi signs. There were many shops and lots of people there. Those guys talked me into making an ass out of myself.
From there we took a taxi to a local Hunan restaurant. It was very crowded with Chinese so you knew it had to be good. It was definitely the best meal of the week.
There was this one dish that was at least 50% little red peppers. It was very hot and spicy. There were these barbeque ribs, too, that were just delicious, and this great vegetable dish smothered in garlic. There was tripe (pig’s stomach) dish that was OK, and crayfish, too. The crayfish tasted like shrimp, but it was a lot of work to get at just a little meat.
There was a little outdoor market outside of the shop and afterwards Mike bought this strange bunch of fruit and gave it to me. He did not know the name of it. I had it for breakfast Friday morning. It was a little larger than a globe grape, only you had to peel the outside skin. The skin was similar to avocado skin, only brown and without the bumps. It came off very easily, and then there was a pit about the size of an olive pit inside. I cannot think of any other fruit to compare the taste to, but it was good.
Friday morning we took our typically cab ride again. With all of the trips we took from the hotel to Sodick and back, I think we must have went 7 or 8 different routes. This morning seemed like one of the more direct routes. I snapped some pictures along the way, and so did Mike. In some of them you can see all of the construction with the scaffolding surrounding the buildings. It is like this all over Shanghai. You wonder how they can be building so many at once, and why they don’t finish more first before going on to the next one. What is really neat is that for some of the shorter buildings (up to 8 or 10 stories maybe) they still use scaffolding made entirely of bamboo. After that, Spiderman takes over.
Friday night we went to dinner with the whole training class from Sodick and the executives again. We had Szechwan style food. It was again hot and spicy but not nearly as much as the Hunan. There were a lot more soup style dishes than the previous nights. The one thing I really remember was this tasty Asian style radish. Very tasty.
Saturday morning I got up very early. Here is the picture out of my hotel window as the sun is rising. Mike also took a couple of the view from the hotel. The air quality can be poor, but not that poor. That is dirt on the windows.
My flight was not until 11:25 so I figured I needed to leave for the airport by 9 at the latest. That gave me a couple of hours to sightsee. I got in a cab at about 6:25. I had wanted to go back down to the Bund area and take pictures of the buildings there, and I also wanted to go to the Jade Buddha Temple, which I had read about and seen a picture of the Jade Buddha. I should have thought about what time it was and when things would be open and gone to The Bund first, but I was not thinking and pointed to the Jade Buddha Temple on the map that I showed the driver.
He dropped me off at the temple about 6:40. The fare was 16 Yuan, or just over $2. The cabs in Shanghai are very cheap. We never paid over 30 Yuan for single trip the whole week. Of course, that is still expensive to the average resident, and the streets are crowded with bicycles and pedestrians.
There were some people waiting outside of the temple and a door in the gate where a man was sitting. After waiting a few minutes and observing what was going on, I approached the man and motioned about going inside. He held up his watch and indicated to me that it would open at 7.
So I took a walk around the block to kill some time. It was an older section of the city and I think I was getting some strange looks. Anyway, I got back to the temple gates, and the crowd was getting larger. 7 AM came and went, though, and not much was happening. The only people going in and out looked like delivery people and other workers. I was thinking about catching a cab and heading over to The Bund, but then I did not think that would leave me enough time to get back. The crowd did seem to be getting restless, though, so I did not think it could be much longer.
At about 7:25, one of the gates opened and they let maybe half of the people (around 50 or so) in, but then they seemed to just as suddenly close the gate and leave the rest stranded outside. Some of the people outside were really ticked off about that too. I could not understand what they were saying, but I am sure it was not nice. I thought it might turn into a mob scene or something. About then I saw that a lot of the people standing outside were holding these little booklets, almost like a mini-passport. I figured they must all be members of the regular congregation or something.
I had spotted a ticket window off to the side earlier, and now a few people were starting to wait in line for that. They let the rest of the regulars with the booklets in at 7:45, so my hope was that they would start selling tickets and let the general public in at 8. Sure enough, that is what they did, and I finally got inside just after 8.
It turned out to be well worth the wait. There were several buildings inside holding various Buddha shrines. There were people outside burning incense and people inside praying and making offerings to the various Buddha. I was down to just six shots on the camera, and I did not want to disturb the people praying, so I snapped these pictures very selectively. The one is outside the Grand Hall. The second one is of a large bronze Buddha. I kind of got the refection off of the glass so it did not turn out the best. The last one is of the reclining Jade Buddha. The actual Jade Buddha is an even more spectacular sculpture in the traditional Buddha pose but they do not allow photos of it.
I managed to explore all of the rooms and buildings by 8:25, so I figured it was time to go. In the whole time I was there I never saw another westerner. That was quite an experience for me, being such a stranger in a strange place. At the corner where I waited to hail a cab there was a lady selling postcards, so I bought two packs of 10 cards for 10 Yuan each.
When I got in the cab, it took me three tries but I managed to say "Jing Guo Bing Gua" and the driver acknowledged like he understood. I handed him the map card with the hotel address on it just in case, though. I got back and grabbed my bags and checked out, and then got in another cab to head off to the airport right around 9, like I had originally planned. This cab was a minivan, so I was up a little higher, which helped in snapping these pictures along the way. From the looks of them, I could have used some more help.
Traffic was a little busier on the way back to the airport than it had been when I arrived, but it was still not bad. I made it there in about 40 minutes. The fare on the meter said 146, but the driver wanted 160. I'm still not sure what that was about. He was the only driver all week to give me a handwritten receipt and not an automatically printed one from the meter, too. So I might have got taken for 14 Yuan, but when the whole trip was like $20, who cares? I've paid more than that to go the 3 miles from O'Hare to our office in Des Plaines.
The flight back was pretty smooth, and I managed to write all of my postcards that I wanted. I did save a few for myself though, of the skyline and Jade Buddha, and I scanned those in for everyone to see.
The flight back has the opposite time travel weirdness. It left at 11:25 AM Saturday, and you do cross into night for a few hours, but then it arrived at in San Francisco at 7:30 AM Saturday, or 4 hours before I had left China. As typical of most of my trips, getting back into the U.S. took more time than getting into the foreign country. This was one of the few times my bags did not get searched, but I still got stopped and questioned a couple of times.
The one thing I cannot understand is why they have removed mail slots from the airports. I can understand not having them in the International terminal and not wanting people to drop packages, but what is the risk in having a slot for cards and letters inside the domestic terminal? Is someone going to bring anthrax through all of the security just to mail it back out from the airport? Anyway, I did not feel like going back out through security and coming back in so I waited until I got back to LA to mail the postcards. After two flights and some 14 hours of flying, I arrived in LA at 11:30 AM Saturday, five minutes after I had left China. Confucius probably had a saying about that.
The End
If you want to see what awaited me on my return, check out The Dustmobile.