Leaving Shanghai for Beijing

It was my last day in Shanghai so I thought I should actually book a ticket to get me to Beijing on the overnight train and a hotel for when I get there.

The hotel was no problem, but the train I wanted had sold out of sleeper cabins.  Doh.

Nevermind, I managed to score a cabin on the fast train to Beijing instead.  It was still an overnight trip, but it got into Beijing at 7:30am instead of closer to lunchtime.  Not ideal (I wanted to watch the scenery all morning) but the fast trains are new and have great facilities, so at least it would be comfortable.

By now it was lunchtime and I'm at Shanghai train station. I've got time to kill until 9:30pm.

So I wander around looking for somewhere to have lunch.  No shortage of restaurants around the train station, but most are a selection of eastern and western food franchises of the McDonalds/KFC/etc variety.  Meh.

I wander into a dusty old shopping mall that doesn't look much bigger than a supermarket, past a couple of cheap trinket shops, and I see a staircase going up with a sign indicating it had something to do with photography.  So I wander up to see what was up there... And I couldn't believe what I saw!  Dozens of camera shops!  In fact 2 entire floors of this mall were dedicated purely to photography, but you would never know from street level.  Most shops sold pro-level video and still cameras and lenses (very few consumer products at all), but there were also shops dedicated to large and medium-format film, 2nd-hand collectables, pro lighting, photolab printing, etc, etc.  Canon and Nikon reigned supreme with most stores dedicating at least one full wall to one or both of these brands, but the more exotic brands also got a mention (Hasselblad, Rodenstock, etc) and a number of stores had entire shopfront window decked out with Leica gear.  Heaven!

But this wasn't some glitzy tourist trap - it was tucked away from the public eye and presented in a very matter-of-fact way.  It didn't really cater for the compact-camera user.  It was a supermarket for pros.

So I wander into a couple of stores and check their prices against what I know I could get the same stuff for in Australia.. hmm.. pretty good..  And now I come to think of it, I really do need to get a wide-angle zoom for my GF1...

So after a bit of shopping around and price-checking, I settle on an Olympus 9-18mm micro 4/3 lens for my Panasonic GF1.  It's a fantastic little lens and I got it at a great price from my new friend Lee who ran one of the shops.  He said the lens would take about an hour to arrive at the store, but instead of telling me to come back later he sat me down and made me tea and we chatted for an hour about photography, China, and Australia.  He's such a nice guy.

So an hour later I was packed up with my new lens and jumped into another taxi.  I needed to find a post office to send a package back to Australia.  Luckily I had plenty of time as this took longer than expected.  I've discovered that my miming gesture for "posting a letter" seems to be easily confused with "handing over money". Each time I ask where the nearest post office is to send packages, I end up getting sent to a bank.

With the package sent, I went off wandering around Shanghai's glitzy shopping district.  It was getting dark now, and the neon lights of Shanghai were coming alive.  I didn't buy anything except a few glasses of some rediculously expensive whiskey, and then I headed off to the railway station.

The overnight fast train from Shanghai to Beijing (train D302) is modern, comfortable and efficient. It reaches speeds of 250km/h, but you'd never know as it speeds so smoothly through the darkness of night.

It was so comfortable that I slept for almost the entire journey.  The new Shanghai Hongqiao railway station (which only opened mid 2010) is beautiful and a joy to travel through, but the Beijing South railway station I arrived at was a bit more chaotic, with only one of the four taxi ranks in operation meaning a wait of over an hour for a taxi.

Shanghai Museum, Chinese Tea, and The Bund

(Click on this panorama of The Bund to see a larger version.)

Ok now that I had my little culture shock moment arriving in China, I was ready the next day to roll up my sleeves and tackle it head on.  So I jumped in a taxi to head for the Shanghai museum.

As soon as I jumped out of the cab I was greeted by the scene of a man running in front of me flying a kite.  I scrambled for my camera and grabbed the shot just in time.  It was going to be a good day.

The museum itself was amazing.  Artifacts dating back thousands of years, all in seemingly perfect condition.  It's a beautiful museum with an even more beautiful collection.

After the museum I wandered towards the river, to a famous promenade called The Bund.

This was the Shanghai I had imagined before arriving here, only it was much more than I expected.  Shanghai is an amazing fusion of old and new, Eastern and Western cultures, and nothing captures it more spectacularly than The Bund.

On my side of the river was the old financial district - a long road of huge majestic stone buildings that could fool you into thinking you were in 1920's New York or London.  These days they are the homes to exotic designer-label clothes stores and the like, but they have been maintained faithfully to the point where you expect the cars to morph into horses and carriages in any moment.

Then on the other side of the river is the new financial district, a futuristic scene straight out of The Jetsons dominated by a huge sci-fi tower and flanked by skyscrapers, some of which turn into huge 50-story video screens when the sun goes down.

And the Huangpu River divides the two sides, equally busy with tourist ferries featuring garish flashing lights and no-frills freight ships which are the lifeblood of this famous port city.

While wandering around The Bund I was befriended by a couple of Chinese ladies who were on holiday in Shanghai from Beijing.  They were on their way to a Tea tasting ceremony and invited me along.

It was remarkable to get an insight into the science and craft behind Chinese Tea, and I got to sample some very interesting ones.

Shanghai. It makes sense, just not to me.

I flew from Hanoi in Vietnam to Shanghai in China last night.

Wow. I had to keep scooping my jaw up from the floor on the taxi ride in from the Airport.

Everyone knows China is big. Really big. I thought I was prepared for it, but it still blew my mind just the same. I mean Australia is big too, right? Well yeah, but not in the same way China is. Not at all.

Shanghai is not for the sentimentalists. It is 100% pure modern China. It is fast, efficient, polite, somewhat impersonal, and above all massive. They don't do anything in half measures here. In many ways it reflects a huge modern western city, but it feels like I've landed in a parallel universe. Things are so familiar, yet completely different.

I've just spent the entire day today (it's after midnight now) without seeing a single westerner or having a single conversation in English. Not once. Probably be the first time in my life that's happened.

The best I managed while looking at a menu that made absolutely no sense to me was to communicate the single word "chicken" to the waitress. I didn't really feel like eating chicken but I was starving and it seemed to be the only thing I could communicate. She pointed to something in a list I had no idea about and I nodded. Then I just sat and waited for my mystery chicken dish!

From then on I began to look for menus with photos!

For my next meal I ordered an interesting looking seafood dish that turned out to be chili eel. It was very spicy, but tasty. And finally later tonight I had a seafood soup with jellyfish, octopus and some weird things that looked like white centipedes but tasted like seafood. That menu had some English words in it, including bullfrogs, shredded pig stomach, pigeon, sea cucumber, chicken head soup (with a photo with chicken heads floating in it), among other things.

Wandering around today was both fascinating and frustrating. In fact pretty much everything has been like that. My room has Internet which is fast, but plenty of stuff is blocked by the great firewall of china (including this blog which is why I couldn't post this until later). Also it is wired instead of wireless and has a verification system which seems to prevent my iPad from working. I got a lot of google maps caches on my phone before I left Vietnam which is great, but for some reason today it seems the GPS in my phone is wildly inaccurate here - off by a couple of city blocks, which means I need to revert back to looking at street signs on corners to work out where I am. These things are all very minor issues, but are examples of the "familiar yet unfamiliar" feel that everything seems to have.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Shanghai, China.