Our red-eye from Kota Kinabalu got us into surprisingly cold Shanghai early in the AM. We had 8 hours to kill here until our final flight would take us back to SF. Since Janet packed her coat in our (free) checked luggage she decided to just stay in the airport instead of dealing with the cold and the one hour train ride into the city with me.
After a few somewhat eerie minutes of wandering around the huge empty space for customs a security dude started to scorn me for either being late, early or maybe just for being there at all. Eventually he found someone to carefully look over my passport and give me an entrance stamp. The hour long metro ride into the city flew by. The rush hour train was packed, and clean, and people were all very well behaved, but that might have been because most of them were immersed in the American Idol type show that they all seemed to be silently watching on their phones. Picture dozens of straphangers in an oddly lit place grinning down to their glowing phones and swaying with the movement of the train. A Hitchcockian scene that I wish I had taken a picture of.
When I arrived at People's Park station a group of young Chinese people asked me to take their picture. I did and we got talking. They wanted to practice their English so they invited me to go to a tea tasting with them. I cautiously agreed and we arrived into a very homey tea house where we were served a pot of very expensive tea. When I say expensive I mean 450 Chinese Yuan or like $70 USD for a single pot! This is split between the five of us so I end up paying about $13 USD for a few ounces of tea. I've thought about it a lot and am fairly sure they weren't scamming me, and that that was just a normal price to pay for some fancy-ass tea. Regardless I had a very nice time talking with them. They had all sort of questions for me about life in the US and about my thoughts on their country. They shared their surprise that I was not overweight because they assumed all Americans are overweight. And then an hour later another lady said the same exact thing to me! I'm not sure why but I was somewhat offended by this. Obesity is obviously a serious problem for the US, but to assume that all Americans are overweight is unfortunate. Important to remember how wrong some of these assumptions are and to try and not make them about other cultures.
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| People's Park |
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| People's Square |
The 90 Yuan that the tea shop cost me was literally my lunch money, so instead of getting some food I walked around People's Park and watched hundreds of people do calisthenics and other morning exercises. I eventually made my way to the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, a museum dedicated to the city design of Shanghai. So were talking exhibits on public transportation, architecture, environmental resources and more generally on the history of the city. Do I know how to party or what? The major piece of the center is a huge scale model of the city, which takes up an entire floor.
Here are some infographs they had about how fast they built and expanded their metro system that blew my mind. I'd be so pumped if BART expanded at a 1/100th of this rate.
Unfortunately I was out of time and yuan and had to head back to the airport. My visit didn't go exactly as planned, as I didn't get to visit the Bund or any other part of the humongous city aside from the few blocks around People's Park, but it was a nice enough 2-hour sampling of a place I don't plan to head back to anytime soon.
Back at the airport I met back with JJ and we ate some overpriced crap food and eventually boarded a plane that took us on our last red-eye of the trip.
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a few more photos here
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