Shanghai

Day 343 (June 6, 2019) – Shanghai, China

Shanghai was the last stop on our adventures through China, but in some sense it seemed like we'd already left as soon as we arrived. Shanghai felt very different from the rest of China. It was the most cosmopolitan and the most modern. It felt more similar to Hong Kong than to other places we had been in mainland China.

About to board our last high speed train in Tianjin, destined for Shanghai.

On the day we arrived in Shanghai I had a great blast from the past. One of my past coworkers and friend from graduate school was traveling through Shanghai on a work trip and we had a chance to get together for dinner with her and another friend who was living and working in Shanghai for the same company. It had been just over a year since I left my job and it was so great to hear how everyone was doing and talk about everyone’s experiences in China. We were in a restaurant called Liquid Laundry drinking craft beer, eating stromboli and sliders, and gossiping about work. For a moment there I felt like I was right back at home again.

Shanghai makes it easy to pretend you’re not in China. There is a huge concentration of western cafes, restaurants, and bars, particularly in an area of the city called the French Concession. As would perhaps be expected from an area of the city once occupied by France, the streets are far more European than they are Chinese. Tree-lined boulevards with huge houses and wrought iron fences are home to fancy eateries and boutique shopping. After having been in China for two months at this point, we frequently indulged in the availability of burgers, sandwiches, pizza, and pub grub. We also made it around to all the craft brewpubs in the area, which although commonplace at home are a rarity in China outside of Shanghai and Beijing.

A German beer garden didn't seem all that out of place in Shanghai, but it would be anywhere else in China.

We still took opportunities to have some of our favorite Chinese dishes before leaving. One of the best dumpling restaurants we went to in Shanghai was FuChun Xiaolong, which was provided to us by recommendation during dinner our first night. In general, Shanghai is pricey, even by western standards, but this restaurant was so affordable we made the mistake of ordering about twice the amount of food that we should have. A huge array of dumplings arrived at our table. Soup dumplings of pork and shrimp, sweet radish dumplings encased in a crunchy basket of batter, and a plate of the largest fried dumplings we had ever seen. We ended up taking much of the food home with us. We did return a second time but decided to order less than half the food we did the first time. Our other favorite place was a vegetarian restaurant called Jen Dow, which was attached to a Buddhist temple located across the street from us. We didn’t discover it until near the end of our week, but they were serving vegetarian meals in a cafeteria-like setting. It was simple, affordable, and delicious. We returned there a second time as well.

A great vegetarian lunch at Jen Dow.

Shanghai has a strikingly modern downtown area along the Huangpu River in an area called the Bund. Walking through the sea of skyscrapers felt like any other major city in the world, although there is a suspiciously high number of luxury cars zooming around the streets. We bought tickets to visit the observation deck of the Shanghai Tower, the second tallest building in the world. It was really hazy out (or smoggy?) so we couldn’t see very far into the distance, but it was still fascinating to look down on the city from such a height. Perhaps one of the more interesting parts of the visit was a small informational exhibit at the ground floor that talked about the tallest buildings in the world. I can’t remember the exact statistic, but it was something along the lines that in a couple decades the overwhelming majority of the tallest buildings in the world will be in Asia. Historically, the United States had held the record of tallest building for long stretches of time, but that is no longer the case (One World Trade Center in New York is currently the 6^th tallest) and is not likely to be so again as dozens of mega skyscrapers are going up all over Asia.

The Shanghai skyline from the Bund. I admit to color correcting some of the smog/haze out of this photo. With the haze it was slightly less impressive than the photo suggests.

Our last stop in any country after being there for a long time is always difficult because we suddenly realize that we’re about to head someplace new and that we have no idea what we’re doing there. Our last stop inevitably involves a lot of planning for our next destination, so while in Shanghai we spent a lot of time taking care of travel arrangements for Japan. Most of this time was spent in our hotel room, which was fairly decent and had fast internet. However, two very strange things happened with our hotel in Shanghai.

The tallest buildings in Shanghai. From left to right: Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai World Finance Center, and Shanghai Tower.

Looking down at the Jin Mao Tower and the Shanghai World Finance Center from the top of the Shanghai Tower.

The first strange occurrence was that out window suddenly shattered. All on its own. Travis happened to be in the bathroom and I was sitting on the bed when suddenly I heard a huge “whack” sound followed by the splintering of glass. I thought a bird had struck the window but on closer inspection we realized that the window was a double pane and it was the inside pane that was cracked and not the outside one. No idea how that happened. But the initial crack was spreading like wildfire and before we knew it the whole window was a spiderweb of cracked glass. Luckily, it didn’t shatter or fall out ten stories below. To the best of our abilities we tried to explain to the front desk what happened. They seemed very casual about it which made us think they didn’t understand. Eventually someone came up to inspect and they offered to move us to a different room. We were afraid the whole time they were going to charge us for the window, but they never did.

Two cats in a pet store window.

The other strange thing occurred when we tried to have our laundry done. The hotel advertised laundry services so we brought our clothes down to the front desk and inquired. Keep in mind that all communication was happening through translation apps. We asked how much the laundry cost, and they said it was free. That seemed unusual but we said ok. Then they asked if we would like to spend some time with our clothes out in the sun. This is where we got confused. We assumed they meant, did we want them hung out to dry? Yes, we would like them to dry. Were they going to hang them out to dry or were we supposed to hang them out to dry? Either was fine, we just needed to know if we should plan to be around to collect the wet clothes or if we could leave for the day and dry clothes would be ready for us to pick up. She explained to us that after the clothes came out of the washer, they would be wet. Yes, we understood, but who was supposed to dry them? There were dozens of messages between us and we never got an answer to this question so we just said OK to whatever it was they were going to do. We stayed in the hotel for the day, working on trip planning, and if our wet clothes arrived we would be around to collect them and dry them ourselves.

Looking down at the Huangpu River from the top of Shanghai Tower.

A day later we got a knock at the door. A guy was there to deliver our clothes. And they were dry! Excellent, we thought, we managed to get our laundry done. But then he texted us a message saying that the hotel doesn’t do laundry. This didn’t seem to be the case as they tried to help us before and additionally, they just delivered fresh laundry to us, but ok. Seeing the confusion, he texted further and told us that next time we wanted our laundry done we should have our wives do it for us. Okay then…

Dodging our last electric scooters in China.

It’s hard to get offended by anyone when you're communicating through a translation app because the fact that you can communicate at all is enough of a miracle that you can look past the finesse of the actual message. But what we gathered from this was that perhaps the hotel would wash clothes but that we were supposed to dry them. Maybe the front desk felt bad about our collective inability to communicate this detail and dried our clothes for us, which they weren’t supposed to do. Maybe they even got yelled at by their management. Who knows? All we knew at the end of this was that we managed to get our laundry done (minus a missing sock and a pair of underwear...) and that we really wished we knew more Chinese.

We were glad that our time in China was coming to an end. It was a travel experience like no other, but at the same time it was, quite frankly, exhausting. It really puts you in your place when you realize you don’t know how to order food or that you can’t even manage to get your laundry done properly. China was perhaps our most difficult travel destination. Parts of South America could have been a contender, but our ability to speak some Spanish made things easier and opened up many opportunities for us. Even at the end of two months, our Chinese ranged from dismal to nonexistent, which didn’t help matters. But challenges like this are what travel is for. It’s hard to get experiences quite like these if we were staying at home.