Train to Shanghai

Thursday June 10, 2010

The train is gorgeous. They should make congress ride Amtrak for a week straight and then ride any of these trains to compare. These babies have different class seats. Supersoft sleepers, soft sleepers, hard sleepers, soft seats and cattle and chicken class (yes that would be us). The sleepers are bunks so you can sleep, and the soft seats look like giant chairs you see in hotel lobbies. Then there is us. Actually our seats were fine. They are pretty cool actually. There are 3 seats on one side of the aisle and 2 on the other. They do not recline but are very comfy. The cool part is you can swivel the 2 or 3 seat sets so they point backwards or forwards, or sideways so you can watch the scenery (remember over NIGHT train). Cool design. The toilet was not as bad as Jacob made it out, it is fine. What stinks is you come onto this gleaming clean bright rain and 10 hours later it is a pig sty. The Swiss would be taking shifts all night with Q-Tips cleaning the bathroom, but these guys are not quite there.

I sat with a young lady who just graduated from college with a degree in Logistical Engineering, and she spoke pretty passable English. I think she was thrilled to practice her English. We gotta get some TV shows that don't make us look like crime scene, gun toting hookers. Or get Canada to produce something trashier than us. They go to Canada instead of here because I think we scare the hell out of them. Anyway, her dad is an electrical engineer at BASF and she has a job starting this summer with MG (the car guys).

So watched a great movie in Chinese (thankfully with Chinese sub-titles or I would have had no idea what was going on) and tried to sleep not very successfully. At dawn we crossed the Yangtze River, very wide and very busy with barges (like coal barges), and from there to Shanghai a couple hours later. It was bumper to bumper construction cranes building new apartment buildings(tall ones), factories and office buildings (even taller). Since the free wi-fi back in Beijing required joining the People's Republic before you get your free 30 minutes [Jacob's note: This is McDonald's policy, as this wi-fi spot was located at a McDonalds. You have to have a PRC ID number in order to successfully register for their "We-Claim-We-Have-Free-Wi-Fi-But-In-Reality-Only-Give-You-30-Minutes-A-Day" service], we did not have great directions to the hotel Deb had set up for us (Thanks Deb, it is great). So the English speaking girl Googled it, got the address, figured out which subway stops to use, which streets and how far, and personally walked us to the correct subway. I never got her name but we thank you very much. Man these people are nice.

So the Expo is in town and we didn't really see many Anglos, and people still stare at us, which is actually kind of cute. I was dehydrated and we were both famished so we did a few drive-by food purchases before going to the hotel. Her directions were perfect.

So first impressions of Shanghai are sort of what I had heard a couple of times. Without the governments grand buildings, parks and public spaces, it is like any other big city: Busy and noisy.

We checked into the hotel pretty early and slept for a couple hours since the train sleep was not holding up, then went off to figure out the subway and get some lunch. Jake loves street food so he got me something yummy with rice and pork in a banana peel. Then we found some rice bowl porridge thingies that hit the spot. I have been hydrating like crazy because it is hot and humid here.

We went back to the hotel again, did some laundry a la sink so they may have chance of being dry by the time we leave.

Then off to battle the subway that compared to Beijing looks like a pile of snakes, very confusing. We went to Expo and tried to take some pictures, but the camera was having none of it. The camera flaked in and out all day so we go with the backup tomorrow. We then went to the Bund and the glitzy shopping district. The Bund is nice if you stay away from the shopping end. It is a wide concrete walkway that goes all along the river and when you hit it at dusk like we did, it is beautiful to see the city lights across the river. They have passenger boats plying up and down both banks of the river lit up like casinos, and if you look real close you can see the non-stop line of coal barges traveling down river in the center of the river. Guess where all the electricity comes from...

The shopping district felt like we walked into a wasps nest of hawkers trying to sell you something. We couldn't get rid of them. So we ducked down some back alleys and found a hole in the wall food place, had dinner way in the back with the friendly locals and a couple beers.

We saw our first accident today. A guy sitting on the sidewalk with a gash out of his leg and a scooter with the front fender hanging off. Some discussion, not heated at all, no police, and the scooter guy cobbles up the fender and drives off. That would be some combination of police and ambulance back home.

We are finding the subway people pretty rude compared to Beijing. Cutting in line is very common. Nobody gives anyone their seats, and every stop is a mad dash of people getting on and people getting off and scrambling for seats. Maybe not so much a China thing as a big city thing.

The scooters in Shanghai are the same as Beijing but there a lot more of them. They work the scooters hard here. We saw a guy on a scooter with 10 water bottles, you know the water cooler things, 5 gallons or so each. These guys are masters of piling huge amounts of stuff on their vehicles.

We walked all over trying to find the subway and didn't get back to the hotel until 11pm so we are beat (again). Jake is worried about missing the continental breakfast (hopefully not noodles again) so we gotta get to sleep. Maybe back to Expo for pictures with the other working camera tomorrow, will decide in the morning.