Arr. Pudong airport 7.05am. Queue to sort visa - then bags - then customs. V. tired. L2 metro with bags, then change to L10. Arrive hotel - check-in - room OK. 11am. go for walk around the old town bazaar. Eat in the food court -dumplings and satay chicken + green veg. Back to hotel. After some beer and peanuts - an early night.
As I mentioned in the previous post I have no recollection whatsoever of the flight from Auckland to Shanghai. My only memento of the journey is the handful of photos I took, towards the end of the flight as the sun rose, or more accurately inexorably caught up with us at a steady 550mph as we failed to out-pace earth's rotation, spinning counter-clockwise at roughly twice the velocity of the plane's.
Gill plugged into the in-flight entertainment...
Wonder Woman at dawn...
Followed by breakfast which tasted as bad as it looked.
All of this has vanished from my memory as if it never happened in the first place, only when I looked at the photographs later did any of it comeback to me. How accurate are such 'triggered' recollections? Not at all according to current psychological research. Dr Julia Shaw asserts that everything we recall is partially false. We embellish the blanks even without realising.
The magic of long-haul, what would take 12 days by on a cruise ship traversed in 12 hours, or instantly in my case since I could not remember a thing. The images on my phone of the information screen prove I was there, though mysteriously there are no pictures of me on Gill's phone... I feel a conspiracy theory coming on....
Flat, dull and covered in warehouses - our first impression of China as the flaps went down on our final approach to Pudong International.
I do vaguely recall touchdown, but my first clear memory of Shanghai Airport was this - modern, huge and curiously empty. At passport control we 'aliens' were herded into a large side-room full of trestle tables and plastic chairs, it was like being back in school, cheap biros littered the tables next to piles of small square buff-coloured forms. We duly completed the short-stay visa forms then queued up to hand them to a unsmiling, impressively uniformed official at the counter. After carefully scrutinising our faces, comparing them with the passport photo, he stamped our passports with a flourish. The experience was intimidating, which is unsurprising because it was designed to be.
Gill looking surprisingly perky after an over-night flight - perhaps some of that Wonder Woman vibe rubbed off. Something else, look how compact her wheelie holdall is, it is remarkable we managed to travel for almost six weeks with just two medium sized bags. It did make transfers simpler and cheaper enabling us to use public transport rather than taxis in cities.
In the case of places with a non-Latin alphabet using public transport takes a bit of pre-planning, though it transpired that in Shanghai the metro station signs and announcements and some of the main street signs were translated into English, sometimes with surprising results.
While twiddling out thumbs in Christchurch Airport we had rehearsed the journey from Shanghai Airport to hotel, traced it on the map that came with our Shanghai Lonely Planet 'pocket' guide. It looked straightforward we decided, take line 2 from Pudong Terminal, change onto line line 10 at East Nangkjng Rd, go one stop south in the direction of Hangzong Rd. alighting at the Yuyuan Garden metro stop. The Renaissance Hotel would be easy to spot, twenty storeys high in a low-rise neighbourhood, about 300 metres north on the left side of Middle Henan Rd, or so it seemed from the photos of the place on TripAdvisor.
All went well until we emerged from Yuyuan metro station. It was difficult to tell north from south, there was a mid-rise rise block in the distance in both directions. Normally at this point we would have consulted Google Maps, this is not an option in mainland China as all things Google (and Facebook) are blocked by 'great fire wall' of the People's Republic.
Undaunted we drew on ingenuity gleaned from our analogue youth, well almost middle-age really, when Tim Berners-Lee uploaded the first web-page in 1991 we were 36 years old. It means that although we are both quite tech savvy we have still retained our former analogue functionality. Looking around, map in hand we could see a tall sky-scraper towering over some low wooden buildings down a side street, Pudong finance district we reckoned, across the Huangpu River. "North's this way," Gill announced, pointing to the right. We set off towards the tall building in the distance, our impromptu attempt at urban orienteering paid off. We were relieved to reach the Renaissance Hotel, it was now over 30 hours since we had booked out of our apartment in Akaroa, we just were desperate to lie down for a while.
Our room was on the 10th floor with a view south towards the old city and the famous Yuyuan Gardens. The hotel itself was a tad corporate, but comfortable and efficiently run. The front of house staff in particular were welcoming and helpful, which is not typical in Shanghai generally. When you are exhausted lying down feels truly blissful. We fell asleep immediately but woke up less than an hour later feeling very hungry. The last substantial meal we had eaten was forty hours ago, since then we had sustained ourselves with airport 'lite-bites' and the unappetising meals served on the plane.
You can never win against jet-lag, only put up determined resistance, which in our case meant trying to stay awake until evening. Keeping active, we decided, was the only solution, so we headed out in the early afternoon in pursuit of a late lunch.
Shanghai 'old town' was a ten minutes stroll from the hotel. I suppose the warren of streets and old wooden houses and shops corresponds to westerners stereotypical ideas about authentic Chinese vernacular architecture in the same way The Shambles in York would strike a Chinese tourist as typically English. The big difference is that the ancient city centres of places like York have been wholly gentrified whereas although 'Nan Shi' is not untouched by tourism due to its proximity to the world famous Yuyuan Gardens, nevertheless the area remains a bustling working class neighbourhood of open fronted shop and traditional houses. For two people who had spent the last fortnight wandering the empty landscapes of Southland and the Otago the effect was overwhelming.
The Yuyuan bazaar had a big food court, the choice was bewildering as was the queueing system and where you actually paid for the food. Somehow we muddled through and ended up with chicken satay, dumplings and xxx xxxxx.
I think it is fair to say that the food was filling and satisfying rather than delicious, but given our jet-lag I think we did well to find somewhere selling street-style food, the easy option would have been to use the hotel room service menu.
High-rise Shanghai besieges the old city, spectacularly so as you look towards the river. The sight of Pudong business district's silvery towers is haunting, as good a visual metaphor as you might find for the contradictions you find constantly in China which has managed the seemingly impossible trick over the past thirty years of becoming an export orientated capitalist super-power while retaining the mass social control of an autocratic communist regime. Our arrival coincided with the latest twist in the story as this very afternoon the National People's Congress rubber stamped President Xi's bid to change the country's constitution to make him head of state for life. We knew this because our BBC News app reported it as their headline story for about 20 minutes before China's great firewall removed it.
We were lucky with the weather, it was mild and sunny, the receptionist at the hotel told us it was their first spring-like day. Perfect conditions for exploring the city, bright but not to warm.
By now we really were feeling exhausted. We got back to the hotel around 5pm. From our window we watched daylight fade. It all felt quite strange and exotic, somewhere exciting and slightly outside our comfort zone, surely that is one of the joys of travel.
After a substantial lunch at the food court we were not feeling particularly hungry. We managed a beer and peanuts in the bar then headed to bed.
