Shanghai Day One

This was my fourth time to visit Shanghai.  It was fun, and strange, stepping off the plane into a more familiar place than the one we'd left.  Although I've lived in Korea for almost a year, I still feel more foreign here than in China, maybe because of my poor Korean skills, or because I work and shop on base rather than living entirely on the local economy.  Shanghai has of course changed since I'd been there last--the restaurant where I wanted to eat dinner our first night in town had closed, for one--but the smells, sounds, and vibe of the city were like familiar friends.  It was also fun to translate for my husband for once, instead of the other way around.

So.  Day One:

We left a rainy Seoul Friday morning.

As I mentioned before, for once, booking our flight late had had an advantage--we ended up in business class for the flight over.  Not too shabby.

It was a quick one hour flight to Shanghai.  We landed at Pudong Airport, across the river from downtown Shanghai, and took the super-fast MagLev train into town.

Public transportation is easy and relatively cheap in China.  I generally prefer the bus or subway, because it's cheaper and more adventurous and makes me use my Chinese more, but we did take a lot of taxis over the weekend because we didn't have much time in the city.  (My brother, who grudgingly walked many a mile with me in China is thinking dark thoughts right now.)  And too, it had been four years since I was last in the city; I was not feeling as familiar with bus routes and neighborhoods.  

We checked into the hotel, which turned out to be really neat.  It was located in the historic French Concession part of the city--the area that was ruled by the French in the late 1800s and early 1900s--where boutiques, restaurants, and historic houses are tucked in along tree-lined streets.  We chose to stay in a newer hotel, with just 12 rooms, each of which was different.  First, though, to the top-floor cafe for some "welcome tea" while they made up our room.

"Welcome tea" turned out to be English Early Grey.  Slightly ironic for the tea capital of the world.

The room we booked wasn't ready, so they gave us a free upgrade for the first night.  I loved the windows in this room, as well as the chest in the corner and the huge bathtub.  And strangely, even though the bed was hard like beds always are in China, it was pretty comfortable.  I'm not really sure what the abstract English Nobleman painting is doing on the wall.  Maybe it's supposed to show off the trendy new China.

We didn't spend too much time admiring the room; it was lunch time.  We headed out for the West Nanjing pedestrian street, famous for its shopping.  I thought I remembered a street food alley here from my previous trips.  

Alas, I could not find the street food.  We wandered around the block, looking at least for a more hole-in-the-wall-ish place, as opposed to the touristy joints facing the main drag.  We found a suitably shabby establishment (plastic tablecloth covers are a good sign) and sat down to eat.  The menu was refreshingly nonsensical after almost a year of mostly proper English on tourist menus in Korea.  I'm not sure if you can tell from the picture below; this page features LiNag Blasting Eel, DuSi Dasey Incense, Detonation of DeXing Fish, Article Moss Peanut, and Parsley Small Plian Chicken Pu, among other offerings.  I can read enough Chinese characters to feed myself fairly effectively, but it's always nice to have either a little help or a little entertainment when there's English on the menu.

I went with dumpling soup, my favorite eggplant dish, and a beef dish that looked safe (I'm pretty sure it was beef with oyster sauce).  The total for the meal was less than $5 U.S., and goodness was it tasty.  Not a bad start to our Chinese culinary adventure.

Well-fed and refreshed, we walked back down the main street to People's Square, stopping to browse a couple of the food product stores.

We ended up buying some pork jerky that Mike has been enjoying for the rest of the week.

Back in People's Square, we had a couple of options for the afternoon.  The Shanghai Museum is deservedly famous--it has a great collection of cultural and historical artifacts.  There's also the Art Museum, which has one of the best displays of Asian art anywhere.  We decided to go with less-famous but less intimidating Shanghai Development Museum.  It's kind of a cool building.

The lobby featured a prominent slogan-sign (so quintessentially People's Republic of China)--"Better city, better life"--the motto of the 2010 Shanghai Expo.

The museum is relatively small, just four floors, six or seven exhibits.  One of my favorites is the room that has a scale model of Shanghai.

The large river running through the middle of the picture is the Huangpu River.  To the east (right) is Pudong, "east of the river".  This area of the city used to be mainly agrarian, and then a mix of agrarian and industrial; the Chinese saying was that it was better to have a bed in Puxi ("west of the river") than a house in Pudong.  In the last 25 years or so Pudong has grown into a modern business hub, home to Shanghai's financial district (and stock exchange) and some of the tallest buildings in the world.

West of the river is the older part of the city.  In the very left side of the picture you can just see People's Square, part of which was a horse racing track in the era of the Concessions, then a giant slab of concrete similar to Tiananmen Square in the Communist heyday of the '50s and '60s.  In the last two decades it's been transformed into one of the city's largest green spaces, along the lines of Central Park. 

A little more history, if you're interested: Shanghai was a fishing town going back to the 17th Century, and later a shipping port.  It was one of the port cities forcibly opened to the western powers after the Opium Wars of the 1840s (when the Concessions were developed).  Some of Shanghai's most notable attractions are left over from this time period:  the Art Deco architecture of the Bund, the mansions and trees of the French Concession; even the "Shikumen" or stone-gate residential architectural style is a blend of Chinese and Western that first became popular in the 1860s.  Although most of the city's foreign population had left by the time the Chinese Communist Party won the civil war in 1949, Shanghai today is once again an international city.

More about the rest of our trip soon!