chopsticks and bright lights
having spent the last week or so with my mind already in china it was little surprise that my body, eager to follow suit, tumbled out of the door at 5:31 on thursday and straight onto the clunking thameslink train which would slowly wheeze its way tardily to gatwick; if the standard of public transport is anything to go by, the evidence of even a few hours' in china suggest that england's claims to bearing the exulted title of first world are getting weaker by the day. the flight to shanghai was comfortable but long, with the entire plethora of backseat entertainment options not fully able to conceal the fact that we were flying halfway across the world. after almost exactly twenty four hours in the air, airports, shuttles and boarding gates our plane finally touched down in shanghai at midnight on friday. having managed to evade the swine flu quarantine police sniffing around the plane on landing, we negotiated our way through the shiny airport with its suspicious, facemask wearing staff, and into the balmy shangai air.i had some reservations as to how our initial journey from pudong airport into central shanghai would go. as we were arriving so late the public transport options, in particular the absurdly fast maglev bullet train, were not available to us, so we would be throwing ourselves into a taxi in the hope that the taxidriver would be able to comprehend my attempts at pronouncing the road on which our hotel was located. given that his sole grasp of the english language was “shit”, a word which he used with alarming frequency, he had no idea what my admittedly weak attempts to phonetically pronounce the hotel address was; suddenly, the little printout of the hotel details in chinese which i had produced last week seemed less geeky and more ingenious. we travelled down long smooth roads into a sleeping city and stumbled bleary eyed into our hotel and up to our bed at around half one.
getting up was a bit of a struggle but we eventually headed out into the blazing heat at around midday, as the sun was rising to its zenith. we headed down to the bund, the colonial riverfront which is the heart of shanghai but whose charm is currently severely compromised by the hoardings and cranes swamping its riverside views. this actually served as a microcosm of our initial view of shanghai, as a city which would not be allowed to succumb to the crumbling, mildly dilapidated, charm of some of its contemporaries across asia. shanghai is new china, and the scaffolding and building works highlighted that at every turn, the art deco signatures of the city hidden away by a sea of protective hard hats.
my initial disappointment that this place may not have the inherent quality which i love in certain cities, or rather that any such quality was being crushed in the hunt for progress, was mitigated when we stepped off the bund and went for a wander up one of the back streets. this was instantly more like it; gaudy signs promising all manner of delights in chinese, maniacal driving of two wheelers across, through and around traffic junctions, wrinkled patriarchs surveying corners as their own, all of a sudden the entire city started to creak to life in front of our eyes. the chinese authorities are aware of the international reputation of the city and seek to control the impression it gives by renewing, modernising and sanitising the most frequented areas. step away from those however and the heart of an asian metropolis still beats with a passion, people honking and elbowing their way impatiently throught its smoker's arteries.
a quick break as the sun goes down before we head back out to see shanghai twinkling in the star and neon light. this strikes me as a city whose excesses will become most evident as its shopkeepers crank up their electricity sapping storefront displays and their potential opponents and victims come spilling out onto the streets to haggle and argue the night away. we'll stick with doing a lot of pointing and trying not to eat too much by the way of dog.
posted by bicrom @ 6:04 pm
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