Shanghai Surprise

I'm tackling Shanghai last because I'm still trying to get to grips with my feelings about the place.

On face value - which if we are to be frank is a lot of what Shanghai's about - it's an amazing city. The best restaurants, great shopping, fantastic nightlife (I assume), allegedly pretty girls (my dad kept saying: "You know, Shanghai girls have such lovely figures but they look sooo ugly"), some great art deco style buildings, a futuristic cityscape in the form of Pudong, a fascinating history especially around the colonial era...

But all my earlier rants about Chinese people basically stemmed from my first impressions of Shanghai. The pushing, the smells, the rudeness, the arguments (people say that Shanghainese sounds like the people are arguing all the time - err, that's because they are), the dirt... down where my dad lived the cheap outdoor restaurants simply threw the left over rubbish out on the street with no bags...okay no need to go down that road again - not till the end of this blog entry anyhow.

So, let me point out a few fab things that I did get to do here:

- firstly: I ate for England. There's something not quite right about Chinese food in Thailand so I made sure I stocked up in Shanghai. My top 3 meals were

1) Guyi (see picture below): spicy Hunanese cuisine - wicked food. Of course it's going to be spicy but every dish we had tasted different. Beef ribs cooked with peppers in a wok was firey, dry fried beans was gorgeous and coupled with some steamed silver and gold buns which you eat dipped in a sweet carnation milk sauce: awesome.



2) Dongbeiren: north eastern country food. My friend & his family took us there and it was wonderful. The fried aubergines are something I will never forget. Plus the whole place is decorated in the bright red or green cloth with prints of peonies and peacocks. Even the waitresses' mary jane shoes are ringed with the stuff.
3) Mongolian hot pot: yep, it's 30 degrees centigrade outside, but who cares, a bubbing copper hotplate, a dish of raw lamb, sesame/soya sauce dip and bob is your uncle!

- secondly: I shopped. Went to the cloth market at Dongjiadu Road and got some tops made. I'd have brought over all my favourite clothes for them to copy if I'd known about the place before I packed. Bought DVDs etc. Nuff said really. We've come a long way since the automatic 'mei you's response to any request starting with 'do you have...?' back in 1990 when bkkmei was bjmei for the first time.

- thirdly, love the old architecture. Just observing the former posh western houses, the buildings that look like they're from the Garment district in New York, the Bund - it's very impressive. And there's the twist: that nice terraced house which wouldn't look out of place in Belgium has a zillion bamboo poles out with clothes drying on them.



What a pity they're all being knocked down.



I'm going to accept that Shanghai will never be my favourite place in China. I've always been more of a Beijing girl having studied there. When I started my China trip my dad and my friend had to help me out. Having spent the last few months learning Thai, my mandarin was crap. And I didn't have the gall to attract attention to get proper service. I mean waving your arm manically around shouting 'qing wen!!' is just not done in Thailand!

But what I hated about Shanghai was the person it made me become towards the end of the trip. My dad - over 80 - was already dashing into underground carriages in a vain attempt to get a seat because he knew nobody would give up theirs for him. Admittedly he looks 20 years younger but still. And I would take to very deliberately saying please and thank you - just to embarrass whoever was serving me into being polite back. But on our trip back from Suzhou, we found this man (I'll be frank, he was a peasant) and his young son sitting in our seats and I really screamed at them to get the hell off. They scurried off. His wife and other son were sitting opposite. Later on, this dominmatrix train guard shouted at the wife to get her son measured up to see how tall he was for ticketing purposes. Watching this wife squirming in her reluctance to get her son measured was heartbreaking. They were obviously very poor and I guess the extra whatever kwai for the ticket meant a lot to them.

And there I had been, screaming at her husband. This is what I had become after one week in China. Thank god I am back in Thailand.

Suzhou

The great thing about Shanghai is the nice trips away from it. Suzhou is less than an hour away by train and while not quite as nice as Hangzhou, has its own character and charm. There are lots of 'towns' laying claim to be the Venice of the East due to their extensive canal system. Suzhou has calm canals with tiny bridges spanning elegantly across, lined with white washed 2 storey houses coupled with slate grey roof tiles.



There are a number of old houses with beautifully designed Chinese gardens. Not flowers and hedges, but stones, pavilions, small ponds. Walls and buildings separate the gardens creating an illusion of space. Holes in the walls - square, round, hexagonal, pentagonal - create a feeling of framed pictures of different scenes.



The touts can be quite aggressive at the train station but otherwise everything went smoothly. We covered three places: Garden of the Master of the Nets, Coiled Gate and Lion Forest. There are tour groups - both foreign and Chinese - milling around, but the gardens are laid out in such a way that it is very possible to hide in some nook and cranny without seeing anybody. Being in these old houses and gardens was very much like being in a traditional Chinese drawing where the ladies have their hair pinned up and are sewing in a pavilion while the master of the house is practising his calligraphy in the 'pine viewing room'.

Of the three places, Lion Forest was my favourite. We spent about an hour drinking Long Jing at the upstairs teahouse. The haze of the gently setting sun was casting blurry shadows on the walls. Very chilled.



I really like the picture below because it reminds me (again) of Chinese paintings, golden orange leaves trapped between the rows of tiles on a slate grey roof.



We took a five kwai pedicab to their main shopping street - wasn't really of much interest except the sweetie shop for my dad.



Here is my favourite story of our trip. Walking along the street we saw this bird outside a shop. The bird was very vocal, saying 'ni hao' (hallo), and very often 'huanying guanglin' (welcome to our shop). I've even got video footage which if I knew how to put on this blog I would.



Later, at the teahouse in Lion Forest, 2 mynah birds were dangling from the window eaves. Trying to elicit any vocal response from them was not succeeding. We told the lady owner of our 'huanying guanglin' performance and the owner sniffed 'well, these birds don't talk much'. As we left the tea house we could hear the squwarking of 'huanying guanglin' from the lady owner as she vainly tried to teach her birds to say the magic words.....

Hangzhou

Following on from my last post, I fear I may have been a tad hard on my 'homeland'. My dad was most upset at my grumbling, saying 'if you don't like China then you don't like me'. Personally I don't know where all this patriotism comes from - he himself frequently complains of the backwardness (quote "How can China expect to host the 2008 Olympics? Nobody speaks English here!"), rudeness, how he doesn't like to be cheated...

Anyhow, allow me to rave about Hangzhou which was a very nice city. On the weekends it's chockablock full of tourists and strollers, but it still has a marvellous charm and beauty. Part of the city is modern - it has Lane Crawford! The part surrounding the lake is more traditional with rebuilt temples and houses. There are a lot of rebuilt sites which look lovely until you read how they all seem to be built in the year 2000. Must have had a big tourism drive that year heh heh.

Here are some pretty pictures:







We also enjoyed the cute shops along "History Street" which we actually thought was the Night Market. Even though it was a re-created scene of the past and extremely tourist-targetted, it was still great fun.



Hmmm, and the food was also very good: duck can be cooked in different ways - deep fried, steamed with herbs and mushrooms, etc. Sour fish at Louwailou was massive and tasty. And there is delicious fatty pork dripping with badness.



OK, it's not all sweetness and light. Visiting Long Jing (Dragon Well - the spring of water which when added to the tea is supposed to taste divine) is crap - just concrete houses with people urging you to drink tea in their concrete ground floor converted room. Apparently the actual 'dragon well' was boarded up so what water they were using to make the Long Jing tea is anyone's guess. Either it's crap or the taxi driver was doing a number on us. Dad bought some tea in History Street which when he tried it was terrible.

And in the picture below, there were signs everywhere saying keep off the grass. But that photo opportunity was just too tempting for many tourists who blatantly flouted the rules and ran amok taking pics. The little boy in the picture was let loose by his parents and proceeded to chase the peacock and try to stamp on its tail. All this to amusement of his mum and dad. Thank God one fellow tourist gave them a bollocking for it. To which they replied 'Oh leave him alone, he's just a child'. Little emperors indeed.

I smell Chinese

phew!

am in Shanghai to visit my dad. He lives in this small, modern bachelor pad: mezzanie bed level, white walls, view of Pudong and the Yangtze river etc. etc. We've also just been to Hangzhou. I'll post those pictures up later.

There is most definitely a musty, singular 'chinese smell' here which permeates everywhere, especially on long bus trips as the masses take of their shoes and the polyester socks let whiff. Phew! The smell pervades into your clothes, hair and makes me want to gag.

I most definitely have a love/hate relationship with China. I love the food, some of the scenery, the culture. I hate the confrontation, the vulgarity that has accompanied modernisation, the rudeness. When I went to Taiwan and everybody was so nice and friendly, I thought: yes, this is what China could have been like had the commies not taken over.

In terms of extremes, I feel that mainlanders and Thai people are at completely opposite extremes. In China they will argue and shout at each other at a drop of a hat. They have extremely loud voices. I always feel I'm being cheated in China. There's no such thing as queuing here. People push all the time. They'll never give up their seat unless they are confronted face-to-face - and even then in the most begrudging manner. Service is still shite. Even when you stay at five star hotels there's definitely something not up to scratch compared to elsewhere. There's no such thing as subtlty here: I mean head-to-toe Burberry? Come on!

Compare that to Thailand - I've been thoroughly spoiled. People smiling, fantastic service, enduring politeness, giving up seats for the tiniest reason... I don't think I could ever live in China again.

p.s. can't actually access the blog spot here, so let's hope this works.

Honkers Stonkers!

Just been on a short break to Hong Kong which was wonderful. As we had been working in Hong Kong before coming to Bangkok, there was more than a hint of nostalgia to the trip. We ate & shopped our way through the island. Or at least I did as poor Fatt had to work. The highlights were:

- seeing the crowds of Hong Kongers in Victoria Park with their candles as they mulled over the 16th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. In 1989, I was a teenager hooked on the news reports: watching the earnest students demonstrating for democracy, tanks rolling along on Chang an Avenue, Kate Adie with bullets flying left and right of her...and this year, I didn't even realise we had hit the anniversary until I was actually there. It's sad how apathetic and de-politicised I have become. But good to see that Hong Kongers at the moment still have the freedom to express their sentiments on the Massacre.

- weather: it was blissfully cooler than Bangkok. Even though all the Hong Kongers were complaining about it being a humid summer. We were laughing!

- Star Ferry: I went back and forth on the rapidly disappearing Harbour a number of times, watching the hawks hovering.

- shopping: I still wear t-shirts I bought from Giordano 5 years ago. Unlike Thai stuff which immediately goes out of shape after one wash, the Hong Kong cheapo clothes are usually of excellent quality. There's also a big market for 'dry technology' sports clothes at uber-cheapo prices. Something much needed in Bangkok.

- eating: Cantonese, Sichuan, northern Chinese...and best of all dim sum. We queued up at Maxims City Hall for delicious dim sum, bothering the trolley pushers into opening up everything they had so we could pick and choose. The chicken feet were the best. Also went to a resto called Hutong - the place to take visitors apparently. Floor-to-ceiling views of Hong Kong island certainly distracts enough from the food. Just as well as 'overpriced' is the general consensus here. On Fatt's side, he made sure he patronised the penny sweet shop and the 'double boiled milk' dessert shop as many times as possible.

- seeing our old apartment block, visitng the neighbourhood, watching the black long-haired cats in the pet shop window, and scoffing at Zitis, our local pizza takeaway / cafe. Zitis was only open for a few months before we had to leave. Our very last meal was brunch there before we departed on the plane for Bangkok. It was good to see them so busy as the earnest chaps doing the cooking certainly deserve all the business they can get.

There weren't any low lights to the visit. It rained, but so what? Hong Kong still buzzes. And listening to my ex-colleagues relate their 14 hour working days made me appreciate my life here all the more. But oh, to be a tai tai in Hong Kong!