Shanghai

Long before we started on our China odyssey I began clipping articles out of the Sunday New York Times Travel section. Two such articles: “Family Travel, Shanghai for Kids: Amid Wheeler-Dealers, an Urban Playground;” “Frugal Traveler, Shanghai: Balancing the Past, the Future and a Budget.” Snappy titles and glittering descriptions of places to see, to eat, to sleep. I rediscovered these articles one week after we returned from Shanghai. Oh well…the Shanghai-for-kids article assumed we would be traveling in the warmer months (most of the suggestions relied upon outdoor excursions) like most sensible people, and the Frugal Traveler article focused on all those hip and cool places one goes to without kids. Before going to Shanghai I don’t think I really knew what to expect—all the history lessons, movies, novels, and yes, even a Tintin story, didn’t give me much to go on after all. After going to Shanghai I feel just about as clueless, only this time I have a clearer mental picture of what it looks like.

I actually have much to say about what we did there but I feel ambivalent about Shanghai itself. It is China, of course, the “Real China” that Dave talks about, just like all the rest of China is the “RC”. But with its extensive history of a European presence and as a major port city, Shanghai feels much more like any other huge cosmopolitan city that I have been to. Not that my travels rank up there for being far-reaching—Paris, New York, Los Angeles—but in my little world of experience, Shanghai really felt like a place that belongs to the world as opposed to one country. As such, coming from Hohhot via Xi’an, I couldn’t have been more surprised.

We stayed at a very nice hotel in the French Concession called the Hengshan/Picardie Hotel. Built in the 1930s, it is a beautifully restored Art Deco building that overlooks a lovely park and the lower “European-style” buildings that are nestled between the many skyscrapers that make up most of Shanghai.

A snowy, foggy view from our window on the 12th floor of the Hengshan/Picardie Hotel.

We have lived so cheaply in Hohhot that we saved enough money aside to really stay in style—we planned on 7 days in Shanghai, with not much to do other than enjoy a high-style vacation that we will undoubtedly never be able to duplicate again in our lives—and thanks to the wise advice of Zach and Pan Yu, we found ourselves in the quiet neighborhoods of the French Concession rather than in the middle of the bustle of the Bund.

If you have read Dave’s post on our trip, you already know about Zach and Pan Yu. For those of you who haven’t, it is important that I introduce them now, for without them we would never had as nice an experience in Shanghai as we did. Dave “met” Zach through a mutual friend and has been in email correspondence with him since probably six months before we came to China. It wasn’t until we arrived in Shanghai that we finally had the pleasure of really meeting him. He has lived for many years in China and now makes his home in Shanghai with his wife Pan Yu. Before coming to China and since we’ve been here his advice and kind emails have helped us feel grounded and not so alone.

Zach met us at the airport when we arrived late at night and successfully got us to our hotel where we gratefully dropped off to sleep in our super cushy bed. (The only hitch in arriving in Shanghai was that that little red carry-on bag of Grace’s—remember, the one that went AWOL in the Xi’an airport?—got left on the bus we took from the airport. It was weird to stand there on the street at midnight, watching the bus drive off with Grace’s stuffed animals. We did get it back, thanks to Zach and Pan Yu’s kind efforts to track it down. We now obsessively count bags and bodies every time we move from place to place—ticket counter, waiting area, plane, bus, taxi, whatever.)

Roughing it in bed: Grace, Samuel, and Dave. The king-size bed was a pillowtop with an additional feather bed on top of the mattress. It sure beat the bean pillows we've been sleeping on for the past 6 months.

Over the course of the next week we ate a lot of wonderful food, both with Zach and Pan Yu and on our own, explored the French Concession (our first thoughts on our first morning out—before the snow kicked in—were “Wow! Look at how clean the streets are!”), found the nearest Starbucks (pitiful, I know), mastered the Shanghai metro system (marvelous except at rush hour, when we all learned the true meaning of being squashed like sardines), took in the culture at the Shanghai Museum, and bought both Harry Potter 3 and 4 because two days after buying the first it was clear that Samuel would finish it before we left for Hohhot. We also slogged through snow that fell so relentlessly that we could barely look up, much less see the top of some of the taller skyscrapers, slipped repeatedly in inches-deep slush, felt frozen to the bone on more than one occasion, watched “Dirty Jobs” on the Discovery channel (not having cable even in the US, it was like going to the movies to watch t.v. in the hotel room), and generally had a really great time.

One morning, so completely disgusted with the shaggy dog stage my hair has permanently moved into, I went to a hair salon where I innocently expected to be able to make my wishes known, by whatever rudimentary means possible. I mean, everywhere else we went people spoke to us in English before we could even whip out our few stock phrases. Why not in the hair salon too, where the name (2 Girls) and the sign on the door listing services and prices were in English? Ah, sweet innocence. Once in the seat (thereby committed to going the whole way) I soon realized that I was going to have to wing it. It turned out there was only one stylist on duty so while I waited I was treated to a 10-minute hair washing session, tea, and a 20-minute back massage. When the stylist finally was ready, we looked at a picture out of a magazine together, mimed how much I wanted cut, and he went to work. One hour later, I had as passable a hair cut as I could hope for having not had any of the obligatory chit chat about what I wanted, the weather, so and so’s unbearable fashion sense, the movies, or the latest scandal in People magazine. Fully expecting to pay an arm and a leg (20-minute massage?? One-hour haircut? French Concession in Shanghai??) I was shocked to find out the total cost was only 60 RMB. In other words, the whole experience cost about $9.00. Or on the other hand—to put it in the context of daily life in Hohhot—my haircut cost about 2 ½ dinners at our favorite restaurant on Mongolian Street just around the corner from our apartment. Cheap by American standards, astronomical by Chinese standards.

Rather than give a boring blow by blow of our week, here are some pictures that will give you a sense of our vacation, of Shanghai, and of how little we really did capture on film—the weather was so bad we feared taking the camera out and often we just did the same things every day: stroll around, drink coffee, eat a yummy dinner either alone (twice take out from Papa John’s pizza) or with Zach and Pan Yu (Indian, hot pot, Zhuang food), read books, or laze around our cozy hotel room.

We were among the few crazy people who went to the Shanghai Zoo when it was snowing. Most animals were in hiding, but we did see the pandas (sleeping).

A view of the Bund across the Huangpu river from the Pudong. The Bund is the stretch of old European buildings, most dating from the early 20th century.

Looking the other way across the river towards the super modernistic buildings of the Pudong. You can't even see the top of the skyscrapers for all the fog. It was pouring rain on this day.

While I got my hair cut, Dave and the kids hung out at the neighborhood Starbucks. They sipped hot chocolate (it was another cold rainy day) and read their books. We never imagined, way back when we were still doing night duty with babies, that there would come a day when we could hang out in coffee shops again. This is Samuel starting out on Harry Potter 3--we bought it the day before and it was finished 4 days later.

Grace is actually reading now, but not at the level of this book. We bought her a copy of Inkheart by Cornelia Funke which Dave read to her at Starbucks.

We normally don't get out too much after dark. We're too much creatures of routine--make dinner, read to the kids, go to bed. It was nice to hang out with Zach and Pan Yu and do the restaurant scene. This is on the way to the hot pot restaurant, near our hotel.

This is the flashiest of the shopping streets--Nanjing Lu. It stretches from People's Square to the Bund and rises many stories high, packed full with people. Our last night we ate with Zach and Pan Yu in a restaurant on the 7th floor of one of these glittery buildings.

Our last afternoon it finally dried up enough that we could wander around the French Concession. We found many many high-end shops catering presumably to the large expat community in Shanghai. Among other things, we found a "Zen" shop with "soothing" stuff for your home, a Williams-Sonoma type kitchen store, and this bakery, "Paul."

It is a really good thing we didn't find this place on the first day. As it was, we took some jambon-gruyere sandwiches (fancy name for ham and cheese on a baguette) and four big slices of rhubarb tart to the airport with us for our dinner.