Osaka to Shanghai

Islands and bridges as we leave Japan.

On a Chinese ship.

48 hours of ferry. I travelled in a Japanese type dormitory, on tatami mats on the floor. My companions were all Chinese so that restricted conversation! There was a machine providing a constant flow of free jasmine tea, that was nice. The meals were mostly Chinese though the first breakfast was European. It was very funny watching the Chinese and Japanese attacking croissants with chopsticks, I'm not sure why they did as the second morning we had dough balls and they had no hesitation in picking them up in their fingers.

There was only one other westerner on board, an English chap, in a wheel chair, who is going to travel back to England by land. I would love to know how he got on, he was a bit reticent but I got the impression that he was ex-military. On the whole the ferry was a good way of acclimatising to China though the sea got rough so it isn't an experience I would really like to repeat in a hurry. There were 2 elderly Japanese gentleman who kept talking to me, I think some of the time they thought that they were speaking English but I could never understand them.

sunrise over Shanghai

Sunday 17th April. I was awake early, rather earlier than I thought. There had been some announcements the previous evening, the ladies in my room stopped talking long enough to listen to the Chinese then talked all the way through the English. I suspect we were being told that we would change from Japanese to Chinese time during the night!
We were already on the outskirts of Shanghai when I got up. The river was incredibly busy, Loads of traffic going both ways. We arrived at 9a.m. but had to wait an hour for administration, and this was a Chinese boat. Eventually we were bussed to a terminal for customs and immigration. There was only one bus so it was slow going. Immigration took photos again, I wish people wouldn't take photos of me at the end of a long journey!

I walked from the ferry to my hotel. Very hazardous! People hang their washing on the pavement so you have to walk on the road, loads of duvets out airing! I thought Tokyo was bad for bikes but Shanghai is worse, it was not just bikes that ignored red lights but motorised bikes and motorised three wheeled bikes as well. I say motorised but actually they are electric and silent. Crossing the road was really dangerous, even cars ignore zebra crossings and little green men. Eventually I found the right street for my hotel but had great difficulty finding the hotel itself. The road was a street market, most side streets seemed to be. The fruit and veg market was at the end of the road and the whole area seemed very poor. Eventually I found my hotel by house number as there was nothing written in english or pingyin. Once I got inside there was a big reception area but the whole hotel was very run down, it looked as if it might have been impressive once. My room was big and I found an english language programme on the television, a chinese produced english programme!

My ship, taken from the Bund.

I had time to go out in the afternoon and went down to the Bund, an area I thought I wouldn't have time to see.

How many men does it take to dig a flower bed?


I had lunch in an old 'Art Deco' restaurant then did a 'sightseeing bus tour'. I also went to the station and got my onward ticket for Beijing, I was pleased with myself for managing that as there was no English speaking window but I had written down everything I wanted, train number, date and name of the destination in Chinese. The hotel I was staying in didn't have internet so whilst I was out I went into another hotel and asked if they had computers I could use, the answer was yes, and they didn't charge me. It was strange, the computer was in what looked like a bar but they didn't serve drinks, not even orange juice.

Amongst all the street sellers are people selling fruit, pineapples, cut into spiral shapes, and water melon slices. I tried to buy a slice of water melon but he wanted 20 yuan (£2), it was such a ridiculous price I couldn't even haggle and none of the fruit sellers have any prices displayed, though the fruit shops do, so I ended up with 2 apples, not so exciting. My lunch in the restaurant only cost 34 yuan (£3.40)

Originally I only meant to stay 2 nights in Shanghai but then I decided that maybe I was being unkind to the city so I decided to stay a 3rd. With hindsight I think the 3rd was unnecessary. I was woken in the morning, at 5.30, by, what sounded like, someone hoovering the corridor with a very loud hoover that kept banging into walls and doors.

Eventually I gave up and got up and joined the inumerable cyclists and the Tai Chi aficionados who were already up and out. I found a Costa Coffee house on the Bund and sat down for a breakfast. I do like my morning coffee. My plan for the day had been to go to HSBC (my bank in England) and transfer some money to my account in Spain. I had found the bank the previous day so this was not a problem until I realised that I could only do this during bank opening hours in England, so I had to wait until the afternoon. Instead I went first to People's Park, all praise to the Communists they have put in a beautiful area of parkland for people to enjoy. Then I went to buy a ticket for an Acrobat show.
After this it was a walk around the French Concession and a visit to the Arts and Crafts Museum, which turned out not to be a museum at all but a workshop and shop but in a beautiful old house.
I used the subway for the first time and discovered that there was information in English and that the system was similar to Japan.

Tuesday, another early wake up but I did manage to stay in bed a bit longer, however I was still out by 8a.m. I walked down to the Old city, via a park where old men had taken their birds for some fresh air and a sing in. I videod the birds simply because the singing was so nice. (video below) The Old city isn't really old, like most 'old' places in China it has been rebuilt in the 90's to encourage tourism. I paid to go into the temple and I'm glad I did. There were many faithful there but the monks had to put on a show. At first I thought I was intruding on a religious ceremony, then I realised that they weren't taking it very seriuosly either, it wasn't so much a religious experience as a communist promoted tourist show, but they played lovely music. I videod a bit but not very well as I was afraid of upsetting people. (video below)
I went to look for 2 mosques that were marked on the map, one I couldn't find, the second had a woman's bit where women were at work washing food trays, I had the feeling that they were running some kind of soup kitchen, it seemed that this was a working mosque, living Islam, and not commercialised by communism. On the way to the mosques I passed a hotel that would look alright in Las Vegas. I bought lunch from a stall and returned to the hotel for a rest as I had walked miles and my feet were exhausted. There was not really anything else I wanted to see in Shanghai, just the acrobatic show in the evening. If I had planned better I would have done a day trip to Suzhou.
On the way to the Acrobatic show I was 'attacked' by a shoe-shiner wanting to clean my shoes and telling me how beautiful I am, I think he needs specs. I had planned to economise and not go for a coffee but in the end I succombed, there was no other way to kill time waiting for the show, which was in the Portman-Ritz complex, so I availed myself of the hotel facilities!

Wednesday, on the move again.
I put my alarm on for 05.30, quite confident that I wouldn't need it as I'd be woken up again by the noisy machine, I was - at 04.15. I tried to go back to sleep but it started up again so I got up at 05.15. Off to the station for my first experience of Chinese railways, like the metro luggage is screened before entering the station. You can't enter the station proper without a train ticket.
I was travelling 'D' class, which is one of the beter trains, but I managed to end up in the middle of a family with 2 children, the children kept wanting to get past me and grandma spent most of the journey shouting to her family on the other side of the compartment. The train got up to a speed of 220 kilometres an hour. I had understood that there would be a dining car on D trains, there were, in fact, a few seats in the cafe/bar area but as the train was overflowing these had been taken, so I didn't manage to get a meal. Later I discovered that there were meals served in one's seat, you had to get a meal ticket from the 'trolley girl' but as I hadn't understood the Chinese I missed out. There was also boiling water on tap and people kept making themselves tea and lots had a kind of big 'pot-noodle' thing. I decided I needed to buy myself a container for tea as I drank one 1/2 litres of cold tea and ate a box of 'pringles' on an 11 hour journey.

Shanghai

I have mixed feelings about Shanghai, as my hotel was in a part of the city not generally seen by tourists, I saw the poor 'underbelly' of the city. In Japan I felt, all the time, that if you scratched at the glitzy, technological surface you would find culture and tradition but in Shanghai you find only poverty. Life is lived in the streets, on my first day, when I was walking to the hotel, a woman was washing her daughters hair, out on the pavement. Everything seems to happen outside, not sure if this is Chinese custom or Asian custom. I was shocked by the enormous division between rich and poor. I was not sorry to leave Shanghai.
My first impressions of Beijing were good. I managed to use the subway with a bit of help. There were long queues for tickets. almost the entire train, for some reason the machine didn't like my money but they were all very patient and helpful. My hotel was in a Hutong, a very chinese locality, although it was a working class/tourist area there was no glitz and no overwhelming poverty as in Shanghai.