When you spend four weeks in another country, it’s hard to know where begin talking about your experiences; when that country is China then the task becomes harder still.
But Shanghai is where we did begin our tour so that’s probably the best place to start.
And what a place! Anyone who has watched “Empire of the Sun”, arguably Spielberg’s best film, will be familiar with the opening scenes, with that spectacular view of the European buildings of the Bund. But until you’ve seen them close up you just don’t get a sense of the grandeur of the buildings put up at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries.
In their time they were opulent enough, but now a 180⁰ turn and a glance across the Huangpu River and you see 21st century architecture at its very best with the vast swathe of skyscrapers that make up the Pudong area, until the 1990s agricultural land.
We took a trip up in the lift of the Jin Mao tower – 88 floors in 45 seconds. Yes seconds. And what a view! It wasn’t even the tallest building – that lay beside us – a huge rectangular beast of a tower with a square “hole” near the top.
The view down to the bottom was mind-boggling to say the least but as we wandered round the observation lounge we were exposed to our first taste of one part of Chinese culture – an overwhelming desire to take photos with Europeans! Clare, with her red hair, is to be found in photographs all over whatever the Chinese version of Facebook may be, and even I found myself in several pictures over the course of the month. But the immediate source of attention for the hosts of Chinese tourists (foreign visitors make up only about 2% of the market) was a guy with dreadlocks! And how the Chinese lapped that up – at one point I swear there was a queue to get a picture with this particular “foreign devil”!
This leads nicely onto another cultural trait – rudeness! Now perhaps if we lived in a country with a population of 1.6 billion we’d be rude too, but it got quite exasperating being pushed past and jostled, not I have to add with any malice; it’s just the way they were. And the rudeness extended to the photographs on occasion – many came up and asked in broken English to have their photo taken, but others merely stood at a distance and pointed their cameras in our general direction without a please or thank you! Later on in the trip as we staggered up the Great Wall of China there was even a policeman bawling through a megaphone, exhorting everyone, we assumed, to get in single file! But that’s for another blog!
Back to Shanghai, and as it was lunchtime, the next stop on our Chinese adventure was a date with chopsticks! I have to say I faced this with some trepidation, and of course my innate clumsiness resulted in several spills in the first few days, but by the end of the month I, and 7 of the other 8 in the group, were chopstick experts! I could devote a whole blog to the food, and may well do so, but at this point I’ll just say that with the exception of the pea-flavoured ice-lolly, it was actually pretty damned good and much better than I had feared, not being a great fancier of Chinese cuisine on the whole.
But I digress so I’ll move on with some speed to our next excursion, which was to take place at great pace – a trip on the Maglev train. It was hard to believe that we were hurtling along, or to be more precise above, a track at over 400 km/h! The news a couple of days later that there had been a serious train crash involving two other high speed trains was a little disconcerting, but thankfully nowhere near where we were, and so it did not affect our trip.
Back to our hotel for a rest, a pleasant enough building of Premier Inn standards, though I’ve never seen turtles and fish swimming in a small pool at the entrance to a European hotel! We actually didn’t notice them when we arrived, but that was par for the course during our stay as there was so much to see and take in that sometimes we missed things the first time around.
The evening was spent on a cruise on the Huangpu River, and almost every one of those skyscrapers from earlier in the day was lit up, at municipal expense, with coloured lights; a truly spectacular experience. My favourite building, and the photo subject of this blog, was an amazing television tower, which truly would have been at home in the spaceport of a sci-fi series set in the future!
So that was the first day, or perhaps the first two; one of my abiding memories is how each day seemed to blur into the next with almost effortless ease!
Clare and I have both decided that Shanghai is one place we would go back to in an instant, and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone pondering a visit to China.
