Shanghai!

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 19^th and start of the 20^th centuries.

In their time they were opulent enough, but now a 180⁰ turn and a glance across the Huangpu River and you see 21^st 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.

Some technology ramblings!

You’ll have to excuse me if I muddle technology, information technology and social media as I blog. There are so many strands to this blog that I foresee several follow-up articles to develop some of the issues covered!

I do, in my defence, come from a generation to whom the sliding doors on Star Trek were a thing of amazement. Little did we know that strings were involved! To me the terms are all pretty much interlinked anyway and strings usually are involved in most things!

Talking of Star Trek it’s quite amazing how it predicted some of the technological future that is now our present, as this article from a couple of years back demonstrates:  Top 10 Star Trek inventions

But as ever I digress. Somewhat belatedly you may argue I have joined the iPhone revolution. Months of nagging by my daughter and here I am at last. And I do have to say that in a matter of a fortnight I am pretty impressed. I have been described as a late but then very enthusiastic adopter of new technology and that’s about right in my view.

As apparently everyone does to begin with, and who am I to be the exception to the rule, I have checked in left right and centre, become the “Mayor” of my workplace and home, downloaded (and then often deleted) apps of all sorts (though not the vast number some seem to have judging by the plethora of recommendations I got) and generally marvelled at the speed everything happens.

I now know how my daughter manages to send so many texts in a month and how easy it is to do so! I have taken a picture and uploaded it to Facebook for all to see in record time, and even discovered quite independently of any advice how to add wee smiley faces to every message in sight! Which fact caused some more technologically savvy friends to exhibit signs of jealousy. But then I can find anything on Google!

I was most impressed when the Shazzam app managed to identify the Disco Polo song I was listening to - and then of course linked it to my Facebook page in seconds!

I marvel at the connectivity of it all to be honest.

But where is it all taking us?

There are as ever the harbingers of doom, forecasting the advent of the Big Brother of Orwell’s 1984. But let’s be honest that day arrived long ago, albeit without the worst totalitarian overtones. You can’t turn a street corner these days without being in line of a CCTV camera, and we all leave electronic trails as we shop. And I could tell you exactly where one of my friends in particular is over the course of a day as his progress is posted stage by stage on Twitter.

There are those who take the opposite view and trumpet the victory of the individual over the state, citing events in North Africa and the Middle East, and the part social networking sites played in these events, to back up their views.

As ever the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle; folk more intellectual than me have written of the battle between the demands of the state and multi-national business to impose some control over our access to information, and those advocating the power of the individual to surf the net and access information to their heart’s content.

And this, in my view, merely reflects the realities of the world we live in.

And perhaps no better place to illustrate this than the People’s Republic of China which I and my daughter will be touring in two weeks time. Even before I have left these shores I am aware of the huge extremes this world power encompasses. Andrew Marr toured an 8 million pound Shanghai penthouse in his recent Megacities series, which to some might illustrate the final victory of capitalism, but on the other hand for the whole of our visit we’ll be cut off from the world of Facebook altogether, and I have been warned to be prepared for the enormous chasm between the super-rich and the poor in this cavernous country.

And all this technology doesn’t necessarily translate into knowledge either.

Just this morning I have seen a poll conducted in the USA last year, linked on Twitter of course, in which 20% of those polled did not know from which country they gained their independence, and 6% named one other than the UK.

And equally having technology available doesn’t mean it is, or indeed can be, taken up. Two or three examples spring to mind. The first is a survey, and for once my Google skills have let me down, but I did read it online, which showed the low penetration of internet access to large chunks of Glasgow, with a number of areas in the 10 lowest in the UK.

The second is the touch-screen arrivals machine we have in our surgery waiting room. It’s designed so that patients don’t need to queue up to merely tell the receptionist they have arrived for their appointment. Although we haven’t formally audited its use, the firm impression of the reception staff is that the 70-80 year old patients head straight for the machine, recognising that its use will allow them to rest their weary legs quicker, whilst your average 20 year old stands in the queue, right beside the machine, and waits to speak to a human being!

And the third example is our use of online appointment booking. Again you’d think that the younger patients would be in the vanguard, but in fact the statistics the company has researched shows that use is fairly evenly spread through the age ranges.

We certainly live in exciting times, and the use of all this technology will become an increasing part of our lives in future years, especially when voice recognition technology, which strangely in my view seems to have lagged behind everything else, catches up and allows us to say, “Add this to Twitter”!

But voice technology is a subject all on its own for another day! More to follow!