Travel Journal

In Shanghai, I got my first taste of a truly big Chinese city. After a 26 hour train journey from Hong Kong, long but comfortable as I had a bed, I arrived at the central trainstation and made my way to the old part of the city. As a lot of the lower range of hostels and guesthouses are not allowed to accept foreigners, I had a bit of trouble finding a place to sleep. But I eventually found a guesthouse, underground in a converted bomb shelter, with walls one meter thick and solid steel doors near the entrance. The shared bathroom in the guesthouse was also used to wash clothes and cook food, and it sometimes felt like I was having a shower in a kitchen, and occasionally found myself shaving next to someone who was chopping up beef for breakfast.

Outside, the narrow streets of the old city still gave the appearance of a village, with people going around on their bicycles, eating outdoors at one of the many small family restaurants, buying fruit or snacks at stalls, and further down was a group of men playing Chinese chess. A man on a bicycle sold crickets, hundreds of them, each in tiny woven baskets, and the noise was deafening. It’s a big hit, though, with many people getting one to get a bit of the sound of the countryside into their homes.

For how long this old part of the city will exist, remains to be seen, as a lot of the small houses and buildings have been designated for demolition, and all around the area are new, towering apartment blocks, with blinking red lights to warn oncoming aircraft. At night, many people, working during the day at one of the hundreds of construction sites, sleep on the sidewalk on thin straw mats next to building materials, with the huge cranes looming overhead, their silhouettes drawn against a sky that never gets completely dark.

Shopping is big in Shanghai, with the long Nanjing Road reportedly being China’s busiest shopping street. When you get tired of the shopping, or wrestling through the crowds, you can walk along The Bund, the boulevard alongside the Huangpu river, where large colonial buildings are looking out over the river, reminiscent of China’s colonial past. Across the river, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower stands out as Shanghai’s landmark, in the district of Pudong. Only ten years ago, this was the “wrong” side of the city, but with the help of enormous investments, it has been transformed into Shanghai’s commerce centre, with an accompanying forest of skyscrapers.

Going around in a city bus is one way to appreciate the scale of Shanghai, as the distances are just too great to go around on foot. One evening, the bus driver turned off the indoor lights and LCD screens while driving over the Nanpu bridge, so the passengers could appreciate the view of the huge city, with all its floodlit colonial buildings, skyscrapers, blinking lights and neon signs.

One reason alone to visit Shanghai is the superb Shanghai museum, at the edge of Renmin Park. The collections of sculptures, paintings, calligraphy, Ming and Qing furniture and ethnic minority arts, to name a few, are very interesting, and thanks to the excellent lighting, the decoration and English commentary, it is all a very rewarding experience.

After a couple of days in Shanghai, the capital of China was going to be my next destination, and I couldn’t wait to get there.