First time in Shanghai

After having spent 5 days in Nanjing I thought that a Chinese city is a Chinese city but after being flung at high speed on a bullet train into Shanghai i have changed my opinion.

God this place is huge.

I paid the little bit extra to get the D train so I wouldn’t be adding around all day on the train. Worked well but by the time we got to Shanghai the train was packed. Three delightful little girls screamed and bounced off the back of my seat for an hour so that made it even more fun.

Shanghai Hongqiao station is enormous. Truly epic in scale. Took me a few moments to get the bearings but I was soon on the way to my lodgings for the night. It’s a hostel. It’s clean, charming and it’s better than a lot of hotels I have stayed in. Better than pretty much any hotel in London that’s for sure.

I went for a walk earlier and found KFC for a bite to eat. I eat enough Chinese food to allow myself that indulgence. Down around the corner from that and about a 1 mile walk was the middle of the Bund. You know the picture you always see of Shanghai. Luckily for me there is an Apple store right beside it. I spent an hour in there looking at all the machines I know I want but I could never justify buying. I escaped with just an iPad cover.

Tomorrow the fun starts. I have to go and pick herself up from Pudong airport which is a hour subway ride from here and 2 full hours from the bullet train station. So were getting the bus to Hangzhou because it’s less complicated.

Such an amount of excitement for one day. Could be worse if the 102 had been any slower (nothing to do with me leaving at the last second of course) I could have missed the train I queued oh so impatiently for 10 days ago.

Preparing for the trip. Or rather, not preparing and just going with the flow.

I don’t think I am going to be able to top the last post for a while. I won’t even try.

 

Great food here. If I knew what it was and how to ask for it.

 

As I was saying., I went to Nan Jing or Nanjing or Nanking or as it is known locally 南京.

<rant> Nan meaning south and jing meaning capital.  This is what drives me batshit crazy when the BBC call Bei Jing Beighhing or whatever.  Bei, north, Jing, capital.   I blame the Chinese for making it one word when it is so clearly two.  So Bei Jing, Nan Jing, easy peasy you would imagine.  Not for the BBC it seems.  When they mess it up all I think is that they are an idiot.  For all their airs and graces they couldn’t be bothered finding out how to say the capital city of China. </rant>

Anyway, as usual it was planned minimally.  As in I picked a place on the map and said, lets go there.  So we did.  The fact the the train ride was 12 hours and through Shanghai and a million one-horse towns on the way didn’t even occur to me.

Getting tickets for the train was the hardest bit.  My complete and utter lack of any Chinese didn’t help.  You can’t buy return tickets and you can’t buy online and you can only buy tickets 10 days before you have to travel.  All a pain in the ass.

The first tickets were easy.  Our collegue who speaks Chinese got the tickets.  Woo hoo.  The return was harder.  We went to the ticket office and the lady yelled THREE at us and wrote something down.  We had to trek back to the college to get it translated.  It meant, come back at three.  So we did.  And she had another freakout.  So we didn’t get tickets.  I thought the trip was finished.

In the meantime I had blown the shit out of the fuseboard in my apartment and I had to get a Chinese collegue to go get a handyman.  China is jammed with people.  They turned up in under 10 minutes.

While he was here I lamented the fact that we couldn’t get tickets.  So he says right, lets go, and brought me into the city to buy tickets.  My collegue by this stage had resigned herself to being here for the holidays and went off to try and get Chinese people to speak German.  Not easy by all accounts.  English class is more a case of allowing them to talk.  Allowing them the opportunity to speak English.

Next thing I show up in the canteen with the tickets.  Woo hoo.  She thought I was joking but was happy because buying tickets is the hardest thing for us non Chinese speaking foreigners to do.

Nanjing here we come.  Slowly as it turns out.  Very slowly.

I appear to have ended up on television.

Thanks to one of my students for forwarding me this.

I can’t watch it.  I was there.  I know what happens.

Somebody make it go away.

Trip

 

Took a trip to Nanjing.  It’s not far in Chinese terms.  12 hours away in a train.

So many photos and experiences to sift through.  The things I will mostly remember is the vast numbers of people and the stink on the street.  Nothing prepares you for the crowds.  And yet it is perfectly safe.  No pushing, no stampedes and no fuss.

The way vast numbers of people can move from one place to another without chaos is amazing.  We passed another train every 5 minutes for 12 hours.  Sometimes multiple trains.  All full.

Getting a long distance train in China is a blog post in itself.   But not until I do one on my trip to Nanjing.

Gulp

Informed by the Girl via Twitter that I have just 13 days left in Ireland before everything turns Chinese.

Virgin has already allocated me Seat 55D.

No sign of the Chinese visa yet though.