It Starts: Shanghai, Suzhou and the Trip to Wuhu
On Christmas Eve, I grabbed my bags and headed south to catch a plane for China.
The trip down was pretty uneventful- I deliberately scheduled my flight for the late afternoon so that I wouldn't have to wake up ridiculously early, and so Older Brother (henceforward "OB") could get to Shanghai in time to meet me after his half-day of work. The flight was so short! Only about three hours- I barely had time to settle into my seat before we were getting up again. I went through customs without any problems (the line was really short, too, probably because it was the 24th), picked up my bags and changed my ridiculous amount of money. (I brought what I thought would be a reasonable amount, and then some extra. Um. Chinese money is worth a lot less than Japanese money. Just, ya know. Fyi. Good thing nobody mugged me!) Then OB and I had a kerfuffle on meeting up, as expected since I couldn't use my phone. Eventually I managed to both find the payphones and get them to work, and all was well.
We hopped the Maglev train from Pudong International Airport to the city (300 km/h? Yes please!), and then subways the rest of the way. Reeeaally a lot easier than I was expecting it to be, though it was a bit tricky to handle with our luggage. Here we come across one of the first wide-spread differences: Every time you enter any sort of public transportation or station for same, you much put all of your bags through an x-ray machine. This counts for everything from the airport to subways to buses. Also, this was our first experience with the real crowding- apparently in Shanghai, Christmas Eve is a night to eat out, so the subways were pretty packed. It was also our first experience with the cutting culture of China, or rather the lack of a line-culture. Nobody lines up for anything; it's always just one big mob of people, so even if you think you're in line for something, people will still cut you. ^^; (I say "our first" because OB reached China less than two weeks before I did, and had spent almost all of his time in the city where he works, four hours inland.)
We did get off at the wrong subway stop, though, so we hitched a very cheap taxi ride to our hotel. Probably you should just insert "very cheap" in from of everything I say from now on, okay? Just. Everything is wicked cheap in China guys.
Our hotel was the Holiday Inn Express Zhabei Shanghai, which I would recommend to people heading to Shanghai (at least for the first night, when you might be exhausted and not necessarily up for complete immersion). It's extremely convenient to the Shanghai Railway Station, from whence trains depart for Nanjing and Beijing (and Suzhou), as well as to the Shanghai Station Metro Station, which means you're easily able to reach the tourist sites of Shanghai by Metro. Plus it is wicked cheap by Western Standards- thirty bucks or so a night for a room with two singles. The room seemed huge as well, though possibly that's in contrast with Japan. Space in China is definitely not at the same premium as it is in Japan.
We didn't do much that night- basically we got settled into our hotel room, went out for a gigantic (and late) dinner at a local restaurant (so, so delicious) and headed back to the room to skype the family. Plus, we settled what we were doing the next day.
For Christmas, we started the day with presents at a fairly unreasonable hour, like 7, so we could open them with the family in "attendance". My favorites were probably the new Where's Stig and the Sherlock DVD. ^^ Then we partook of our complimentary breakfast (delicious chicken sausage) and headed off to, as we thought, explore Suzhou!
This was my decision- I had seen some really pretty pictures of Suzhou and been told it was worth a visit. Probably it would have been fine, but we ran into our first (and thankfully, last) day of travelling snafus. The first issue was this: in China, especially on weekends and holidays, it is wise to book your train tickets at least the day before. We didn't realize this, so when we went to the train station at 9 or so to get an early start (Suzhou is half an hour from Shanghai on the fast train), the next train that had seats available wasn't until 11:45. D: (We were especially frustrated because the board above the ticket booths showed that there were seats available before then. Turns out those boards aren't up-to-date. At all. >.>) We went for it, but we decided we would buy our tickets for the next day then, just in case. After that, we just sort of... wandered around the Zhabei area for an hour or so. There's. There's not much there besides the train station, at least not yet. >.>
This meant that we got a bit of a late start to our day. But not to worry! We got on the train and got to Suzhou to spend a lovely afternoon there. According to our guide book, we could take the Y2 bus to a couple of the big touristy districts of Suzhou, so after purchasing our return tickets for that evening at 6 (we were learning, see?) we headed over to the bus loop (after a couple of wrong turns following signs that lead to bus stops). Then we waited for 20 minutes or so for the number 2 bus to show up and hopped on. At which point my bus-luck kicked in. ^^; Turns out that there was both a Y2 bus (for tourists) and #2 bus (for regular people). Did they go to the same place? No. Was the Y2 bus a mysterious entity that had possibly disappeared since the guide book was published? Yes. Did OB and I get off at a completely random stop in front of some park by a lake as our suspicions grew that this wasn't the bus we wanted? Yes. ^^;
The Random Park was actually quite pretty- it was part of the complex of some sort of science museum. Luckily this meant that we could catch a cab- OB utilized his growing Mandarin skillz and got us over to the street and district we wanted. There was some traffic on the street, which we sat in for a while before the driver decided to clue us in that we were where we wanted to be. >.> Still, he kind of saved the day, cuz there we were in the older sections of town, run through with canals and traditional gardens! OB and I pushed forward to see a Real Chinese Garden. We went to the Garden of the Master of Nets which was really pretty. We spent quite some time wandering around it, then emerged in search of food. We ended up stopping at a Chinese fast-food restaurant which had some of the best Engrish on it's in-store decorations ever, and then at a cake shop on our way back towards the center of the traditional district.
By this point (around 4:30-ish) I was starting to think that we should maybe head back, since our circuitous route to that point had left me with no real idea of how long it would take to get back to the station, but OB wanted to press on to see one more thing. (Darn you, World Heritage street signs.) We did this, only to discover that the Pavilion was closed as of 4:30 or 5, and also that it's pretty impossible to catch a cab around rush hour in Suzhou. By a small miracle, we eventually found an empty cab and managed to stop it, and then got to enjoy the rush hour traffic on the way to the station. Despite our cabbie's dire predictions about there being no way we could ever catch our train... we missed it by just about 10 minutes. *sigh* This was when we discovered a really lovely thing about China: if you miss your train, they will issue you replacement tickets for the next available train at no additional cost. Talk about a sweet deal! :D So now we had tickets for a train at around 7:30 pm. Unfortunately, this meant we had about an hour and half or two hours to kill.
OB was understandably leery of leaving the station area, given our record for traveling that day, so we ended up doing Japanese Christmas- dinner at KFC, baby! Exciting things about that dinner were: a.) I asked for orange soda and, through some sort of communication fail, ended up with piping hot orange soda, on which I burned my tongue (reason number 1 for why I don't normally drink hot things) b.) discovering how to play the panda butt-slide game on OB's phone c.) managing to toss our hand-sanitizer into the garbage with the wrappers and looking pathetic until a worker pulled it out for me and d.) having a brief conversation with a Chinese person who had been living in Toronto and recognized us as Canadians. (Which really confused me at the time, until I realized I had my Canada scarf about my person. XD)
This time we managed to catch our train and make it back to the hotel just fine. We were a little worn out from the long day of snafus and stressing about travel, but decided to brave the big-wide world one more time and head to the Bund, since it and Pudong across the river are two of the Famous Views of Shanghai. It was really good we did, too, because it was pretty awesome! The entirety of Shanghai is lit up at night, from the buildings that function as tv screens (and by this I mean- places that are clearly windows somehow join together so that the entire side of the building can be used to advertize) to the blue Tron-lighting on the highways. It definitely advances Shanghai as a Part of the Future, and had the side-effect of completely redeeming our day and cheering us up. We took a bunch of pictures and then wandered over to East Nanjing Road for a bit. We meant to head back to the Bund and take some more pictures before heading back to the hotel, but it turns out they turn off all the lights at 10 pm? So be aware if you're ever in Shanghai. ^^;
After that we just headed back to the hotel to skype the family again- they got to open presents with our "presence" (ba-dum-tish) and we got to tell them about our day. It was a really good wrap up to the day. :D
This was our last day in Shanghai, since OB had to head back to work the next day. Because of the curfew on his dormitory (he lives in the same dormitory as the students) and the fact that it would take about four hours to get out to Wuhu, I figured we could only really do one thing that day. I chose the City God Temple and Yu Garden (yuan) area. It was pretty fantastic. The temple felt pretty familiar to me, but it was pretty different to see people actually worshipping. (People aren't very religious in Japan.) OB found it really interesting, since it was his first temple experience. Then we wandered around for a bit until we found the entrance to the Yu Yuan- it seemed sort of expensive, but at least we were there in the off-season, and it was totally worth it. I would say we spent a good two to three hours in there, and we weren't even dawdling or repeating ourselves. When we left (via the entrance- turns out we had gone in through the exit), we found ourselves at the heart of the old-fashioned area around the temple. It's pretty helplessly touristy, but at least at that time of year it was mostly Chinese tourists, so it still felt pretty authentic. (There were three big advantages to going during the winter: ticket fees were cheaper; there were many fewer people; and it wasn't hot.)
We had a really exciting advanture at lunch. We got ourselves dumplings (the big kind, not gyoza) at a restaurant in the City God Temple district. What we didn't realize, though, was that these kinds of dumplings are deliberately filled with soup. So you're supposed to pick them up with your chopsticks, bite a little hole in the outside, and suck the soup out. Then you bite in and devour the rest. (The discovery of this totally explained why so many of the stands were selling them with straws in the top.) Needless to say, between our surprise at the soup, OB's inexperience with chopsticks, his insistence on learning to use them with his left-hand and my own discomfort with the different shape of Chinese chopsticks, we made a gigantic mess by dropping the dumplings all over the table. To the point where people were laughing (mostly, I think, because we were laughing at ourselves) and offering us advice on how to eat them and entire packs of tissues to clean up. The restaurant even broke out these giant bowls for us to eat over. It was preeety much hilarious (though also slightly embarrasing).
After lunch we did a bit more wandering around, then headed back to the hotel to pick up our luggage from the desk. (One more point in their favor- they let us leave stuff with them for the day.) Then we headed back to the station to catch the high-speed train to Nanjing, where we switched to the slow train from Nanjing to Wuhu, where my brother works. The fast train was pretty sweet (and fast!); the slow train to Wuhu was pretty... interesting (and quite slow). We learned that all seats on trains in China (other than Metros) are reserved (at least around Shanghai there are none of the commuter-type trains that are so common in Japan). We also found that people will come through on the train and attempt to sell you things. Not just food, either- they sell things like light-up bouncy balls. XD Also, China doesn't seem to have a taboo against things like being noisy or messy. People on the train will play their music straight-out without using head phones, and they tend to just throw their garbage on the floor, although about half-way through most of the trainrides on the slow trains, train attendants do come through and clean-up. My theory is that they don't have the fifteen or twenty minutes to spend on each end of the route cleaning the trains up like they might do elsewhere (Japan). Also, the trains are always full. (The only train I saw that wasn't full was the Maglev to Shanghai airport, and I think that's because it's only half-finished and doesn't really go anywhere useful, though it cuts an hour off the trip to and from the airport.)
OB is currently working as an English teacher in Wuhu City in Anhui Province. It's a small city that's not on any of the maps you'll find, population approximately 2 Million. Which gives you some idea of the sheer population and size of China. He'll be their for six months, so from December to June, teaching at the High School attached to Anhui Technical University. As I said above, he lives in the same dormitory as the students and a couple of the other young teachers, so we had a curfew to meet. We managed to make it despite some delays in departure from Nanjing (the smoggiest city I've ever seen, but more on that later), and settled ourselves in for a long winter's nap.
Next: Wuhu and Nanjing! :D
The trip down was pretty uneventful- I deliberately scheduled my flight for the late afternoon so that I wouldn't have to wake up ridiculously early, and so Older Brother (henceforward "OB") could get to Shanghai in time to meet me after his half-day of work. The flight was so short! Only about three hours- I barely had time to settle into my seat before we were getting up again. I went through customs without any problems (the line was really short, too, probably because it was the 24th), picked up my bags and changed my ridiculous amount of money. (I brought what I thought would be a reasonable amount, and then some extra. Um. Chinese money is worth a lot less than Japanese money. Just, ya know. Fyi. Good thing nobody mugged me!) Then OB and I had a kerfuffle on meeting up, as expected since I couldn't use my phone. Eventually I managed to both find the payphones and get them to work, and all was well.
We hopped the Maglev train from Pudong International Airport to the city (300 km/h? Yes please!), and then subways the rest of the way. Reeeaally a lot easier than I was expecting it to be, though it was a bit tricky to handle with our luggage. Here we come across one of the first wide-spread differences: Every time you enter any sort of public transportation or station for same, you much put all of your bags through an x-ray machine. This counts for everything from the airport to subways to buses. Also, this was our first experience with the real crowding- apparently in Shanghai, Christmas Eve is a night to eat out, so the subways were pretty packed. It was also our first experience with the cutting culture of China, or rather the lack of a line-culture. Nobody lines up for anything; it's always just one big mob of people, so even if you think you're in line for something, people will still cut you. ^^; (I say "our first" because OB reached China less than two weeks before I did, and had spent almost all of his time in the city where he works, four hours inland.)
We did get off at the wrong subway stop, though, so we hitched a very cheap taxi ride to our hotel. Probably you should just insert "very cheap" in from of everything I say from now on, okay? Just. Everything is wicked cheap in China guys.
Our hotel was the Holiday Inn Express Zhabei Shanghai, which I would recommend to people heading to Shanghai (at least for the first night, when you might be exhausted and not necessarily up for complete immersion). It's extremely convenient to the Shanghai Railway Station, from whence trains depart for Nanjing and Beijing (and Suzhou), as well as to the Shanghai Station Metro Station, which means you're easily able to reach the tourist sites of Shanghai by Metro. Plus it is wicked cheap by Western Standards- thirty bucks or so a night for a room with two singles. The room seemed huge as well, though possibly that's in contrast with Japan. Space in China is definitely not at the same premium as it is in Japan.
We didn't do much that night- basically we got settled into our hotel room, went out for a gigantic (and late) dinner at a local restaurant (so, so delicious) and headed back to the room to skype the family. Plus, we settled what we were doing the next day.
For Christmas, we started the day with presents at a fairly unreasonable hour, like 7, so we could open them with the family in "attendance". My favorites were probably the new Where's Stig and the Sherlock DVD. ^^ Then we partook of our complimentary breakfast (delicious chicken sausage) and headed off to, as we thought, explore Suzhou!
This was my decision- I had seen some really pretty pictures of Suzhou and been told it was worth a visit. Probably it would have been fine, but we ran into our first (and thankfully, last) day of travelling snafus. The first issue was this: in China, especially on weekends and holidays, it is wise to book your train tickets at least the day before. We didn't realize this, so when we went to the train station at 9 or so to get an early start (Suzhou is half an hour from Shanghai on the fast train), the next train that had seats available wasn't until 11:45. D: (We were especially frustrated because the board above the ticket booths showed that there were seats available before then. Turns out those boards aren't up-to-date. At all. >.>) We went for it, but we decided we would buy our tickets for the next day then, just in case. After that, we just sort of... wandered around the Zhabei area for an hour or so. There's. There's not much there besides the train station, at least not yet. >.>
This meant that we got a bit of a late start to our day. But not to worry! We got on the train and got to Suzhou to spend a lovely afternoon there. According to our guide book, we could take the Y2 bus to a couple of the big touristy districts of Suzhou, so after purchasing our return tickets for that evening at 6 (we were learning, see?) we headed over to the bus loop (after a couple of wrong turns following signs that lead to bus stops). Then we waited for 20 minutes or so for the number 2 bus to show up and hopped on. At which point my bus-luck kicked in. ^^; Turns out that there was both a Y2 bus (for tourists) and #2 bus (for regular people). Did they go to the same place? No. Was the Y2 bus a mysterious entity that had possibly disappeared since the guide book was published? Yes. Did OB and I get off at a completely random stop in front of some park by a lake as our suspicions grew that this wasn't the bus we wanted? Yes. ^^;
The Random Park was actually quite pretty- it was part of the complex of some sort of science museum. Luckily this meant that we could catch a cab- OB utilized his growing Mandarin skillz and got us over to the street and district we wanted. There was some traffic on the street, which we sat in for a while before the driver decided to clue us in that we were where we wanted to be. >.> Still, he kind of saved the day, cuz there we were in the older sections of town, run through with canals and traditional gardens! OB and I pushed forward to see a Real Chinese Garden. We went to the Garden of the Master of Nets which was really pretty. We spent quite some time wandering around it, then emerged in search of food. We ended up stopping at a Chinese fast-food restaurant which had some of the best Engrish on it's in-store decorations ever, and then at a cake shop on our way back towards the center of the traditional district.
By this point (around 4:30-ish) I was starting to think that we should maybe head back, since our circuitous route to that point had left me with no real idea of how long it would take to get back to the station, but OB wanted to press on to see one more thing. (Darn you, World Heritage street signs.) We did this, only to discover that the Pavilion was closed as of 4:30 or 5, and also that it's pretty impossible to catch a cab around rush hour in Suzhou. By a small miracle, we eventually found an empty cab and managed to stop it, and then got to enjoy the rush hour traffic on the way to the station. Despite our cabbie's dire predictions about there being no way we could ever catch our train... we missed it by just about 10 minutes. *sigh* This was when we discovered a really lovely thing about China: if you miss your train, they will issue you replacement tickets for the next available train at no additional cost. Talk about a sweet deal! :D So now we had tickets for a train at around 7:30 pm. Unfortunately, this meant we had about an hour and half or two hours to kill.
OB was understandably leery of leaving the station area, given our record for traveling that day, so we ended up doing Japanese Christmas- dinner at KFC, baby! Exciting things about that dinner were: a.) I asked for orange soda and, through some sort of communication fail, ended up with piping hot orange soda, on which I burned my tongue (reason number 1 for why I don't normally drink hot things) b.) discovering how to play the panda butt-slide game on OB's phone c.) managing to toss our hand-sanitizer into the garbage with the wrappers and looking pathetic until a worker pulled it out for me and d.) having a brief conversation with a Chinese person who had been living in Toronto and recognized us as Canadians. (Which really confused me at the time, until I realized I had my Canada scarf about my person. XD)
This time we managed to catch our train and make it back to the hotel just fine. We were a little worn out from the long day of snafus and stressing about travel, but decided to brave the big-wide world one more time and head to the Bund, since it and Pudong across the river are two of the Famous Views of Shanghai. It was really good we did, too, because it was pretty awesome! The entirety of Shanghai is lit up at night, from the buildings that function as tv screens (and by this I mean- places that are clearly windows somehow join together so that the entire side of the building can be used to advertize) to the blue Tron-lighting on the highways. It definitely advances Shanghai as a Part of the Future, and had the side-effect of completely redeeming our day and cheering us up. We took a bunch of pictures and then wandered over to East Nanjing Road for a bit. We meant to head back to the Bund and take some more pictures before heading back to the hotel, but it turns out they turn off all the lights at 10 pm? So be aware if you're ever in Shanghai. ^^;
After that we just headed back to the hotel to skype the family again- they got to open presents with our "presence" (ba-dum-tish) and we got to tell them about our day. It was a really good wrap up to the day. :D
This was our last day in Shanghai, since OB had to head back to work the next day. Because of the curfew on his dormitory (he lives in the same dormitory as the students) and the fact that it would take about four hours to get out to Wuhu, I figured we could only really do one thing that day. I chose the City God Temple and Yu Garden (yuan) area. It was pretty fantastic. The temple felt pretty familiar to me, but it was pretty different to see people actually worshipping. (People aren't very religious in Japan.) OB found it really interesting, since it was his first temple experience. Then we wandered around for a bit until we found the entrance to the Yu Yuan- it seemed sort of expensive, but at least we were there in the off-season, and it was totally worth it. I would say we spent a good two to three hours in there, and we weren't even dawdling or repeating ourselves. When we left (via the entrance- turns out we had gone in through the exit), we found ourselves at the heart of the old-fashioned area around the temple. It's pretty helplessly touristy, but at least at that time of year it was mostly Chinese tourists, so it still felt pretty authentic. (There were three big advantages to going during the winter: ticket fees were cheaper; there were many fewer people; and it wasn't hot.)
We had a really exciting advanture at lunch. We got ourselves dumplings (the big kind, not gyoza) at a restaurant in the City God Temple district. What we didn't realize, though, was that these kinds of dumplings are deliberately filled with soup. So you're supposed to pick them up with your chopsticks, bite a little hole in the outside, and suck the soup out. Then you bite in and devour the rest. (The discovery of this totally explained why so many of the stands were selling them with straws in the top.) Needless to say, between our surprise at the soup, OB's inexperience with chopsticks, his insistence on learning to use them with his left-hand and my own discomfort with the different shape of Chinese chopsticks, we made a gigantic mess by dropping the dumplings all over the table. To the point where people were laughing (mostly, I think, because we were laughing at ourselves) and offering us advice on how to eat them and entire packs of tissues to clean up. The restaurant even broke out these giant bowls for us to eat over. It was preeety much hilarious (though also slightly embarrasing).
After lunch we did a bit more wandering around, then headed back to the hotel to pick up our luggage from the desk. (One more point in their favor- they let us leave stuff with them for the day.) Then we headed back to the station to catch the high-speed train to Nanjing, where we switched to the slow train from Nanjing to Wuhu, where my brother works. The fast train was pretty sweet (and fast!); the slow train to Wuhu was pretty... interesting (and quite slow). We learned that all seats on trains in China (other than Metros) are reserved (at least around Shanghai there are none of the commuter-type trains that are so common in Japan). We also found that people will come through on the train and attempt to sell you things. Not just food, either- they sell things like light-up bouncy balls. XD Also, China doesn't seem to have a taboo against things like being noisy or messy. People on the train will play their music straight-out without using head phones, and they tend to just throw their garbage on the floor, although about half-way through most of the trainrides on the slow trains, train attendants do come through and clean-up. My theory is that they don't have the fifteen or twenty minutes to spend on each end of the route cleaning the trains up like they might do elsewhere (Japan). Also, the trains are always full. (The only train I saw that wasn't full was the Maglev to Shanghai airport, and I think that's because it's only half-finished and doesn't really go anywhere useful, though it cuts an hour off the trip to and from the airport.)
OB is currently working as an English teacher in Wuhu City in Anhui Province. It's a small city that's not on any of the maps you'll find, population approximately 2 Million. Which gives you some idea of the sheer population and size of China. He'll be their for six months, so from December to June, teaching at the High School attached to Anhui Technical University. As I said above, he lives in the same dormitory as the students and a couple of the other young teachers, so we had a curfew to meet. We managed to make it despite some delays in departure from Nanjing (the smoggiest city I've ever seen, but more on that later), and settled ourselves in for a long winter's nap.
Next: Wuhu and Nanjing! :D