We discovered a little known aspect of chinese food: the fruits are wonderful. Our lunch on the flight in to Shanghai contained a slice of really flavourful and sweet orange. Every day after that we brought some fruits. The bananas are not very special, but the oranges, apples and nectarines are superb. So are the cherries and the many different kinds of berries. We really love the mulberries (shahtoot in Hindi, see the photo above): they are so sweet in this season. We still haven’t the delicious mangosteen or the dragon fruit, which look spectacular, but which taste a little insipid.
It is hard to find many desserts in restaurants, but there is always a plate of fruits. You can also buy cut fruits in plastic cups on the roadside, and in supermarkets.
Beauty is big business in Shanghai. You can’t walk very far without running into a row of hair dressers or nail artists (example above). Interestingly they are all very full. The Family is itching to go into one of them. She regrets having done her hair just before leaving Mumbai, and doesn’t take very kindly to my reminder that her hair dresser in Mumbai is also Chinese.
Tourist guides tell you to visit Xintiandi in Shanghai. This Xintiandi is full of well-preserved and tastefully renovated Shikumen buildings repurposed into restaurants, coffee shops, up-market shops and bars. When you walk through this you see the beautiful people of Shanghai and foreigners. All very posh, but exactly like any other town center in Europe. Why travel to China if all you want to see is Europe?
The Lilongs on the other side of Xintiandi are more interesting for a tourist with a camera. During my visit I saw two places where crowds had gathered. I nosed in, and saw a very serious card game in progress (photo above). In case you think this drinking and gambling is a man’s thing, think again. The next game had two women!
Luck is serious business in China. I’m told that the colour red is important because it is lucky, and not because it is beautiful.
We left for Hangzhou by train one morning at 10. The trip to Hangzhou takes around 70 minutes from Shanghai Hongqiao Station. At the station we hopped on to the Y2 bus and reached the Lingyan temple in about half an hour. We couldn’t possibly miss this, since it is on the flanks of the Feilai mountain, which is supposed to have flown in from India!
You need two separate tickets to visit the temple. One ticket for the mountain (no discounts even for Indian passport holders) and another for the reconstructed temple. We thought it was worth the money. The mountain side is full of birds; there were several species we had never seen before. Unfortunately we were not equipped for birdwatching; we had neither field guides, nor binoculars. The sky was heavily overcast, and every now and then a fat drop of water would plop on to our noses or heads.
The Guardians of the Galaxy
The temple was spectacular and full of people hedging their bets on the future. After visiting three spectacular halls with the Buddha-in-residence attended to by a host of scowling guardians, we needed a little respite. We had an al fresco lunch at a little temple cafe with a variety of nuts, dried fruits, and green tea. Refreshed, we climbed a little further to some more temples and a little temple museum. It was now well after noon, so we decided to go check into our hotel.
We took a taxi to our hotel. While checking in we discovered that the room we had booked was no longer available due to a mix up. The hotel gave us an upgrade to what they called a king room. Then while trying to pay for it I realized that I had left my phone in the taxi. The concierge immediately took my taxi receipt and called the company, which in turn traced the taxi, found my phone, and agreed to deliver it later in the day. Meanwhile we were shown to our room, which was spectacular: huge and comfortable, with a free minibar, a grand bath, a huge bed, and other luxuries which we thought we would not be able to use, given our tight schedule.
We dumped our bags and rushed off to Xihu (the West Lake). Our plan was to walk along the Sudi (Su causeway) all the way to the north, and then cross a small island and take the Baidi (Bai causeway) to the east. We had barely gone a hundred meters when a thunderstorm struck. In moments we were drenched. The only way out of the rain was to take a cruise. This took us to one of the smaller islands where we got even more drenched watching beautiful rock sculptures and lotus flowers in a rain-swept lake (see the photo above). We made our way back from this disastrous trip to our hotel, where we had dinner and enjoyed the room.
Hangzhou is pretty and friendly (I did get the phone back), has good cuisine, and probably makes a great holiday within a holiday. But for that you need a little luck. Ours was short this time around.
The oddest thing about China is resurgent religion. It is not the middle-aged or the old who take to religion, it is the young. You can see the fervour with which they pray to Buddha in the photo above. I saw this again and again, in different temples. Shatters my naive belief in the materialistic culture of the orient.
A Song dynasty jade carving depicts a cow gazing at the moon
When we came out of the Shanghai Museum, we were happy that we didn’t skip it. The Shanghai that we had seen before was the modern China, the city of engineering marvels. This gave us a glimpse of the other China: the old civilization that developed across the Himalayas from us.
The museum is located in People’s Square, and entry is free. It is worthwhile to take an audio guide for RMB 40. The museum classifies its collection by form: furniture, bronze, jade, calligraphy, painting, and so on. Calligraphy is an art form that is hard to appreciate if you cannot read the script. There are also other sections of the museum that we were not culturally prepared for. What we could appreciate was really well selected. I spent a lot of time in the porcelain, jade and painting galleries. The galleries contain a lot; it would be easy to spend half a day in each. We simply did not have the time.
Detail from an enormous celadon vase; apparently one of the first large celadon wareThere are exquisite pieces of jade. The photo at the top shows a lovely piece whose cultural significance I do not appreciate. The only connection I know between the moon and a cow is through a nursery rhyme, or the song in Lord of the Rings. The porcelain is astonishing. I had not realized how much technology is required to execute porcelain; the development of celadon work required precise high-temperature kilns. I understood later when talking to a modern pottery artist that the state of the art is not very much further advanced. Celadon kilns work at a little over 1200 Celcius. Modern kilns can achieve around 1350 Celcius, but the success rate of firing pottery in these can be as low as 20%.
The art form from China that is perhaps most familiar to all of us is painting. We saw wonderful examples in the Shanghai museum. In addition to the individual pieces, walking through these galleries gave me a first understanding of how the aesthetics of China developed in a direction so different from either the Western or the Indian.
We arrived in the museum early in the morning, when there was absolutely no queue to enter. When we left at 1 PM we saw enormous queues, and realized how lucky we had been with the timing of our visit.
Traditionally the wonders of the world have been amazing engineering feats. In the same spirit, let me list three engineering marvels of Shanghai.
Partway up the Shanghai World Financial Center
Pudong is definitely the first of the wonders of Shanghai. This new business district was created east of the river Huang Pu in the 1990s. Today it has two of the world’s 10 highest skyscrapers: the 632 meters high Shanghai Tower (second only to Burj Khalifa) and the Shanghai World Financial Center, which is 492 meters tal, and the 4th highest in the world). It has four buildings over 400 meters tall: the Oriental Pearl Tower and the Jin Mao Tower, in addition to these two. It also has a staggering 15 buildings which are 250 meters or more in height.
The plush interior of the maglev
The maglev train is the second wonder of Shanghai. It runs between Pudong international airport and the Longyang road station. The distance of about 30 kilometers is covered in about 7 minutes, and the peak speed is 431 km/second (a slower version has a peak speed of 301 km/s). This is the only commercial train of its kind in the world.
A pacing ad in the Shanghai subway
The third wonder of Shanghai are pacing ads next to the metro trains. As a train speeds between stations, there are video ads which pace alongside. This amazing synchronization needs screens covering large areas of tunnels, and software to keep the image synchronized with the windows of passing trains. This amazing invention has hardly received any notice in the media.
There is a fourth wonder, which is not really an engineering marvel. It is a management solution to garbage disposal. Shanghai is a city of 23 million people, and its roads are cleaner by far than the roads of Paris or Mumbai. This is surely a wonder.
One day in Shanghai we took the Metro to Xintiandi, walked a little way along Madang Road, and then ducked into one of the gated Shikumen-style complexes. We walked through and into lovely roads full of life. This was one of the lilongs which we wanted to see. The area is bustling with life. We arrived a little before lunch time and found many restaurants open for business, vegetable vendors, hair dressers, people playing chinese chess, smokers lounging, a quartet of beer drinkers, housewives chatting, … The photo above is a little slice of this life.
Eventually when we decided to have lunch it was smack in the middle of lunch time for the office goers who had trickled in from the businesses and malls on the main streets. With our complete lack of Chinese, it was difficult to figure out what to do. We went into one of the eateries, and one man told us to choose our food. When we did, he asked us to pay! We protested, saying we hadn’t even sat down, but he was insistent. As a queue grew behind us, and communications were not established, we left.
A little way down the road, was another establishment. There someone explained to us that you stand in the queue and order and pay for your food, then look for a table to get empty. After you sit down, the waiter will get you your food. This place had people who were very helpful and some of them spoke a little English. We made our choices by pointing at others’ plates. The owner helped us to sit down. The neighbours helped us with catching the waiter. Everyone in the lane seemed to be eating some kind of a noodle soup. We grew to like this: you can get it with all kinds of meats, or even just mushrooms. One of the girls at our table was eating a dark egg: apparently a boiled egg soaked in tea and soya: a tea egg. I tried one, liked it and had it as a snack several times later.
One question was voiced by The Family. In India a place like this would be quite dirty. How do they keep it clean in China? No answers, yet.
The most unexpected and fun thing about Shanghai was definitely the dancing on the streets. All our reading about China never told us this. We stepped out for a coffee late on our first night there and found six women our age with a portable music system dancing away in a little corner next to the hotel. They were having fun, and motioned to The Family to join in. Further down the road we found other groups. Some were complete amateurs, and had more left feet than me, others were good (like the couple in the photo above). None of them mind passers by joining in. The Family practiced a couple of steps!
Why are they doing it? A large number look like they grew up in the years of the Cultural Revolution, and this may just be their final act of forgetting. But The Family points out that this may not be correct: there are a few youngsters in there as well. Maybe it is just what you do when your children do not need looking after any more. May be it is something that you did not do when you were young and want to do now that pressures are off.
It does not matter really, as long as you are having fun, and open enough to invite foreigners to join in. And they enjoy themselves so much that it brings a smile to the face of a bystander.
By the time we ventured out of our hotel in Shanghai it was almost 5 in the afternoon. We were tired from the lack of sleep. I could feel a migraine about to come on. Tourism would have to be light and we would need to retire early. From our hotel off East Nanjing Road it was about a kilometer to the Bund. We could do that.
East Nanjing road is fun in a very commercial kind of way. There are big stores lining the street, and a large number of well-dressed young people hanging around, especially around the apple store. In search of something local, we wandered into a bustling food shop. It was full of food we didn’t quite recognize. The Family picked up a packet of a local sweet. As we were paying for it we noticed that next to the cashier there was a container of hot water with skewers of boiled meat. Now that was local! There was also a counter of local ice creams doing brisk business.
We continued to the Bund. This was really full of life: local and tourists. The sun was going down behind us, so the skyscrapers of Pudong (East of Pu) were in bright sunlight. The golden hour had brought out an incredible number of photographers, so the edge of the Bund was crowded with tripods. Behind that phalanx other people walked, played or sat. I watched a couple of children playing as their grandmother looked on happily (photo on top). We walked on to see the everyday life of a Chinese city unfolding before us: so very much like ordinary life in India. We watched Pudong come alight as the sun set behind us. When the sky had turned a deep blue and Pudong was bright with lights we came down from the Bund.
David Sassoon’s is a famous name in Mumbai. This 19th century trader has left his mark on the urban geography of Mumbai. At the junction of the East Nanjing Road and the Bund is the house he built for himself. This grand structure is now the Fairmont Peace Hotel. As we wandered past we saw this brace of photographers intent on capturing a piece of this history. They’d brought along a ladder: equipment that no photographer should be without. They saw me taking their photo, and had a laugh: a good way to connect with photographers with whom you do not share a language.
Dinner? The Family was wary. So we went into a mall which had two restaurants per floor for 6 floors. Two floors up we saw a restaurant called something like the Local Taste of Shanghai. Curious, we walked in. It was full of local couples. Very reassuring, we thought. We got the English menu, and decided to start with a beer and three things which looked innocuous: an abalone pancake, steamed dumplings, and a pumpkin pie. The pancake was like an Indian stuffed puri, the sesame covered pumpkin pies had a bean-paste filling, and the dumplings were like the Chinese dumplings we were used to. The Family decided that China was good. We were still hungry, so we ordered a plate of mushrooms, a plate of fried green beans and a bowl of rice (mifan). Our waitress helped by making a face when we ordered things that she thought wouldn’t go well with the rice. This was nice dinner to start our trip with, and it cost us only around INR 500 per head, with beer. It’ll be fun if we continue to eat like this.
After dinner we strolled down the road, people-watching again. This part of the town is full of lovely 19th and early 20th-century architecture covered with the glitter of the newly commercial 21st-century China. The combination can be somewhat startling (as in the photo above), but lively, and much fun. My migraine had receded after dinner, but both of were drooping. We returned to our hotel and turned in early. We had complicated plans for the next day.
Don't hold your breath 