Shanghai was absolutely wicked, I was picked up at the train station by Wolfgang and asked what I wanted to do during my stay. I gave him a list of everything I’d read about on my long train ride over and told him my one wish was not to have to organize anything. As a lone traveller, you have absolutely no-one else to rely on and if you don’t organise it is doesn’t happen, simple as. After over a month of relying on myself it was nice to be able to take a back seat and know that I would be spoilt by Yi and Wolfgang.
First we opted for a return journey on the world’s only maglev train. The train is suspended above the track and magnetism is used to propel the train forwards. Top speed was approximately 269mph, we travelled at this speed for less a minute during our eight minute journey. My book lied, the buildings did not pass by in a blur you could see them properly. You only realised you were travelling so fast when a maglev train going in the opposite direction came and went in a couple of seconds max.
Vistied Yu Yuan, a lovely small garden dating from the sixteenth century. Once inside it is hard to believe you are in a major city. Had tea at Huxin Ting tea house, this has been visited by very many famous people including Queen Elizabeth and Bill Clinton. Unfortunately the price list reflects this so you find only a few tourists in here and no Chinese which is a pity as atmosphere is distinctly lacking.
Yi took a day's holiday and we all went and had lunch at Radisson’s revolving restaurant on a clear day - which I'm told is rare due to the pollution - and got to see the whole of Shanghai’s skyline. We went for some drinks at Bar Rouge on the Bund, as expected the prices were typical English bar prices and it had the obligatory escort sitting at the bar sipping a drink too. Wolfgang did point out a few more Chinese escorts for us too but I was not convinced. Afterwards went to Windows Bar, the hip bar of the moment and it was very relaxed, full of foreigners and Chinese people with a few pool tables thrown in. It was lovely.
Visited Shanghai museum, the only ‘museum’ I’ve visited in China and it was worth the time invested, it’s regarded as one of the best museums in China. It had lots of great Jade pieces, bronze pieces, Chinese calligraphy and paintings too. Could have stayed longer and took more time but we arrived late and had a short time to look around before it closed so I was prevented from doing my usual reading of everything.
Suzhou
I took a day trip to Suzhou from Shanghai. Wolfgang and Yi did mention that there were far better towns surrounding Shanghai with much nicer canals. I decided on this for several reasons – firstly my guide book mentions it as a nice place to visit. Both Jane and Heather recommended it as they’d been and I’d heard it called the Venice of the East many times. Having been to Venice I wanted to compare and contrast. The canals were alright but the buildings were no where near as grand as those in Venice, infact they were decidedly grubby, plain and boring.
The two classical gardens I visited in Suzhou were lovely. They were others but a day was too short to see them all. Of the two I visited I much preferred Shizi Lin (Lion Grove) to Zhouzheng Yuan (Humble Administrator’s Garden). I also visited the Silk museum and saw silk production
Whilst I was in Suzhou, Yi was kind enough to book me a plane ticket to Beijing. It was only when I got to Beijing that I realised what an awesome deal she had struck on my behalf. The cheapest tickets a couple of friends could get were almost double the price I paid – it helps to speak Chinese or at least know someone who does!
New Culinary Discoveries
Wheat flavoured drink – this discovery was down to Wolfgang. It was light and refreshing, tasted like I was drinking Shreddies. I thought I brought some back with me but having tasted it, it is green tea as opposed to the wheat drink - so disappointed.
Birds eggs – very small, about a centimetre long strong tasting but alright nonetheless.
Fish in duck’s blood – the fish was really nice, the liquid was not blood red which was a disappointment but a nice kind of disappointment if you know what I mean!
Fried sweet sesame balls – these became my favourite dessert instantly. It was the size of a tennis ball, contained a little red bean paste on the inside otherwise empty. Probably constitutes at least a day’s worth of calories, a cardiologist would certainly have a heart attack just looking at one but absolutely delicious. So glad I discovered them towards the end of my journey as opposed to the start or I would have been in trouble.
Thanks Yi for ordering all the food. In my opinion, the best food I’ve had is when I have dined out with Chinese people and left food decisions up to them. The next best is when food has been included with my hostel price. The worst has been when I’ve ordered alone. In order to get the very best food in China you ideally need to read or a least be able to speak Chinese.
Language
Whilst my Mandarin skills while laughably enough to get me by they were no where near as good as some other tourists who’d like me had picked it up on their travels. In my first week during my stay in Yangshou I’d gone on an hour long language course and thought I’d learn loads more during my travels in reality I added very few words to my vocabulary.
The dialect changed from region to region and whilst I was easily understood in some areas in others when I used the same words they stared at me blankly. Take the phrase ‘Thank you’. In Hong Kong it was pronounced ‘She she’, in Yangshuo as ‘Say say’, in Chengdu as ‘She say’ and in Xi’an as ‘Share share’. I had ‘goodbye’ memorised and sorted the first time I heard it though, that was probably because everyone understood ‘Bye, bye’ ;-)
Chinese people will tell you that there is no single word for ‘No’ however from my travels it is obvious that us foreigners have corrupted the use of the word ‘Mayo’ which means ‘Nothing’ to mean ‘No’, in reality we should be using ‘bu yao’ to mean ‘I don’t want’. In some places I think I got extra respect for using ‘bu yao’.
As everyone knows the Chinese language is tonal, if you use the correct Arabic letters but not the correct tones you will not be understood. At times it was down right frustrating. In a restaurant if you asked for rice using the words ‘be fan’ or ‘ba fan’ they would stare at you blankly until you pronounced it properly as ‘by fan’. Maybe I’m simple but to my eyes and ears given the setting it should be obvious that I want rice from the first pronunciation onwards.
Originally I tried speaking Chinese but I got stared at blankly or worse laughed at rather than corrected so often that I started writing sentences using Chinese characters. It was seriously hard the typo in my book was very small and difficult to follow I’m sure I missed out some strokes. My characters looked childish too probably analogous to how a five year old starts writing their native language. It’s funny to think about now but when I first started ‘writing’ Chinese I left gaps between words. Sometime later I learnt whilst each character looks like a picture there is a strict order in which the strokes should be drawn, to draw them in any other order is wrong basically you write from left to right, and from top to bottom. Then add dashes etc. It makes sense if you consider how else a Chinese dictionary would work.
Even though my efforts were crap, eventually through the writing, speaking, or should I say pointing to the name of the city in my guide book I got my tickets. I never argued about train or bus times I was just grateful they understood my destination. Through using buses I got to recognise a few characters and their pronunciation.
Before I left I knew the language would be difficult but took comfort in the fact that I would be able to understand numbers. A couple of days before I left Anika had me scared when she casually mentioned they use different characters for numbers too. In that moment I wished I’d chosen an ‘easier’ country like New Zealand. In China, yes they do use different characters for numbers than us but thanks to the Casio calculator and mobile phones they understand and can use our characters too. Using trains is very easy, for trains use Arabic characters either a letter and three digits or four digits. The downside of this is that you ‘learn’ far fewer Chinese characters using trains as opposed to buses.
Over time without realising gradually I resorted to asking the receptionists at my hostel to write down what I wanted on a piece of paper. I then showed this piece of paper to people or showed them the names of places I wanted to visit directly from my guide book. That got me to places and it was so easy. It wasn’t until I got to Xi’an that I realised that I was constantly doing this that I resolved to trying to speak Mandarin again. The first time I tried I went to the railway station in Xi’an to buy a ticket for Luoyang. I read the words in my book, memorised my sentence on the bus to the station and in the queue at the station. I was hyped up when I got to the counter. However I was soon disappointed as the lady behind the ticketing counter got up and went and got a person who could speak good English to take my booking. I was gutted.
It was only when I got back to the hostel that the receptionist told me that the structure of my sentence was all wrong. Thereafter I’m happy to report that I managed to book tickets at stations quite successfully on most occasions, though in Chengdu I did have to call Yi and ask her to speak to the ticketing lady as we didn’t understand each other.
