Camera Obscura

Wanping Road just outside of my hotel. Nice bike lanes.

The hotel I'm staying in is one of those places a typical Chinese middle class person would stay in. It's like a highrise motel since most people here don't have cars (yet), located about a kilometre from a Metro station. The room is tiny, just wide enough for a queen-size bed to fit in one corner, a desk and chair on the other, and space between to pull out a chair or walk through. There's an electric teapot, and they provide paper tea cups, tea bags and bottled water. The bathroom is the size of a closet but well appointed and looks kind of cool in a wierd way with a glass panel between the shower and the bed.

Funky flip drain in the sink

Shower with a view...

...or rather that can be viewed

Breakfast is included with the room, and it ain't your Continental breakfast. It's a hot Chinese breakfast buffet, enough to load up on before getting on with your day. There's fried noodles, sauteed baby bokchoy, steamed buns, savoury and plain congee, and, well, some foods I've never seen before but looked safe to try. I pressed a button on the drink dipenser and it gave me hot sweetened milk.

My first day in Shanghai was spent looking for things I forgot to bring, mainly a bike lock and a camera. The former was easy to find and I got a cheap cable lock for about 3 bucks, but I was so surprised at how hard it was to find a camera shop. I walked up and down East Nanjing Road, the main pedestrian shopping street in the city and came across only one store specializing in cameras. The prices are high, too, much more than I would pay in Canada. I had one particular model in mind that I had shopped for at home, so I knew what to compare. By the afternoon, I gave up on the old part of town and took the subway across the Huangpu River towards the shiny skyscrapers in Pudong to try my luck. There, among the glitzy shops (including an Apple store that rivals the one in Manhattan) I found a Best Buy. The camera I wanted was here, albeit for more than I would pay for it at home before taxes. I was tired of wasting time looking so I just bought it anyway. I figure I'll make up the cost in cheap eats.  Most manufacturing in China happens in free-trade zones, so once goods get out (if they are not smuggled) the government levies huge taxes. Hong Kong being the spoiled prodigal child of the system probably gets the blind eye with smuggling and would have been the ideal place to get a camera.

The public transportation system here is awesome. With the help of a young person who could speak English, I bought a refillable smart card which can be used to pay for the subway, buses and ferries, even the taxis. A slap of the card on a turnstile lets you though, and on the way out it just deducts the right fare, with a small screen reminding you of the amount left in the card. This and the squeaky clean and white metro stations make Toronto with its archaic subway tokens look like a sad provincial backwater. The Shanghainese are non-chalant about the technology around them -- huge touch-screen information panels everywhere and almost every other bilboard in the subway is a flush moving video but no excessive garish flashing screens and starburst graphics.

I'm not much of a shopper and after I buy the camera, jet lag and general lack of sleep started to consume me in the late afternoon. I walked around snapping a few photos, grabbed a very early dinner before returning to the hotel, collapsed into bed and slept on and off for a total of almost 12 hours.

Into the Great Firewall of China

It was a stressful week leading up to my departure, and to make things worse, my camera mysteriously went AWOL. I sifted through the house looking for it which distracted me from the fine details of packing for the trip. I ended up forgetting a few things like a bike lock and a battery charger, but China's chock full of them anyway.

The direct polar route from Toronto to Shanghai was excruciatingly long and I barely got any sleep, my mind caught between the energy of the mad rush to leave and the unknowns of things to come.  The in-flight movie selection was terrible ("The Last Airbender" anyone?) and despite the awesome landscape of Greenland and Siberia sliding past on the ground below, the novelty of staring at the polar ice cap only commands an occasional minute every so often. The saving grace was that nobody was in the seat beside me providing the luxury of stretching in the extra legroom. My eyes felt like they were going to pop out of their sockets when we finally approached Shanghai.

The Chinese certainly have been doing things in an ambitious and futuristic scale. Shanghai's new Pudong Airport is cavernous but super-efficient. The customs officer slips my passport into a scanner and tells me to look left, and a face-recognition camera compares my face with my passport photo. While this sounds ominous, there is a small screen that shows me what is going on and the information that is being typed into the records, and all I have to do is verify its accuracy.

I make a beeline for the Maglev train, shelling out Y40 (about $6) for the fast ride instead of the Metro. It was surreal rushing past highways and rice paddies at 430kph -- a top speed we retained for maybe all of 10 seconds before the train had to start slowing down toward the terminal station. Getting out of the Maglev and into the Shanghai Metro despite its own modernity, was like going back from car to horse-and-buggy speed. Manoeuvering my luggage among the commuting crowd was tricky, and in my disoriented state it seemed to take forever to get to the cheap hotel I had prebooked on the internet.

The streets of Shanghai are bustling. The energy of the place is like a cross between New York and Paris. The traffic on the main roads is fluid with cars, mopeds and bicycles, while the sidewalks and small side streets are filled with people shopping and eating. Except for the air, the city is clean and leafy, much more orderly than some cities in southern Europe. I surprised myself navigating from the metro station to the hotel successfully with relative ease. I checked in, and then went in search for food around the corner.

The culture shock can be overwhelming. No matter how much I try to memorize a character for something (chicken, for example), when I'm suddenly faced with an entire wall of glyphs, it just all goes out the window. Luckily this place was a cafeteria-style eatery where you just point or pick little plates and pay for it at the end of the line. I had a very filling meal for Y28 which included a huge bottle of beer.

I got back into the hotel, which advertised it had free internet, and thought about updating my Facebook status to let my family and friends know I had arrived safely. I could not get through and thought something was wrong with the system. I ask the guy at the front desk, and he comes up to check my connection. He sets me up properly and says in his best Chinglish, "Look, google come". Google does indeed come, initially streaming in in Chinese, but no Facebook or Blogger. After surfing a bit, I find out that Facebook, Twitter, most blogging sites , and YouTube are all blocked in China, a futile attempt of the communist government to suppress the technology that they themselves are mass producing the hardware for. The irony of the situation hits me, that the majority of the trinkets of the contemporary social-networking society we live in, from cellphones to newfangled iPads, are pouring out of the factories here....

But "google not hide all things". After bit of surfing I find a way around the crumbling wall.

Bike Maki Rolls

A few years ago when I got my Bike Friday I bought the suitcase that the bike fits into but I stopped short of ordering the kit that converts it into a trailer. This trip sounds like a good excuse to finally complete the system, so I placed an order for one before leaving on my Erie Canal trip and told them to deliver it to the UPS store in Ogdensburg NY so I could pick it up on the way home. Unfortunately there were some delays in shipping and the package did not arrive when I got there. It ended up sitting on the American side for a couple of weeks more, as I timed picking it up with a drive to Toronto to attend a small reunion of friends from Manila whom I had not seen since 1978.

In jest, I refer to the suitcase as "Bike-a-muckee" after Benamuckee, the cannibals' god in Robinson Crusoe, as it swallows up Bike Friday. I'm thinking maybe I should Asian-ise that to "bike-maki", like rolled up sushi :) Now that the suitcase has trailer wheels, it gets to be towed around like Friday's cultural baggage. No stickers are forthcoming, it's a private joke.

Something happened on the way to Frankfurt

Back in July my sights were set on cycling the Swiss Alps. Feeling restless and at the same time nostalgic, I was also going to revisit some of the places I went to on my first backpacking trip around Europe. That was my first big adventure way back in 1987, almost another lifetime ago. Maybe I was pining for that giddy feeling of unfettered travel I had then, when mouth agape I stared up wide eyed at the clacking destination boards in the Milan central train station, clutching an ISIC that promised cheap travel throughout the entire European rail network. OK, so maybe the onset of mid-life crisis is making me reminisce about my youth when I used to complain about my thick unmanageable hair... ah, hair.

Milan, April 1987. Waiting for the youth hostel to open, 
I met a bunch of other travellers so we just sat around in the middle of a traffic island. 
Black jeans and white Stan Smiths — what was I thinking!

My bicycle panniers were packed, I even bought European maps for my GPS. There were a few details I had to finish on a couple of projects and then I was going to take off. The plan was to fly to Frankfurt and cycle up the Rhine valley into the Swiss Alps then descend into Milan where I once went to "school" (it's a long story i won't get into), down the Mediterranean to Genoa, Liguria and the French Riviera and then up the Rhone. I was going to travel in style with a collapsable decanter and wine glass for those mellow picnic lunch stops.

I'm going to have to do the Europe thing some other time,
otherwise what would I do with these? :-)

When I finally got online to book a flight to Frankfurt (one of the few direct European flights from Ottawa), big red words on the website side bar were flashing at me: CHINA ON SALE, THREE DAYS ONLY. It was the last day, and few hours remained. The price of the ticket to Shanghai was more than $200 cheaper than going to Frankfurt. Shanghai. Frankfurt. Shanghai. Frankfurt... click. Shanghai. 

With a visa to arrange, more time required for planning, and because of reportedly unbearable heat and crowds during Shanghai's summers, I decided to travel in the autumn. In the meantime, it also allowed me to do a trip that I had wanted to do along the Erie Canal. The whole turn of events is like passing on kuchen, having apple pie instead, and eating dim sum, too!