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.