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.
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