Shanghai!! (Part 1)

I was invited to go on a quick weekend trip to Shanghai by Kyle, one of my fellow Ligong teachers. We were going to stay at the house of one his family friends. Both of us had a gap in our schedules for that week and so we were able to squeeze in a four day trip from Thursday to Sunday (including travel). So we hopped a train and about 21 hours later we were in Shanghai. Trains are pretty tedious travel mainly because of the length of the journey…China is very big, and so while some places (mainly within provinces) take less than 10 hours to get to, others take more than 24 hours, more than 48 even. In this case, Shanghai was about 16-21 hours. The trip is easier when you are able to space that out so that you can sleep through the night. We were able to do that for the first trip, but the trip back to Xiangyang we left in the morning and got back late at night.

I got a bottom bed on the way over to Shanghai, but on the way back I took the top bed. If you're looking for a more comfortable journey, get the bottom one. But usually it's not too bad...unless you're used to the finer things of life. 

It just gets a little hotter up at the top, and also you have no space to fully sit up. So it's best to either find a way to lie down and use a laptop on your belly, or to get a nice book that's not too big to read. Trying to read on your side with a book that's too big is not possible. And what I mean by too big is more than 8 inches long. The beds up there are very narrow, made only for sleeping.

This is what most of the trip looked like outside. Farmland for miles, with the occasional buildings thrown in. This is what the Chinese call the Nong Cun (农村), the country. This is rural China as rural as it gets.

Recently on a train ride, I asked some friendly Chinese passengers next to me what the people in the Nong Cun do to get supplies. I asked if they have a convenient store or supermarket...I mean, they can't just grow everything they need out of the ground. The passengers told me that they have a little store nearby where they live where they can get a few things. I imagine that the store has a limited supply in which other things have to be ordered several weeks or months in advanced. I mean, that's what the pioneers had to do when the American west was being colonized.

So anyway, we got to Shanghai and we were picked up by the family’s driver. The family we were staying with was an expatriate family, and the father had been regularly traveling all over the world for the job he had. The family has been everywhere…so to me that is such a cool thing, not having traveled much until I was 18. The father of this family has a pretty high positioned job in the company he works for, and so they were living pretty nicely in Shanghai…but a little more on that later.

We were picked up by the family’s driver…but before you jump to conclusions about the family having their own personal driver, keep in mind this: most expatriate families are required by their companies to have a Chinese driver (at least in Shanghai), because if they are driving around in the foreign country and they get into an accident with no driver, then they could get into more trouble…the fact is, an accident they were possibly involved in would create much more of a hassle than simply having a Chinese driver would. I think that’s a very smart thing to do, and hey, I wouldn’t complain if my company made me have a personal driver that knows the foreign country better than I do.

This is the van that drove us around Shanghai that weekend.

So we found the driver and I discovered that the driver really didn’t speak any English. I personally was able to communicate with him perfectly fine, but it occurred to me that because the family spoke no Chinese, how could they communicate with the driver to get around Shanghai?

I posed this question to Kyle, and immediately at that moment he looked down on the floor of the car and by his feet was a big ring of cards…a REALLY thick pile of cards all on this ring. And we picked it up and from what we saw there was a big list of different places on it. They were color-coded, if I remember correctly, and the cards were divided into specific sections such as entertainment, exercise/recreation, restaurants/bars, shopping, banks, etc. On each card, there was English and Chinese written on it, so it looks like they just give the card they want to the driver and then off they go to wherever they want to go. That works and it’s a good system, but the only thing about that is that they can’t communicate how long they’ll be staying or whether they want the driver to wait for them or when to pick them up. I’m sure they find ways, but it must be more tedious than just speaking in the language. Makes me really grateful to be able to speak Chinese.

So the taxi driver asked us where we wanted to go, and after replying to him in Chinese, he remarked on how good our Chinese was (as pretty much every Chinese person does when they hear me talk to them in Chinese) and off we went to Nanjing Xi Lu (West Nanjing Road).

Nanjing Xi Lu is a popular area for shopping and food that I used to go with my roommate and her friends while I studied in Shanghai in the summer of 2010. I remember one day when she asked me if I liked a Chinese food called “Xiao Long Bao” (小笼包). This is a Chinese soup dumpling, with a pastry exterior and soup placed inside it. They cook it like that and the whole thing looks like a little bag twisted at the top. When you eat it, it’s like a burst of flavor in your mouth. REALLY REALLY good.

What they do sometimes is deep fry these babies and they’re called a different name “Sheng Jian Bao” (生煎包), which basically means “potstickers”. And THESE…well…you gotta eat these a VERY specific way, or else the whole thing falls apart and the liquid spills out all over your plate. L

So my friend asks me if I like Xiao Long Bao, and I love them so I said yeah! She tells me there’s a really great place for Xiao Long Bao down at Nanjing Xi Lu. So off I go with her and her friends. Nanjing Xi Lu is a very long road located in Old Shanghai (there’s New Shanghai which is much more metropolitan where the expats live and business people stay in hotels and go to work and all, and there’s Old Shanghai where a lot of the Chinese migrant workers live and it’s much more traditional in appearance, but seeing Shanghai three years later I’m seeing that change a lot…it beginning to look less traditional Chinese village and more bohemian hipster village). I didn’t remember how long the road was until we got there again this time. And me and my roommate and her friends get out of the taxi in front of this kind of mall district that has clothes stores, a food court, and several small restaurants. We go into one teeny restaurant packed with people…it’s a miracle we all got seats together. And we sit down at a table and my roommate orders something for me (at the time my Chinese was pretty bad).

A few minutes later comes these HUGE, POTSTICKER dumplings that I had never seen in my life. They’re piping hot and I wait for them to cool, then I take a big bite. WRONG DECISION. Liquid squirted everywhere, on my plate, on my face, I was lucky it didn’t squirt anyone next to me. Yeah, and my friends laughed. Fail. But it was the yummiest burst of flavor in my mouth…so good…epicness all in one bite. It was the best I’d ever tasted. Win.

Soooo…FLASH FORWARD.

The driver drove us down Nanjing Xi Lu in search for those very same potsticker dumplings. I knew it would be wishful thinking to try and find the same place we were before. I didn’t know what it was called and it was three years ago that it all happened, so I was resigned to find a place that served the potstickers. So we find a food court down on Nanjing Xi Lu, which according to the internet served those potstickers, and we go inside to see if it has what we’re looking for. The whole food court is packed with people and there are little restaurant booths lined up next to each other. Every booth was serving really really good food, but we couldn’t find the potstickers. So we settled for some other good food. After searching for a seat for a long time, we managed to find two chairs that were almost right next to each other, and sat down. As we were eating though, we noticed someone go by with the exact potstickers we were looking for, and I jumped on that. Even though we were pretty full, I went and bought some potstickers…because they’re worth it. For something as good as these, you make room.

Upon sitting down to eat them, I made the same mistake I made last time: CHOMP. Liquid everywhere. Now let me explain to you what exactly is the correct way to eat these kinds of dumplings. You first take a little dainty nibble out of the top of the dumpling. This creates a little hole in the top of it, from which you neatly drink the soup out of the dumpling. And ONLY THEN do you proceed to chomp on the rest of the fried and meaty pastry. It looked so yummy and good that I did not stop to think about how to properly eat the dumpling…I made the chomping mistake four times. Kyle did not. I just wanted to stuff them all in my face and devour them. That is NOT how you eat them. Don’t do what I did if ever you come across these dumplings.

Anyway, they were super super good and super worth it. Then we moved on to our next destination: The Bund.