Shanghai!! (Part 2)

On that same day, we went next to the Bund. The Bund is a wharf or quay lined with European-style buildings, and at one point the whole area used to be owned by several foreign countries. In the early 1900s, this area used to be filled with foreigners with very few Chinese. It’s pretty cool, and it’s something interesting to check out if ever you’re in Shanghai…mainly for historical purposes.

So we went over there, and usually when you go over to the wharf and look out over the balcony, you should be able to see the Huangpu River, and on the other side of the river you should be able to see the famous Shanghai skyline. That’s really why anyone goes to the Bund…it’s really just to see the skyline, which is pretty cool.

But it’s December at this point, and the winter is when Shanghai’s air quality is the worst. In the summer, when the weather is warm, that’s when the air is cleanest. Sooo…we went to the Bund to see what we could see…and we saw absolutely nothing.

In fact, we had happened to arrive in Shanghai on a day that had one of its worst air qualities of the entire year, and we couldn’t see a single thing. On days like these, new regulations had to be enforced around the area such as shutting down after-school activities, not allowing firecrackers to be set off, and other things that keep people from going outside or adding to the air pollution.

There are huge buildings hiding back there in the haze. You'll see what should be there in the next post.

I really hated this haze, it was annoying to me...like sitting in a movie theater and some tall guy sits RIGHT in front of you...you just want to wave your hand and say, "MOVE!"

Today my hair is just...no. So let's ignore that and enjoy the hazy view of the Shanghai skyline, or lack thereof.

After a few minutes we gave it up and walked along the wharf to find the mini museum about the Bund. It took a few minutes to find it because the arrows on the signs weren’t exactly accurate. Some pointed in one direction but didn’t tell us where to turn so we went too far past it, then some arrows pointed straight down, as if the place was under the ground we were standing on. Ultimately we found it under a big memorial platform. And it was interesting and had a lot of grammar mistakes and spelling mistakes and spelling mistakes that were corrected with a letter or two taped over the mistake.

This was a pretty area off the wharf next to the Bund.

This is a memorial statue that stood over the museum. I am standing under it taking a picture looking up, in case the dimensions are hard to figure out here.

After that, we tried out something that was recommended to us by one of our bosses in Xiangyang. Apparently at the Bund there was this really awesome tunnel that takes you under the river to the other side of it, and all the way through it there are these flashing lights and cool effects and it’s really interesting. So Kyle and I decide to go see what it’s all about.

We paid 70 yuan (not even a ticket to see the Forbidden City was that expensive) to go both ways through the tunnel, to the other side and back. So I was excited, I was expecting this thing to be 20 minutes of awesomeness and epicness. I was prepared to have my mind BLOWN. I was prepared to have my mind BLASTED (inside joke to my parents).

To say that the whole journey was anticlimactic is most surely an understatement. It was a pathetic show of a tunnel that was mostly dark with a few flashing lights and screens showing pictures along the way. You sit in a transparent vessel and that’s how you watch the whole thing. There was this weird futuristic music that was being played along the way, and throughout the music random words such as “METEOR SHOWERRR” or “MAGMAA” or “SEAAA” were being spoken by a strange voice. Don’t bother googling it, because the images just make it look like it is so much cooler than it actually is. Just take my word for it that it’s really not worth the trip, NOT EVEN if you have 70 kuai to burn.

We came out of that tunnel just shaking our heads, stunned at how bad the whole thing actually was.

Our next stop we went to was a lovely little area called Tai Kang Lu (泰康路) or Tai Kang Road. It was recommended to us by a guy we met at the Crowne Plaza when we had Thanksgiving dinner there. He was also an expat living in Shanghai for the time being and he suggested to us a few places we could go, and Tai Kang Lu was one of them. He told us that it was a really really awesome hipster place where you could go to if you just wanted to just sit and chill or just walk through. So we decided we would check it out.

The guy we met didn’t speak Chinese, so he had said Tai Kang Lu without any tones…and I had to tell the driver where we were going. For those of you non-Chinese speakers who don’t know this, sometimes when you say something to someone in Chinese and you don’t get the tones right, you either are making no sense or saying something completely different. HOWEVER, sometimes if you just take a wild guess at how you think it’s supposed to sound or if you just say the words really fast, then maybe you’ll get away with it. So that’s what I had to do this time. In this case, I said what I thought it should sound like, and then hoped for the best. Luckily, the driver was like, “Oh, yeah I know that.” And off we went. Win!

So we got to Tai Kang Lu, and we walked down the road. It was really just like any other road. We walked down a little ways to see if there was anything particularly interesting or a site to check out or something. But we didn’t see a lot. We noticed a Starbucks and another cafe next to it, so we went into the cafe whose name we’d never seen before.

Though most Chinese cities have (in order of popularity) a McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, and Subway (there are others but those are the big five I’d say), Xiangyang only has McDonald’s and KFC. So we’re limited if we’re looking for proper dessert options or coffee shop options, as well as most other Western food. So at this point I REALLY wanted some cheesecake, which is super hard to come by in Xiangyang…and even if you do get it, it’s not really that great. So we walked into this cafe and while Kyle got coffee I looked at the dessert display and saw exactly what I wanted: this really delicious looking slice of raspberry cheesecake. Oh my gosh okay I have to stop describing it now cuz I’m once more in an area where I can’t get cheesecake super easily.

This isn't the piece I ate, it's just a really tasty looking piece of raspberry cheesecake.

Anyway, like Thanksgiving, it was really just a nice experience to just sit in a cafe with heat and good food, and just chill. So even though we were there thinking Tai Kang Lu is a fail, we still were having a really good time. As we were chilling there, we were taking in the environment and observing the culture of Shanghai Chinese people in comparison with Xiangyang Chinese people.

Shanghai Chinese have acquired much more modern and Western culture, so we even saw a kind of Chinese form of hipsters there. We saw the edgy haircuts, the pants that stop in the middle of the shin, AND we saw the poindexter glasses without the lenses. For girls, we saw a lot more modern fashion (the girls in Xiangyang dressed nicely and looked very nice, but their style wasn’t modern high fashion as we saw here in Shanghai). You could also see more of the edgy haircuts for girls too, looking more like a light homage to a rock n roll style. A lot of the Chinese girls were much taller than in Xiangyang too. You’d see tall girls in Xiangyang, just not as often as we were seeing them in Shanghai.

We also saw a whole lot more foreigners and we found it really awesome how just being there no one was staring at us and wondering why we were there. Nobody there talked about us while we were right there. They didn’t even give us a second glance. It was nice.

So after spending a little time in the nice cafe, we moved on. We went outside back on to Tai Kang Lu, and after walking to pretty much the end of the road, we decided that we’d seen all there was to see and made our way back to the driver.

While we were walking back, we noticed a teeny obscure little side path that led off to the right of Tai Kang Lu, which a few people were walking through. It looked kind of interesting, so we decided we had a bit of time so let’s check it out. If it was nothing, then we could always go back. So we went down the path, and maybe ten steps into it, we discovered far more than we ever thought we’d find.

The guy we met at Thanksgiving was absolutely right to rave about Tai Kang Lu. Ten steps in, we found ourselves in a world of hipsterdom and bohemia! There were little shops selling souvenirs, little indie Western and Thai restaurants, tiny bars selling smoothies, shakes, and drinks, and places where you could get a photo taken or caricature drawn.

My camera takes blurry photos at night, but here's a little taste of what we saw. There are more and better photos next post.

We could only spend a couple minutes there walking around, but the place was actually quite huge. We had no time that night, so we decided we’d come back the next day and explore the area a little deeper.

Then the driver took us to the home of family we were staying with. I won’t talk about too many details about the family because this is a public blog, but let’s just say they were super super awesome. They had a beautiful house, and they had seen so much of the world that I was so envious of them. While they served us dinner that night, they told us stories about the experiences they had in the foreign countries they had traveled to, and we told them stories about our experiences deep in semi-rural China. The world we had wandered into here in Shanghai was so completely different from our time in Xiangyang. For the first time in months, I was able to take a shower without waiting an hour for the water to heat up, I could actually DRINK the tap water (the family had set up a system that made their tap water drinkable…and I purposely took a large gulp of the tap water in sheer defiance- mwahaha I can drink the tap water!!), and I had heat in the bedroom I stayed in which I could keep on all night without worrying about how many units it was taking up (it took me a moment to get used to that one, but soon enough I was able to relax about the heat being constantly on). The beds were soft and everywhere in the house smelled wonderful. Even their pet smelled wonderful! (I’ve always loved great scents before, but I think since my time here in Xiangyang I’ve been much more affected by a really good smell…it just makes me super happy inside and out and just gives a feeling of real comfort…there aren’t a whole bunch of super good smells in Xiangyang. :P)

So after a good dinner of frozen pizza (yeah I know frozen pizza sounds bad but THIS WAS THE BEST FROZEN PIZZA I’D EVER EATEN) and wine, along with a couple hours of good conversation with some of the sweetest people I’ll ever meet, and after a warm shower in a clean bathroom, I snuggled under the thick and soft covers with a warm and soft mattress (my bed in Xiangyang is not soft) in a room filled with heat, and then fell asleep.