First Impressions of Shanghai

So now I've been in Shanghai for a couple of days. I'm at Fudan University, which is a bit outside of town (a 40 minute bus or train ride, to be exact). I'm in a double room at the foreign student dorm, and my roommate is another girl in my language program, Krystal. She's half Cantonese and lives in England. She's very laid back and likes food almost as much as I do - I think we'll get along well. On my first day she showed me around a little bit - the area around the university is not super-exciting. There are some restaurants, but none of the ones I've tried so far are particularly good. I'm still looking for a good Shanghainese noodle or dumpling place nearby. There is a Starbucks knockoff called "SPR" that has wireless internet which occasionally works, which is nice.

The first day we ventured into town resulted in very little success at accomplishing what we set out to do, but at least through all the walking we got to know our way around. We found the big foreign language bookstore, which was less useful than we'd hoped; there were no good books on China in English and no pocket maps with the pinyin (Romanized) street names for when we couldn't read the characters. I did get some postcards, though. Then we decided to take the city tour bus that both of our guidebooks described. We figured that we could see which areas looked most interesting and come back to those later. However, it turns out that the tour bus was cancelled two years ago because of SARS, as we were informed by multiple hotel desk clerks. Going into the hotels to check was nice, though, as the hotels themselves were all very fancy and (more importantly) had air conditioning. I guess summer was not the best time to pick to come to Shanghai; it is incredibly hot and humid. I don't know how hot it is exactly because everything's in centigrade, but I do know that I drank two and a half liters of water that first day and didn't have to go to the bathroom once because I sweated it all out.

After finding out the tour bus doesn't exist, we decided to take the boat tour along the Huangpu River that runs through town down to the mouth of the Yellow River. Along the way we took the Bund tourist tunnel, which was a big tacky light show in a rail line tunnel under the river. We also had our first good food experience, as we stopped in a restaurant along a back street and had some dumplings, soy milk, turnip cake, and more dumplings. When we finally got to the harbor, all of tour boat companies informed us that we had missed their last trip. We decided to go see a museum instead, but soon realized that all of the museums we were thinking of visiting were about to close. In the end we just decided to call it a day and head back to Fudan, sweaty and tired.

[Pictures from the Bund Tourist Tunnel]

Our next several trips were more successful. We eventually did make it onto the boat tour along the river, and it turns out that that aquatic ecosystem of Shanghai consists mainly of loading cranes and cargo ships, with a couple of smaller boats loudly putting around for diversity. The river tour also introduced us firsthand to the huge quantities of air pollution that a growing city can generate. Later, as we walked downtown along the main shopping road, Nanjing Donglu, that point was reinforced - the multitude of billboards and towering buildings just got lost in the smog after a while.

[On the river tour: 1-Cleaning a ship;
2-City in the mist... er, smog]

On a more positive note, one of highlights so far was the Yu Gardens area. The gardens were created by a wealthy Ming Dynasty family (according to the Lonely Planet, anyway), and they consist of a maze of immaculately groomed plants, sculpted rocks (or "rockery" as the signs stated), zig-zag bridges, and small buildings for prayer, reading, or contemplation. The abundance of tour groups did detract a bit, especially as the guides all seemed to feel it was necessary to use a megaphone even if there were only five people in the group. Outside the actual gardens, there is the Yu Gardens bazaar area which has tons of shops - and more importantly, restaurants. Overall, the whole place (the gardens and the bazaar) is a bit touristy but still a cool area to wander around and get food.

[At the Yu Gardens bazaar: 1-The line for dumplings at a particularly popular stand;
2-Some of the shops lit up at night.]

[In the Yu Gardens themselves]

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