Shanghai By Night

Welcome to Shanghai!  Welcome to China!

I got into China almost a full 24 hours late because my connecting flight out of Seattle was delayed.  (It was annoying, but still not as bad as the nightmare I had getting to Milan in 2008.)  I didn’t get much sleep because we were supposed to be back at the airport for a 5 a.m. make-up flight.  But even that was delayed several hours.  As soon as it became apparent I was going to lose a day of my trip, the wheels started turning.  I decided I was going to have to sacrifice visits to the Shanghai Zoo and the Shanghai Museum.

I had been looking forward to the Shanghai Zoo so I could see pandas in China.  I originally thought the Beijing Zoo would be the place to see them, but then I read that the Beijing Zoo has very sad enclosures for their animals and that the Shanghai Zoo was much better.  The Shanghai Museum was the only major museum I was planning to visit on this trip.  (Well, not counting the Forbidden City, which is known locally as the Palace Museum.)  The Shanghai Museum is filled with ancient Chinese artifacts, which would have been interest to see.  But think of all the museum pictures you don’t have to look at now!  Shanghai, by the way, is pronounced more like Shunghai.  You know, that old “a” before “n” rule.

When I landed in Shanghai, I took the Maglev (magnetic levitation) train into the city.  It’s the world’s fastest train, but it only goes 18 miles.  It makes the run in about 8 minutes.  I was surprised that it was a little shabby.  I figured that must be China.  But it’s not.  All other transit I took was topnotch.  It’s maximum speed is about 260 miles per hour.  But for some reason, it travels at different speeds at different times.  For my ride, cruising speed was a mere 180 mph.  After the Maglev, I took the subway to my hotel in the center of Shanghai.  The Pacific Hotel, my Shanghai residence, was a grande dame from the 1920s.  It was early evening, and I was determined not to miss a whole day of sightseeing.  So I hit the town, and Day 1 became Night 1.  After walking for a bit in the center of Shanghai (Huangpu), I took the subway over to Pudong, the ultra-modern district on the east side of the Huangpu River.  (Pudong basically means “east side of the Huangpu River”.)  The pictures pretty much speak for themselves.

Of the 3 buildings pictured above, the Jin Mao Tower in the center is the smallest, and the Shanghai Tower on the right is the tallest.  The Shanghai Tower was completed jsut a copule months before my visit.  It’s the tallest building in China and the 3rd tallest building in the world.  I visited the tallest, Burj Khalifa, on my trip to Dubai and Southwest Asia in 2013.

Shanghai isn’t just enormous.  At over 24 million, it’s the biggest city in the world.  The entire Shanghai metro area, at 34 million, surprisingly comes in second to Tokyo, at almost 37 million.  Suddenly, New York seems cozy.  Shanghai definitely is the New York of China, especially when compared with Beijing, which is very much of the Washington of China. As China’s biggest port and the world’s busiest container port, Shanghai is fittingly named.  It loosely translates as “on the sea”.

Time for an adventure in Shanghai!

I regretted that, due to my delayed flight, I didn’t have time to take in the view of Pudong, the face of modern China, from the Bund, on the opposite bank of the Huangpu River.  At this point in the evening, I needed to rush.  I had to get to the train station to pick up my train tickets for the next 2 days so I wouldn’t have to worry about picking them up in the morning.  Everything was reserved in advance, but only Chinese citizens could use the ticket machines.  Everyone else has to wait in line.  I had to rush because the train station, like so many things in China, closes early.  I picked up my tickets in time, and then I tried to get the subway back to the hotel.  Would you believe the subway in the world’s biggest city shuts down at about 10 p.m.?

I was able to make it to the platform, so I was hopeful.  But an English-speaking employee told me it was too late.  I figured I’d have to take a taxi back to the hotel.  (And it sounds like that in itself could have been a Pandora’s box, based on what I had read, what with language and metering issues and such.)  He asked me where I was headed, and told me I could get a bus upstairs.  This was great news because taking a taxi would have violated my travel rule for relying solely on public transit.  But it was time for my first bus adventure.  I knew the likelihood of getting an English-speaking bus driver was nil.  Knowing my hotel was located on People’s Square, I looked up the Chinese name in my travel guide.  Then I asked every bus driver, “Renmin Guangchang?”  They kept pointing, and I kept following where they were pointing.  Success!  I found the bus going to Renmin Guangchang.  Now it was just a matter of getting off in the right place.  Fortunately, I looked out the window just as I saw a park-like area and then a sign in English for People’s Square.  “Renmin Guangchang?” I asked the attendant.  (This was the only bus I rode in China that had an attendant in addition to the driver.)  He nodded, and I alighted into the night.

I thought I was home-free.  But I wandered around much longer than I should have.  It seems I had wondered into a different park across the street from People’s Square and People’s Park.  I finally overcame my stubbornness and broke out the map.  I was way off from where I needed to be.  Finally heading in the right direction, dodgy people in the park kept approaching me for who knows what.  What seemed like an eternity since disembarking the bus to Renmin Guangchang, I found the hotel.

It was about midnight at this point.  When I had left the hotel earlier in the evening, a man immediately had tried to arrange a massage for me.  This time, a man outside the hotel was harassing me for I’m not sure what.  Cigarettes?  He was very aggressive.  A beggar was just as aggressive.  At last I made it back into the safety of the Pacific Hotel.  I had arrived in China 22 hours late.  I was now nervous about entering and exiting the hotel, at least at night.  But China 2015 was on!

[Factual information is primarily gathered from Wikipedia, so you know it must be true.]