Recap of China - Shanghai

Tommy eating grilled spicy squid on a stick.


EXCUSES FOR DELAY IN BLOG UPDATES
While we just arrived in Thailand yesterday we are just starting our China blogging. This is due to China's tight internet censorship, which includes blogger/blogspot. When we first got to China it looked like we would be able to continue our posts by using some websites that allow you to bypass various types of internet firewalls. They are for people who want to post blogs from China and others who want to visit their Facebook page while at work at IBM. However, about a week into our time in China, just as we were getting comfortable enough with everything that we were ready to spend some time inside blogging, the riots in Tibet started and China really tightened up it's internet censorship. We then found our selves several places with very slow internet, power disruptions, and very few options to communicate in English. Pretty soon we decided to try to start up the blog again in Laos.

Well, when we got to Laos there was too much to do during the day to sit in an internet cafe and the curfew at night kept us from working late. Soon the task of catching up on the blog' began to grow into a labor intensive task that has seemed easier to push out one more day than starting at the stop by an internet cafe to quickly check email. Finally, the time has come to tackle the task. It is very hot, humid, and sunny outside and some time in the AC is a welcome reprieve.

ARRIVAL IN ASIA
Now, Shanghai. Shanghai was our first stop off the beaten path on our own. In Ecuador Phillip and Melissa were always near at hand to translate language and interpret the culture. New Zealand was easy. Now we were in Asia and all on our own. The trip from the airport to the first subway stop was via the world's first maglev (magnetically levitated) train. Very cool! It was a fast smooth ride. The subway was also not too difficult. It was similar to subways in the states. The ticket machines even had an English setting. Things started to get a little bit more harrowing once we were ready to leave the subway.

Now we were about to face the unorganized jittering world of the streets of a Chinese city. People are everywhere, horns of all pitches and volumes are honking everywhere, and it is starting to rain, hard. Our map says that our hostel, which we have already booked online, is about a mile away. We are unsure of who, if anyone speaks English. We had been told different things and had not conversed in English to anyone on our journey from the airport to here. Just as we were happy we had the map correctly oriented and decided we would try to flag down a cab a Chinese man in business attire asked us in perfect accent-free English if we needed any help. Maybe this would be easy after all. Without much trouble, but basically no English, we got a cab to take us right to our hostel. This trip went fairly smoothly and I think gave us a little boast of comfort.

Shanghai was cold, probably in the low to middle 40's. When we got into the hostel lobby, which looked quite nice, it was at least as cold inside as outside. You could clearly see the breath of the lady checking us in. She spoke pretty good English. At least we know we are safe while inside. The room was a little warmer, but not by much. There was no heat to mention of. Tired from an overnight flight (Since she couldn't get to sleep Kristin spent almost the entire flight watching movies on her personal screen attached to the seat in front of her, 4 or 5 movies in total I believe) and the stress of navigating to our hostel in this new world we napped until dinner time.

FIRST MEAL IN CHINA
Dinner time also meant, night time. If we were a little unsure of ourselves on the city streets in the day we were not ready to venture too far out of sight of the hostel at night for fear we may not be able to find it again. We made our way to Steak King just two turns away at the recommendation of the hostel. The staff their spoke English and had a more or less legible English menu. The food was great and we started our trend of ordering too much food. How can a bowl of soup for $1.20 be big enough for 3 people?


The next days were basically spent exploring the city on foot. We quickly learned more or less what to expect and had a pretty easy time getting around. Most poeple did not seem to speak English, at least not more than Hello and Goodbye, but enough people did speak enough English that it was not really a problem. Pretty soon the subway was a piece of cake and we could find food whenever we wanted. We saw and experienced many firsts. Most of these were not really gross, or disgusting, just different from at home. For example our first squat toilet (at least Tommy's first squater was clean, many later toilets have been disgusting), street food, street markets, and overloaded bikes and scooters.

BAD AIR
It was not until an hour or two before sunset during our second day exploring the city that Kristin realizes that maybe that weather forecast we saw last night was correct. That this is a blue sky. The smog in the city was so bad that we had thought that it had been incredibly overcast the last couple of days. Like one of those winter days that just seems to stay dark all day. But, we discovered that if you looked straight up, where you were looking through the least amount of smog, that you could get a hint of blue sky. Thank goodness for the clean air regulations that we do have in the states.

PEOPLE EVERYWHERE
There are people everywhere, really everywhere, but rather few cars. The roads are full, but it is only maybe half car traffic, the rest is bikes, scooters, and the many electric bikes. There were around 4 or 5 million people in all of New Zealand. There were 8 million within the city limits of Shanghai! This was a big change from our recent surroundings!

There were also huge skyscrapers everywhere. Not just in one downtown area like the cities I have been to in the US, but miles from the center of town too. Most of these seem to apartment buildings, 20, 30, or 40 stories high. And in groups of one to ten buildings. We went to an observation deck on the 70th floor of the tallest building in China. Literaly as far as you could see in every direction there were skyscrapers. Granted that due to smog you could not see all that far. Across the street from this building was a nearly completed building which will be the new tallest building in China when completed. The construction rate in Shanghai, and the rest of China, was noticeable and rapid. The area in Shanghai where these two buildings now stand was all farmland just a dozen years ago! The land on which all of these buildings stand was farmland just 12 years ago!


SOME INTERESTING SITES IN SHANGHAI

Many, well most every, street is lined with some sort of vendor. They sell everything from sunglasses to live chickens, and cell phones to live turtles and fish. Here is one vendor's setup where he will sell you a very freshly cleaned turtle or fish. He was just one of several similar vendors on this street. I motioned to ask if I could take this picture and he said it was fine. Then he got up and moved, it appeared he did so not because he did not want to be in the picture but because he did not want to mess up my picture of his 'store' It was a very thoughtful gesture.

STIR FRY RESTAURANT....ON A BICYCLE

Bicycle based (often actually tricycles) businesses were very common here and, we have since learned, across most of Asia as well. Here is a common example of store front and kitchen all built into the back half of a bicycle.

ELECTRIC DELIVERY BICYCLE

Here is a nice example of two sites I could not get enough of: electric bicycles and bicycles carrying what would have looked like an amazing large load before I arrived in China. We saw a couple of bikes carrying loads of chucks of styrofoam that made your jaw drop, but I did not get a picture of them. It looked like an ant carrying a bumble bee.


ACTIVE DECENTRALIZED RECYCLING

I would be willing to bet that over 90%, maybe over 99%, of recyclables in Shanghai (and the other Chinese cities we visited) are recycled. There seemed to be about 1 recyclable collector for every 2 vendors. There were cardboard collectors, many plastic bottle collectors, other plastic collectors, metal collectors, etc. Again, many of these were bicycle based businesses. They dug through trashcans and the cardboard guys rang a bell for shops/vendors to bring out their cardboard as he passed. There were so many of them, especially the people collecting plastic bottles that I would think it rare for a bottle to last 15 minutes in a trash can. There were also many garbage collectors who swept the streets and emptied the many small city trash cans. These folks take their collections to one of the many places that buy the recyclables. From the street view there is nothing centralized about this system at all. Many, many, many independent collectors and many, many independent buyers. If Waste Industries ever comes to China millions of people would be out of work.