Going from Huangshan to Shanghai was kind of a culture shock. While in every city I have been in I have run into other westerners, they were relatively rare and far between. Chinese girls would stop and ask to take their photo with me (or force me to be in their's without asking). In Huangshan, I would get stares from the locals wherever I went. But when I first got on the subway when I arrived in Shanghai, I couldn’t help but be the one staring at all the westerners this time.
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| Streets of Shanghai |
Shanghai really surprised me. It felt incredibly western and modern, like I was in New York City. I expected Shanghai to be like Beijing, just a little more modern and with a few more skyscrapers, but I really didn’t even feel like I was in China anymore. I had thought because of all the colleges in Beijing, there would be more westerners there to teach english then in Shanghai, but I was apparently wrong. At some of the locations I was at, the Chinese were the minority.
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| Vanilla and I on the Bund |
In Shanghai I met up with my next couchsurfing host, Vanilla. A Shanghai native, she works as a wedding planner, but because it was still Spring Festival, she was off from work and free to show us around the city. She was also showing around another couchsurfer from Brazil named Felipe, a Physicist professor from Brazil who was in town to help a colleague of his, but ended up being free his last week.
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Me somewhere in the crowds
of Yuyang Garden area |
She gave us a tour of Yuyuan Gardens, which was packed with people there to see the Spring Festival decorations.
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| View from the Bund |
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Shanghai World
Financial Center |
Next she showed us the Bund with the old european built buildings and with a great view of the skyline across the river.
We took the ferry across and went up the tallest building in Shanghai, and the fourth in the world: the Shanghai World Financial Center. Afterwards we stopped at a jazz club and Vanilla told us about the marathon of ceremonies that go into a Chinese wedding and the grand scale of weddings that some of the upper class in Shanghai go through.
Despite being a few days into the Spring Festival now, fireworks continue throughout Shanghai while I was there here. They welcome the Chinese god of wealth a few days after Chinese New Year, and with Shanghai being the finance capital of China, it's widely celebrated here. The next morning at 6 am, I get jolted out of a deep sleep by a loud explosion going off right next to my head, someone launched a firework that exploded right next to me just outside the window. Not a very nice way to be awoken.
The next day a met up with another person through Couchsurfing named Kukie. She had previously traveled to a lot of the same countries I was about to and I was eager to get some advice and input from her. We met up over coffee and tea and she helped me get an authentic Shanghai meal. We visited a couple of the local hangouts she enjoyed, which were filled with all westerners but herself.
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| Kukie |
She told me about how she had also recently started long distant running and I told her about how I went from never being a runner, to running a full marathon in a year. She shared with me her trip which ended up being rather similar to my own, both in our reasons for doing it and for the fact that we both did it in one long extended trip. The one difference being that mine is for four months, and her's lasted for three years.
This is something interesting I've noticed on my travels though, is some people I talk to are shocked that I'm traveling for a whole four months; while other's I've met are shocked I'm only traveling for four months, "Why not a whole year?" It's interesting the different perspectives people have in regards to travel.
Kukie shared with me her experiences on her trip and gave me some advice about the areas I was going to. It was impressive hearing about how she survived traveling all these countries alone, but at the same time I felt a little disappointed with myself as I seemed to be running into more difficulties my couple weeks thus far then she had in an entire three years of travel.
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| Jelly Fish at the Aquarium |
The next day Vanilla, Felipe and I went to the Shanghai ocean aquarium, hosting amazing sea life I had never seen in person before in one of the longest underwater tunnels in the world. I flew out early the next morning so Vanilla insisted that it’d be easier to just stay up the whole night enjoying the Shanghai night life then trying to get up that early. I was paranoid about oversleeping and missing my flight, so I agreed. We went to a couple different clubs, starting with a latin jazz one. Next we tried to go to an apparently exclusive club that refused to let us in without a reservation or paying for an expensive table, but Felipe kept insisting that we had reservations and that they must have missed them, until they finally let us in. Lastly we went to cub that Vanilla said was only really known about by locals, unlike the others which were mostly westerners. The place was famous for a drink called “Baby Sleep Three Days” that Vanilla decided to go ahead and order for us before we could protest. I look over to the bar to watch them make it, and it looks like they are pouring every bottle and can they can find behind the bar into a huge aquarium sized bowl. Vanilla teaches us the Chinese rules to liar’s dice, which are surprisingly close to the rules I know, and we play until late onto the night, until we finally head back so I can pack up and get to the airport.
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| Fillipe and I across from the Bund |
Once again I felt like I head met some really cool people and made some good friends, and was disappointed to leave them and possible never see them again.
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