First Time in China
Posted by Trevor in Journal, Shanghai, China
Ni Hao (Hello),
Wo hen xihuan Zhongguo (I like China very much).
Sorry I haven’t had the time to write to everyone until now, I have been in China for 6 days and have been too busy to get on the net until now. I am actually at a small restaurant/bar in downtown Nantong right now that has WiFi. The gym is just up the street so I stopped in here on my way back (I’ll tell you more about the gym later).
So far I’ve learned a lot, met a lot of people, and had a good time in the few days I have been here. I’ve written down most of the things I have done, but I’ll start off by just telling you about my first day in Shanghai…
where I flew in and my dad and I got a hotel for two days. Unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera with me when I went to the gym today so I probably won’t be able to upload my pictures until tomorrow.
Let me start off by putting something in perspective for everyone, Shanghai has a residential population of 14 million and it is estimated that another 8 million non-residents on average are in the city on any given day. That puts the total population of Shanghai at 22 million or 2.4 times the population of New York City; 110 times the population of Des Moines, Iowa. Shanghai is the economic capital of China, it is where all the biggest businesses are based and where their stock market is located, many people consider it to be the economic capital of the world.
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I left my house at 4:30am Wednesday morning to get to the Boston airport by 6am for check in. Flew to Chicago for my connection to China and boarded a huge 747 full of Chinese people. We flew straight from Chicago to Shanghai over the North Pole. It was a 13 hour flight and it never got dark, I spent the whole time reading a few books on Shanghai and sleeping for a few hours . The woman who sat across the isle from me on the plane happened to be an Accounting Professor at George Washington University in Washington DC. She originally grew up in Beijing but has been in the United States for 10 years and is going to Shanghai to give a lecture at a conference and then go visit her family in Beijing. I told her it was smart of her to get the University to pay for her vacation back home. She laughed and I talked to her some more about business and China. She happens to be friends with a woman who recruits colleges and universities from the United States for study abroad in China, I’m not sure who organizes our program at Iowa State but it is good to have that contact so I can compare different options in the future.
I arrived at the Pudong Airport in Eastern (New) Shanghai at 4:50pm on Thursday. The architecture and design of the airport was really impressive, check for some pictures of it later. Customs was a lot easier to get through than I had anticipated, I think there will probably be more security when I am re-entering the US. Something that was really funny was that as you leave the airport you have to walk through this little maze sort of like the waiting line at the airport or the at the bank and there are about 150 Chinese people staring at you. I assume they are all waiting for different people (unless the government is paying them to intimidate incomers) but they blatantly stare right at you as you walk by. I walked through it and tried not to laugh as hard as it was. “Welcome to China,” I thought to myself. At the end of the “maze” I met my dad and his driver and he took us to our hotel in downtown (Western) Shanghai. The Pudong (Eastern) area of Shanghai is a relatively new area which is under development until 2020, so it is not very commercialized yet. As we drove to the hotel (about a 45 minute trip because of the slow traffic) the skyscrapers gradually popped up. They were all residential skyscrapers with really small units and all of them had at least 30 stories (thats about 3 times as tall as Maple-Willow-Larch). In China people don’t use drying machines for their clothes so you could see clothes hanging outdoors of all the tiny apartments in the skyscrapers, and overall the units just seemed to be in very poor condition. Before we got into the city the residential skyscrapers just lined up, try to picture four rows of two or three of these big buildings every few blocks, on either side of the road.
As soon as we got into Western Shanghai more skyscrapers just sprung up, more than I have ever seen. More than Boston or New York City. At the time my dad also had some bad news, after I left my dog started whining constantly and my mother had to take her to the vet. We found out she had an infection in her uterus and had to have surgery immediately or she would die. It wasn’t very good news by any means.
We drove through part of the city to get to our hotel the Jui Long hotel. It’s not quite the Ritz but it was a good hotel. I don’t know if this is something about China but there was a phone in the bathroom, that’s just something weird I noticed. After we put our stuff in our room we decided to go get something to eat at Shanghai Uncle, a top-rated Shanghainese restaurant not far from the hotel. So we go downstairs to the lobby and had one of the staff write the name in Chinese characters for us and grabbed a cab outside. I didn’t know this before hand but the literacy rate in China is around 90%, which is pretty good for a semi-developing country. Taxis are the main way for getting around Shanghai, it’s very cheap and costs only 11 Yuan (about $1.37) for the first three kilometers and 1 Yuan per kilometer after that. I’d like to see you find a cab for that price in New York City.
So as we were on our way to Shanghai Uncle the taxi driver didn’t really know where he was going and we just had him drop us off somewhere in proximity of the location, we didn’t really know where we were so we just picked a nice looking place and went in to try and get some food. The waiter spoke some English and he asked us a lot of questions about the United States that were very funny to my dad and me. The conversation went a little like this: He asked us what city we were from and we said Boston, and his reply was, “Oh yes, many movie star from there, great city.” Then he said, “I like New York City, people there have very high paying salary, good job.” Then he asked us if we have a gun, he goes, “Every family have gun in America.” “If you walk in your neighbor’s garden you shot immediately.” My dad’s reply was, “Yeah or quicker.” We all laughed. After getting out of the restaurant we walked not far to the Bund, which is the Shanghai waterfront along the Huangpu river. It was nighttime and tons of people tried to sell us fake Rolex watches and these rollerskate things you put on your shoes. The Bund is a really scenic area with great architecture. Another thing about Shanghai is that there are tons of billboards and billboard sized television screens. There is one huge skyscraper across the river from the Bund that is basically a television screen. A couple of the boats that were on the Huangpu river also had television screens on their side.
After walking the Bund we got a taxi back to the hotel and went to sleep.
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Stay tuned, more info about Shanghai and China as well as pictures tomorrow.
Trevor
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