Shanghai on Life

In an effort to get off the beaten track of urban China and see some scenery before the weather gets cold, Sandra and I ventured off with six friends to Huangshan (the Yellow Mountains) the weekend before last. This time the German-ness was broken up a bit by our Mandarin tutor and friend, Amanda, who is from Shanghai…not only nice to have her company but also good to dilute the group with another non-German speaker (especially one who’s not afraid to demand conversations be switched to English). The other five are friends who study at Tongji University (another university in Shanghai), three of which Sandra knows from Mannheim back home.

The trip started with a 6 hour bus ride on Friday evening. We arrived around 11PM in what at first appeared to be the middle of nowhere, China. It’s so funny because despite being a pretty small town and being the middle of the night, a couple of restaurants and even a small grocery store were open..absolutely nobody was on the street when we rolled off the bus and it was obvious that our hungry tourist selves were a sight for sore eyes for those restaurant owners. That night we stayed in a hotel which Amanda had arranged. We each paid 30 RMB (~$5 CAD), though the posted price for a room was over 600 RMB, so it’s easy to see that it pays to negotiate in China! We ate a big Chinese dinner in the middle of the night before turning in, mysterious and delicious as usual.

The next morning we left at 9 and hit the grocery store for breakfast and lunch supplies. Not big on refrigeration in this part of China (I guess the energy costs are not economical for shop owners), we were limited to strange, dried Chinese mystery goods, Oreo cookies and white bread. So cookies, bread and warm water it was!  I am sad to say that a large portion of our weekend was spent mainly on this diet, especially brutal when you’re trying to make it through hours of mountain climbing each day.

We took a bus to the base point for hikers and began our hike up a million, gazillion, badillion stairs that would soon become our nemesis for the next two days. Stairs, stairs and more stairs, I am serious when I say I wouldn’t have believed before that hike that I was physically capable of climbing so many stairs in such a short period of time. Imagine hours on end of climbing stairs straight up a mountain side, is this anyone else’s version of hell? Now, I was definitely in favour of the cable car option but nooooo we have to climb the mountain! I guess that’s what you get for traveling with a bunch of fit, hike-happy Germans. Stairs aside, the views were pretty breathtaking. Seeing the Yellow Mountains makes you appreciate Chinese paintings – I couldn’t get over how much the landscape resembled a painting (or I guess I should say, how closely Chinese paintings resemble this landscape).

Amanda mentioned that everything is a bit more expensive on the mountain and after about two minutes of climbing it was pretty clear why. All food, drinks, and supplies consumed on the mountain are carried to the top by men. Needless to say, these guys had the most ripped calves you’ve ever seen in your life. A long bamboo pole resting on one shoulder with two packages tied to string and balanced on either end, these men carried everything from toilet paper to vegetables, to flats of water and even gigantic watermelons. So you can only feel so sorry for yourself after you see these guys. Suddenly you’re not feeling so ‘woe is me’ carrying up your one weekend worth of clothes in your backpack with padded hip straps.

Four or five hours of stair climbing later we arrived at the hostel on top of the mountain hungry and covered in sweat. We changed and went back out to explore the nearby views and ate some apples and cucumber from a small stand as the hotel restaurant didn’t open until 5:30.

The hostel we stayed at was pretty hilarious. We slept in the most enormous dorm i have ever seen. There was one room with at least 100 people sleeping in it either in bunks or tents on the floor. We were staying in a “private dorm” of 8 women around the corner from this huge room, but in fact the walls were separated only by corrugated metal with gaps at the top and bottom, so as far as sounds, light and germs go, you were in fact sharing with about maybe 120-140 people.  The best (read:worst) part was the bathrooms..2 bathroom stalls and one sink for women, 3 shower heads for the whole dorm – I am not kidding! But overall Chinese people are much more tolerant of these cramped quarters unlike us privacy and personal space obsessed westerners and nobody seemed to mind much except us.

That night we sprung for the much needed all-you-can-eat buffet and a short stroll around in the fog after dinner. In the evening Amanda informed us that we would be hiking an even more difficult route the next day.  At first this seemed to defy mountain climbing logic, don’t we get to go down the mountain after climbing up it? But nooo, we had to then climb across the mountain range and then take a cable car down. And so we went to bed early and nobody slept as best we could considering our 200+ bunkmates.

Now, the whole point of sleeping at the overpriced, under-washroomed dorm on the top of the mountain is so that you can wake up in the middle of the night and book it up to the nearest peak to see the famous Huangshan sunrise.  So despite not getting much of any sleep we rolled out of our bunks at 4 in the morning to perform our tourist duty. Stumbling around in the cold and dark on wet stairs, none of us had considered that before sunrise it’s dark and we might need a flashlight but we made do well enough with the light from our cell phones. We found a suitable peak and waited for half an hour in the dark on its windy face. Waiting and waiting it seemed to be getting lighter… a bit cloudy, not the best morning for a sunrise, but we kept waiting. Crammed on the peak, a group of now about 15 of us and maybe 30 Chinese people, shoulder to shoulder, everyone stood quietly and waited. Brighter and brighter it became and eventually I was aware we were standing in full daylight and had seen absolutely nothing! But still, everyone just kept standing and staring off at the horizon, just waiting for something to happen when clearly it was over. The sun had risen on the other side of the mountain, and the 40+ of us had dragged ourselves out there in vain. Really just too  hilarious! Right on par with our palace double-dipping in Korea in my opinion! Here we had suffered all this travel hardship for this sunrise and ended up facing the wrong direction.

Cold and feeling silly we retreated back to the hostel for a breakfast of instant noodles, basically you’re only choice on the mountain.  So we started hiking again at around 6 and it was I guess around 11 or 12 by the time we made it to the other side of the range. We took the cable car down the other side of the mountain to save our knees and finally got to see some Huangshan monkeys on the way down!

From the bottom we did an hour or two worth of busing and transferring buses before arriving at Hongcun village, a Chinese village at the base of Huangshan also a UNESCO World Heritage Site as of 2000. One of the locations used in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Hongcun has a reputation as being the “village from a Chinese painting.” There were young art students painting and sketching literally around every corner, something I’ve yet to see once anywhere else in China. The village was established in 1131 and is apparently quite well preserved. The Internet tells me that the village was originally built by a feng shui master to resemble a cow..not something you notice just by passing through, but interesting all the same. We wandered around, ate some street food and met some really cute kids who were unusually proficient in English. We got back on the bus and headed back to the city to catch our bus back home. Some crazy mission-impossible style taxi taking, KFC eating, bathroom-going stunts later we made our second bus on time. Exhausted on the bus ride home we mostly slept, though I did manage to meet my first random Canadian in China, a nice guy from  Montreal doing his masters in architecture in Shanghai.

So we survived the Yellow Mountain, and though it wasn’t exactly a relaxing weekend getaway, the good company, scenery, and shenanigans made it more than worth it.

Greetings to my loyal audience! It’s been awhile now, but that Korea post really took it out of me I have to say. Life is still chugging along here in Shanghai. It is still warm and we’ve hardly seen any of this rain that people keep talking about, so I could get used to this! Don’t get too jealous though because I’m looking forward to a winter of sub-zero temperatures and no central heating :( After discovering our lack of central heating (and whining about it), Daniel suggested that I might consider wearing a sweater when I feel cold – a harsh slap in the face for an ex-Power-Smart rep..how far I’ve fallen already.

Last weekend I went on a day trip to a nearby city, Suzhou, with my friends Christian and Simon. Suzhou is known for its beautiful gardens and a history full of silk trading and prosperity. Wikipedia taught me that Suzhou is one of Victoria’s four sister cities, a little random but interesting fact. The day was fun and relaxed; we rented some rusty and rickety bicycles for $5 and biked our ways to some of these famed gardens, lunch and a temple. When we arrived back at the train station we found out it would be 3 hours before the next train and even that one only had “standing room only” tickets left. The Germans filled this wait time with beer (so cliché) and, eventually, seeing how many crackers they could fit in their mouth at one time (I may have encouraged this behaviour). I, on the other hand, managed to entertain myself with a Vogue magazine that I couldn’t read and a few too many games of solitaire. Not feeling like standing for 50 minutes on the train, we spent the ride home wedged into an empty luggage compartment and managed to catch quite a few stares…now not just the white people on the train but the white people inappropriately sandwiched between their suitcases on the train.

I have recently set about on a mission to make more Chinese friends. I have been hanging out quite a bit with a girl names Joy who is my age and studying accounting at Donghua University in Shanghai. She is in many ways typical Chinese…only child (with parents who worry too much) from Hunan province, came to Shanghai to study and obtain her Shanghai residence permit, loves KTV, table tennis, etc.). Joy speaks English quite well and had recently decided she wanted to expand her horizons (and improve her English) by meeting some foreign friends.  Last Thursday we went for lunch, shopping and a dose of education at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition and the Shanghai Museum. The exhibition has some neat exhibits about the history of Shanghai as a city, a floor dedicated to the upcoming World Expo (starting this May in Shanghai FYI), and (what everyone comes for) a miniature scale model of the city of Shanghai – very cool! I managed to find my neighbourhood but couldn’t locate our apartment building exactly.  The Shanghai museum was also very cool, a manageable amount of artifacts for one afternoon…calligraphy, jade, ancient currency, furniture, traditional paintings, etc. Joy’s father is a Professor who teaches ancient Chinese history (a subject she also takes personal interest in), so she had many insights which made the museum a lot more interesting. I have also begun a language exchange arrangement with another Chinese girl, Jasmine, who works and lives in my neighbourhood. Jasmine has a variety of projects she works on professionally, one of which includes a corporate social responsibility consulting project targeted at real estate development firms in Shanghai. When we meet I usually help her with fine tuning the English translations of her business plan or whatever else and she helps me with Mandarin.  It’s nice to get some free help and actually I enjoy working  on her stuff as well (CSR upstart initiatives in Chinese real estate development anyone? Cue nerdy business student drooling!).

Last weekend Sandra went to Xian (home of the famed Terracotta Army) to meet with one of her friends from school in Germany who is currently on exchange in Hong Kong. Sandra’s friend was traveling with five of her friends she met in Hong Kong and one of them happened to be Canadian. One question leads to another and this girl asks Sandra if she knows a Canadian Amy in Shanghai. “Like my roommate Amy?”.. So out of the oodles of universities in Hong Kong and the hundreds of exchange students at their university, it just so happened that Sandra’s friend, Nina, befriended my friend from UVic BCom and former co-worker, Lily. We didn’t realize that they were friends and in fact, both of them had planned to visit and stay with us in Shanghai together but we were in Korea at the time so couldn’t play host..all the while we never figured out that they were coming together and it wasn’t just a coincidence! aaahhhh small world-ness strikes again!

Other highlights in recent weeks have included being taken to dinner (along with Andy, the other BCom exchanger from UVic) with a bigwig from UVic Business International Programs who happened to be in Shanghai on business. A very nice and easy going guy, it was good to see a familiar face..also a passionate advocate of international exchange (Japan changed his life once upon a time), we get along just fine. But lets not forget, we got treated to some seriously awesome (and fancy) Chinese cuisine – lotus root stuffed with sticky rice, sichuan tofu, the coolest looking tea I’ve ever drank in my life, the list goes on. Last Thursday we watched our friend Simon (not lung Simon, another Simon) play trombone with “one of the best youth orchestras in the world” who he usually plays with in Germany.  I guess they are good enough to have all-expense paid trips to China, so I think it’s actually true…they were here for a week touring around with their last stop being in Shanghai, so not a bad deal! The concert was free and ended up being packed with locals who just went crazy for this German orchestra which was really nice to see. There was all this clapping to the beat, swaying, whooping and hollering, and a final standing ovation…it gave you those cross-cultural warm and fuzzies. On a side-note, some members of the orchestra returned to Germany with H1N1 which is apparently creating newsworthy quarantine and investigation hell for both the German and Chinese Governments…..78 people hitting different cities every night for a week makes it a bit difficult to narrow down the origin.

The basketball season has finally started up over here and I went to check out the team on Sunday night. I wasn’t able to play with them as I am sick at the moment (I may as well admit it as my mom has already busted me blowing my nose on skype), but the team looks great and I’m quite certain I will get a chance to play with them! I made it to a Rotaract meeting for the first time last night and it was also positive. The Shanghai club is a little more formal and a little older than our club at home, but everyone was very friendly and they are currently working on some impressive projects, so I’m hoping to stick with it.

I’ve been in Shanghai for two months already! This realization comes with pretty mixed emotions…less than three months to go until Jen, Cody and (hopefully) Sarah arrive for our grand tour around Southeast Asia (hooray!), but at the same time I feel like things are really getting started here, it’s already half way done :( On the bright side, it’s my birthday on Sunday, woohoo!

The first half of this post sat in the “drafts” folder for a little too long, so if time lines seem messed up, it’s because they are.  But anyhoo, this past weekend a group of eight of us went to Huangshan or “the Yellow Mountains”  where we saw some very famous Chinese scenery action! Anyway, more on Huangshan to come!

Hope everyone is well in fine, apologies to those of you who diligently check for updates..more posts are on the way :D

-amy