Seven Thousand Words on China

2008-08-01

For anyone unaware, I spent May 26th to June 10th around the east coast of China, visiting Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai (in that order), on a cultural exchange program with BCIT and its various Chinese partner institutions. It was an amazing experience, and my first time outside of British Columbia. Below I’ll share my experiences, from the people to the food to the shopping to the girls to the environment!

First, the short version, then the long chronological one: the people are very kind, and very polite. Many speak English, and in the shopping centres they often speak French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and/or Japanese as well, since tourists are where the money is. Haggling and negotiating are everywhere at the smaller shops, where merchandise is almost always fake. You’ll often get a product for 1/10 their original asking price, and if you ever pay more than 1/3, it’s a certainty you were ripped off.

The cities are booming, and for the most part quite beautiful, but old abandoned buildings still litter the place, and pollution is terrible. The food is whatever you want it to be, with KFC, McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Haagen-Dazs establishments everywhere, although foreign foods come with their foreign prices as well, leaving McDonalds as one of the most expensive places to eat in the area at about 25 yuan for a decent meal, compared to 5-15 at restaurants native to the area. Rice, dumplings, soup broth and beer are seen at almost every customary meal though, and while all taste good, you may find it a bit bland after a while.

It seemed to me that especially in Nanjing, where foreigners are not as common, we all received quite a bit of positive attention from people. Girls would constantly glance and giggle, ask us to take pictures with them, etc. People would want to play sports with us, or at least watch and cheer by the sidelines. This wasn’t the case in Shanghai where foreigners are very common, but throughout China everyone was courteous to say the least.

Traffic is terrifyingly fast and dense in urban areas, and pollution dominates the skyline of every major city. Still, I’m told things have improved greatly for the Olympics, and with luck things won’t recede once they’re over.

All in all, China was an amazing experience, and I would go back in an instant, given the opportunity.

Now, the long version:

The excitement begins bright and early, approximately 6:00 am, as I’m rushing to get my bags together and discover I’ve misplaced my passport! Turns out I didn’t actually misplace it, I just didn’t see it, and rather than looking carefully, tore apart the rest of my luggage on the search. On the bright side, I was awake with adrenaline as I rushed out the door.

Sadly, when you’ve never left BC, things seem noteworthy long before China! Other highlights included my first visit to an Ihop restaurant (only $2.99 for a decent breakfast - I ordered two!), my first time spending over $3.50 for a simple bottle of water (never buy anything at the airport!), and a good hour of making fun of Roan for packing a good litre of liquids in his carry-on luggage, along with at least six pairs of socks, for reasons unknown. Oh, and this was my first time on an airplane that didn’t have a propeller! The plane was something! Two in-flight meals, a very interesting entertainment system that, despite being unbelievably slow to respond (about 3 seconds between button presses), happily played from a large collection of recent movies, TV shows and songs and showed a nifty map of where we were in the world. Also, I experienced frightening toilets in advance of China, since I’d never seen this method of using 850 km/h winds as suction before. Those toilets howl like some kind of hellish wild animal!

About an hour before touchdown, the weather outside turned quite dull. It was just grey, everywhere. Every direction you looked, shapeless, lifeless grey haze. I thought it was just the clouds, but slowly, it began to dawn on me. When we actually reached Beijing, and descended through it, I confirmed my fears: the last hour, the last 850 km, I was staring at an endless horizon of pollution. And that’s just the radius. If it was the same in all directions that’d be about 9 million square kilometres of nonstop smog, but of course as I confirmed later, it stretches down the entire eastern border of China.

Anyone that doesn’t believe the world has a population problem needs to see the environmental damage we outsource across the Pacific. It really is terrible, being able to look straight into the sun days at a time without the slightest strain, as if the world was under a lampshade. We joked that it was healthy that there was so much smoking in China, since the filters on the ends of cigarettes would probably clean the air enough to offset the damage from their own tar.

Anyways, as we descended closer, I noticed a lot of other things that were later confirmed for me throughout China. Identical apartment complexes were arranged in massive grids everywhere. Each grid featured a different design, but each design was featured anywhere from 10-30 times. Efficient, if a bit robotic. It also didn’t take long to notice that almost every roof in the entire city of Beijing featured one of precisely two colours, a shade of red and blue both very close to the primary colours themselves.

The Beijing airport is one of the most impressive buildings I’ve ever seen. To say that it dwarfs Vancouver’s is modest. Massive floors, never less than ten metres high and often exorbinantly more, stretched farther than the eye could see. The place was very clean and well-lit, and felt outright luxurious. Just how big was it? Well, it featured a mass transit system, essentially a roomier, cleaner, smoother, air-conditioned SkyTrain, with no less than three stops, inside the terminal itself! In fact, in Beijing public transport everywhere was very impressive, with five times as many buses as I’ve seen in the busiest parts of Vancouver.

Nowhere was less crouded than the airport. I later read that it has become the busiest airport in Asia, and no surprise considering all the work being done in expanding Beijing in preparation for the Olympic games in two months.

We caught a very nice bus, which I believe was part of a tour package BCIT organized, to get us to the airport from there. The sights along the way were astounding. The beautifcation work being done in Beijing is extremely impressive. Flowers line the streets everywhere, with foreign yet familiar trees and bushes scattered in between. People can be seen without any trouble trimming or watering bushes, removing litter from the streets, etc. And construction is everywhere. Bamboo scaffolding shrowded what seemed like entire city blocks being rebuilt from scratch. The major buildings that were up all appeared reasonably new, although almost every window was accompanied with an archaic-looking air conditioner haphazardly held in place undoubtedly by the stickiness of the humidity itself.

The frightening thing is that empoverished sections of the city were still fairly common throughout the city, and just as likely to border luxurious new office complexes as they were anything else. After examining the city on foot later, and asking around, we learned that the city is doing all it can to clean up the often abandoned shacks and piles of rubble throughout the city, but that it wouldn’t have time to complete this by the start of the Olympics, and so the solution for now has been to build makeshift walls of sheet metal around them, and drape them in posters of flower gardens or some other more pleasing site. Sadly, the effect isn’t entirely convincing, and only caused us to become curious of what monstrosity could be hiding behind them.

Still, I say again that the city is booming, growing far faster than anywhere I’ve ever seen, and is in fact quite beautiful in many ways. The architecture is powerful, modern, and oddly spacious. For example, large sections between office towers stemming from a common base, covered in a wall of glass housing a small walkway bridging the two.

Our hotel was also extremely nice. One of the nicest buildings I’ve had the pleasure of visiting, in fact. At least in the cities, it is quite possible to conduct your daily life without feeling the least bit of culture shock. Staff are very friendly, and a surprising number speak enough English to get by. Most important signs in the city and its tourist-friendly buildings have English on them as well, although the translations are consistently poorer, and often more hilarious, than anything we’ve seen on websites on the topic of funny foreign translations. Two examples come to mind: a ahem romance movie for men (if you see what I mean…) with the tagline “ABSOLUTELY CONQUERS!” and a drink I purchased that claims “The tasty taste is what it brings!” They seem to use the spelling and grammar checkers competently, but the phrases come out as peculiar as they could be anyways.

Back to the hotel: it was a beautiful place. The beds are extremely firm, but easy to sleep on. Light switches had Chinese and English labels written on them, as well as a small light on the switch itself indicating its position. The bathroom was also nice, although the hot and cold taps were not only unlabelled, but backwards (only in the hotel bathroom, not throughout China), and the shower head looked like something from a gas chamber at a WW2 prison camp. We had a small LCD HDTV in the room, although all the channels were of course in Mandarin, except for HBO, which played the same three movies in a loop the entire time we were there (although one of them was 300, so it wasn’t all bad!) A couple things I noticed about the TV: the audio and video were out of sync as badly as they’ve ever been in old martial arts movies with English dubbed over them, and every time the United States or George Bush was mentioned, the clip was almost always suspiciously sandwiched between two ten-second montages of military footage, the first showing vehicles and artillery, the second showing explosions and aftermath. Without knowing what they were actually saying in the news, I can’t be sure if this footage was appropriate in the context, but I still found this a bit unsettling, as much as the United States’ foreign policy worries me.

Our first full day in China, we made the short walk from our hotel to the BC Pavillion in Beijing to promote the 2010 Olympic winter games in Vancouver. This building was very beautiful itself, with many nods to British Columbia living within. Forestry and mining industries are talked about a great deal inside, and of course our wood, metals and precious stones are used exclusively in the buildings construction. I was surprised to see that Vancouver isn’t the sole centre of attention either. Prince Rupert and Terrace, for example, were both mentioned explicitly in our tour. Inside were video panels and Google Earth-like kiosks showing the region, and of course a pair of mounties guarded the entrance. What caught my eye above all else, though, was the massive mural stretching several metres in either direction along the wall of the building, with each noteworthy building in Beijing modelled in pewter, forming a map of the entire valley and the mountains that encompass it.

It was near here that we met with representatives from the various partner schools of BCIT’s in China, and got to give brief presentations explaining life at BCIT, with translators working in both directions through the evening. Back at our hotel we got to meet our partner students and instructors from the schools we would be going to, and shared our first formal dinner in China, where we learned the custom of beginning every sip of our drinks with a toast. I also learned the hand gestures used throught China to represent the numbers up to ten on a single hand (only six and up being unlike our own system), which seems quite handy (pun intended) to me. We should all learn them!

6: the thumb-pinky extension you’d use to represent a telephone if you were miming a phone conversation, except pointing up with your palm forward, instead of against your head.

7: thumb, index and middle fingers meet, as if you were performing the stereotypical universal gesture for eating, but with your fingers facing forward instead of into your mouth.

8: thumb up, index out, as if you were pretending to make a gun out of your hand.

9: curl your index finger into a hook, facing up.

10: I lied - their normal gesture for ten is to use the index fingers of both your hands together, to form a cross, which happens to be the Chinese symbol for the number 10 in writing as well

Later that night, we decided to go out to a club a short walk down the road from our hotel. There were several parts, each with a different atmosphere. The first we were in was fairly calm, but with popular English music taking up at least half of the playing time, good drink service and a few attractive-looking girls floating around. We got to see police in somewhat military dress complete with all-white helmets escort what I imagine was an underaged girl out of the place, which I thought was an adventure, until I went to the washroom.

So, no joke here: I walk over to the urinal, and I’ve just began to do my business when I feel a pair of hands on my shoulders. By the time I look in the mirror to see what on earth is happening behind me, I’m receiveing an upper body massage from a guy that must have been waiting in the corner out of my sight as I walk in. Turns out this is normal nightclub service in the area! I nervously completed my business and went to wash my hands, where he proceeded to hand me the soap and ready a towel for me as I washed, while a second one continued the massage. When the ordeal was finally over, they gestured at their tip collection, which seemed to contain only twenties. I must say I’m surprised something as foreign to us as that would remain so unknown to everyone back home. Ladies, I assume your washrooms are a bit more private than that, but do let me know if you ever find out first hand!

Eventually we found our way to the second part of this club, with a very different atmosphere. The most monotonous techno music I’ve ever heard was blasting, with so little spoken word in it that it was tough to tell what language was being played at all. But this place was packed, and everyone was dancing, although in a very different way than back home. Groups would all move synchronously in short patterns four steps or less, over and over again all night. It was like looking at an animation sequence from a SNES game. I left before it got too interesting, but I’m told as the night progressed, things got very interesting, with the girls migrating towards all these exciting new white guys, and the other guys in the club, some of whom I’m sure were their boyfriends, not being too impressed by the situation. From the sounds of it, a fight nearly broke out before the rest of the BCIT group decided to leave. It was the only time when anyone reported any kind of tension between them and anyone else in China.

The next day (it’s the 29th now), we had free, and decided to explore Beijing and do some shopping. There are large department stores, of course, but the real adventures are to be had in the malls comprised of small, one or two person shops no more than a couple metres in each direction, packed full of merchandise. I was under the impression that there would at least be a superficial effort to curb counterfeitting, but this simply isn’t the case. Everything around you is almost certainly not made by the company it claims to be, and this is common knowledge in the area (eg. 128GB thumb drives don’t exist, yet alone a model by Sony). And it is this fact that allows bargaining to take place so ubiquitously. Every shopkeeper promises you their best price, claiming they’d charge anyone else 50% more than you, but that you’re a student, or a Canadian, or just looked like a nice guy, so they’d cut you a break. And yet everything is eventually sold for 1/4, sometimes 1/10 of what the original asking price was. Anyone that pays even half of what they were originally asked has certainly allowed someone an early retirement! Just walking through the door of the first market we came to, the first words I heard were “Two hundred! One hundred! Fifty! Twenty five!”

It’s a bit dehumanizing, because the girls running these shops all appear extremely nice and yet do absolutely everything they can to keep you there. They will pull at your arms, hold your bags, ask you all kinds of questions about Canada, anything to keep you in proximity to them. Many had Canadian flags, pins, etc. decorating their shop, which tempts me to think they had scouts looking to determine the homeland of each batch of guests to the market, although some things looked too fixed in place to be swapped out on command, leaving me quite flattered. At any rate, saying “I’m not interested” isn’t enough. Saying “I don’t like this one” isn’t enough. They ALL demand you at least tell them what you’d be willing to pay so that they can tell you if they can do it, and of course they begin negotating from here. The only way to escape is to waste so much of their time while other potential customers walk by that they finally give up on you, or physically walk away from them, ignoring their protests. I don’t believe they actually take it personally, although we often joked that you could only be sure you got a good deal if they appeared very upset with you at the end of the transaction. The people I bought from, sadly, were always very happy to do business with me, telling me how clever I was at getting such a good deal out of them, and handing me a business card as I left.

So, what did I buy? Well, my first purchase was a belt that’s too big and a purse by “Dolge & Gabbanna” (note the G in Dolge, which should be a C), for a total of 160 yuan (divide by seven toget the Canadian value). Sad, no? I did little better by the end of that day. Luckily by the time I got to Shanghai I’d learned, but it was a sad beginning! Oh, and one other interesting thing about the money: Mao (who I noticed everyone in China calls by the fuller title “Chairman Mao”) is featured on the back of every denomination of yuan, which I was originally bothered by, thinking that there must be other people that deserve to be shown, until I got home and realized that the Queen of England is shown on the back of every Canadian coin, just the same!

On the 30th, we went on a day-long bus tour around Beijing, with the main attraction being a two hour walk on the Great Wall. Our tour guide, Cindy, was very cute, and very friendly. We drove for at least an hour to our first stop, a factory where a great deal of expensie handmade pottery is produced. Along the trip, Cindy told us about recent Olympic developments, a bit about the history of China and the Great Wall, and about the terrible Beijing traffic. In another couple of weeks, Beijing will apparently introduce a new law wherein even and odd license plate numbers will be allowed on the roads on different days of the week! Shanghai had an alternative solution to its traffic problem: charge $4500 US just to get a license plate, and don’t allow out-of-city plates on the major roads! Cindy also told us about the notoriously pamperred women in Shanghai (in exchange, we taught her the term “gold diggers”!), and about the gradual change of expectations of women in China for wedding gifts from a bicycle and a dish washer to a diamond ring, an apartment and a TV. Evidently money is the great world equalizer!

After visiting the factory including a massive warehouse of items priced anywhere from 80 to 1.2 million yuan, we were back on the bus, eventually making it to the Great Wall. I was somewhat disappointed, I must say, that the place has become such a tourist trap. Vendors line the path leading up to the entrance of the public area, and there’s even a small zoo featuring an unfamiliar breed of bear (no, they weren’t pandas), lazing around in the sun and waiting for people to throw snacks from provided platters of cut up tomatoes to them. I worried a bit for these bears, since while most were fantastically lazy, there were one or two that would eagerly climb on their hind legs to the top of some poorly balanced scaffolding to make desperate lunges at poorly-aimed food. All was well though, and once we were on the wall the vendors left us alone.

The wall itself is, of course, very busy as well. While most of the locals didn’t appear to speak any sizable amount of English, our exhausted panting and looks of awe and excitement whenever we stopped to look up at the mass we were climbing were all we needed to communicate anything we were feeling. (And besides, had I been able to communicate better, I likely would have made a fool of myself trying to say something constructive to any of the very, very attractive girls that were climbing alongside us!) It was the best exercise I’ve had in a long time, climbing that wall. I can’t imagine being in adequate shape to haul stones up to the top of it during its construction, and that’s assuming I’d have been climbing the wall itself, and not the rocky hills and cliffs around it. It was a very good experience, and certainly convinces me of the walls merit as one of the most awesome wonders of the world.

Without a doubt though, my favourite part of the entire tour was our trip back to the hotel, wherein we had Cindy sit down with us and talk casually about life in China.

The next day each group went our own ways to the cities where our schools were expecting us. My group had an overnight train ride to Nanjing. The train station was extremely busy, but the trains themselves, which I believe were first class by Chinese standards but apparently still within BCIT’s budget, were quite nice. The ride was fast but smooth, and very roomy. We were broken into four-bunk rooms with a small table and plenty of cargo space for the night. Before bed we all sat and talked for a good couple of hours, joined by one of our instructors who was raised in China and spent her teenage years at the height of the cultural revolution. She kept the spotlight for most of the night, telling us stories of spending years away from her family, sleeping on a bed of cold bricks, hauling her own weight in supplies on the long journey home when she finally returned from working fields instead of attending school. She also told us of her husband, then boyfriend, who waited faithfully for eight years to see her again. It was an extraordinary story.

Following this we spent some time each sharing a bit of our own story, talking about why we were interested in computers and how we ended up at BCIT. Afterwards our instructors remarked that they believed Chinese students were far poorer at explaining their dreams, interests and desires, and that motivation was a very big problem in Chinese institutions. Looking back a few days later, seeing an education system engineered to direct students to fields of study based on ability at the expense of interest, this comes as no surprise to me at all. It’s not far from the jokes I’ve always heard about “the communist work ethic”. The distribution of interests of the students I later talked to was almost random, with people that loved sports, languages, health sciences, and engineering, and yet all of then learning computer systems. I’m under the impression they were encouraged not to bring this up with us in great detail either!

One final note of interest on the train: I felt quite sorry for the girls staffing the train, who themselves slept during the journey, but in the hallways crunched in positions that would make any chiropractor cringe. I’m told it’s a desirable job to have though, since they’re paid along the way and working a 24 hour shift can then be followed with two or three days off.

We arrived in Nanjing at something like 5:15 am on the 31st, and arrived at our dorm rooms a couple hours after that. Nanjing is a beautiful city, with many large buildings and much construction of its own, minus a few of the largest from Beijing, but with much more natural beauty still existing in and around the city. Pollution was also not as bad, although still clearly a problem, with visibily varying but rarely better than a kilometre. Our dorm rooms were nicer than I expected, although of course not up to the standard of our luxurious tourist hotel. We three students shared a single room roughly twice the size of the individual rooms at BCIT’s residence, perhaps 10 feet by 13 feet, plus a modest balcony. This was also our first experience with standard Asian toilets, which for those that didn’t know, have no bowl and are ment for a squatting, rather than a sitting position. We were surprised with hot showers, a rare luxury in residence, thanks to one of our predicessors from the year before who got sick and inspired the idea.

On our first day, we visited a wonderful tourist area, called Purple Mountain among other names, and one of the few major sights I saw in China not tainted with repulsive numbers of shop vendors, thanks to its spiritual nature. The mountain hosts the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, a large tomb dedicated to the co-founder of the Kuomintang and first president of the Republic of China. The statues and gardens alone were worth the trip, but the sight at the top of the miles of forest stretching in all direction were truly rewarding, especially after being away from home (Terrace, that is) for so long.

Our “buddies”, as they were called, were all very nice. The three of us followed the three of them to some of their classes for the first few days, although it was one of our instructors doing the teaching, and so we ended up witnessing the same 90-minute lectures three times in a day. I was quite concerned during the lectures that the students would unable to understand these lessons, which were done exclusively in English (remember that students these days take English as the standard secondary language in school, so everyone should know it well enough to understand basic conversation), but when it came time to actually answer questions and do lab work, they managed to at least have a general idea what was going on, although they certainly required our assistance. It’s difficult now discerning whether or not students had a genuinely hard time with some aspects of the work, or if there were merely too shy to speak out when asked about them.

The thing that struck me most about the students, perhaps about anything in China, was that they were so much like us. They were as visibly bored as we would have been, were as quick to begin playing games and browsing the Internet as we were, and were often attempting to sleep or text friends from their phone. A phone even rang once in class, something I expected not to see at all, based on the strictness of some teachers even in Canada. Fashion, attitudes and interests all seemed not far from our own at all. I suppose with students there being, relatively speaking, in a similar economic class, I shouldn’t be quite so surprised, but I was.

Some things, of course, are different. Students there seemed unusually patriotic, with large Chinese flags hanging from the balconies of many rooms. And the dorms are strictly divided between men and women at all times. In fact, the first full Chinese phrase I learned to read was “Male student dormitory” followed by “Female students do not enter”. But 20 year old human beings are 20 year old human beings, after all. They aren’t allowed in each others dorms, so they meet outside and go for walks around the track and field area of the campus… and things get very graphic from there. I’m pretty sure you could sell tickets to see a sight like that back home!

Apart from our buddies, I also got to know a couple of the other students very well while I was in Nanjing. Lulu, for example, I’m speaking to right now over MSN! Right before I met her, I was told by one of my buddies, Raymond, that she was the smartest one in the class, and indeed, if her English is any reflection of this, I believe it. And there was another I got to know fairly well named Sum. But even those I didn’t get to know all seemed very nice. Some students, especially in other programs, spoke almost no English at all, but even they were friendly. Me and the other two BCIT students I was with would play basketball or badminton there, and a group would slowly form around us, watching and clapping. Eventually we would, through gestures alone, communicate teams and get them involved as well. Basketball is extremely popular in China, and I happen to be terrible at it, but even so, when I did something right, there was always a gathering of beautiful young women clapping for me!

I’m proud to say I did much better in the classroom! I naturally faired quite well in English, but even math I did well in, at least in the brainteaser format they showed to us. You might think this isn’t quite fair, since the language barrier would give me a sizable advantage, but in fact this wasn’t much of an issue in math - and I attended a Chinese-lead math class as well, and managed to make sense of a few things on my own! In fact over four days or so Lulu taught me at least a couple dozen Chinese characters, and with a bit of reading a Chinese phrasebook I had and running things through Google’s translator, I began to pick up other characters and even a little bit of the grammar. I don’t know if I’ll have time, but I would like to learn to read and write Chinese, and might give it a shot!

A couple points I found interesting about Chinese:

They have a universal tense modifier instead of past tense versions of all their actions. Since there is no alphabetical order to look characters up by, you look them up based on the number of strokes used to write them. Often, mixing two polar opposites, for example “small” and “big”, is used to mean the entire range or category in which they belong (in this case, “size”).

Nanjing was extremely hot during our entire stay, averaging I believe over 30 degrees during the days, and very humid, but we also experienced some violent storms! Rain came pouring down out of nowhere on a couple occasions, and one night it came down as hard as I’ve ever seen anywhere in my life, with a powerful thunderstorm accompanying it. Standing out on our balcony I saw a bolt of lightning strike the ground not seven metres in front of me, which needless to say startled all of us, but it was absolutely beautiful to experience in person.

On our last full day in Nanjing, we travelled downtown by public bus to visit one of the ritziest shopping malls in the area. I was shocked to see that the place was filled, all seven or eight floors of it, with European and American fashion labels. Aside from the instructions on the elevators I don’t think I saw a single Chinese character printed everywhere. And even the models on all the posters were white, despite me and Ian being the only white guys within a hundred kilometres of the place!

What I noticed most of all though, and it really is hard not to, were all the signs, posters and collection boxes around to raise money to assist in the repairs where the earthquake struck not long before we left for China. It really was heartwrenching, being literally surrounded in pictures of ruined homes, decimated families, abandoned pets and exhausted aid workers. I dare say it was tough keeping myself together in there for a while.

Sadly, after only a week, we left Nanjing, although we did exchange email addresses and even a few gifts with our new friends! We took another train from Nanjing to Shanghai. Once again Canada was outclassed by extremely roomy seats, smooth travel and air conditioning, although I imagine we were on one of the nicer ones.

Shanghai… wow. Now that’s a city! Buildings there would tower 40 stories over Vancouver’s offerings. The smog there is sadly quite bad as well, but the city has large commercial industries, and so it doesn’t produce the kind of pollution you would expect for a city so large if it were anything like the others. Shanghai is a very international city, with a great deal of wealth, and many foreigners, which made our little BCIT group not particularly special for those final few days, but it was still an amazing adventure. We had another tour, like the one in Beijing, visiting Buddhist temples (which were crowded with both tourists and worshippers, which surprised me somewhat, since I know I would be quite bothered by all the uninvited guests if I were there for spiritual reasons myself).

We also visited the observatory near the peak of the Oriental Pearl Tower, the world’s third largest tower, which offered an impressive view of the booming Shanghai skyline. This building was an astounding advertisement for Shanghai, with a view of entire city blocks being constructed from scratch, and videos looping showing computer generated models of what seemed like the entire city itself being reformatted a block at a time, gigantic skyscrapers falling to be replaced almost immediately with larger ones. In a place like this, it could be done, too! I’m told, almost warned, at the poverty of mainland China, and the countrysides everywhere outside the main cities, and I have no doubt this rapid urban growth owes much of its success to those left behind, but regardless I can’t help but be impressed by the rate of construction and expansion within these cities.

The final attraction on our tour of Shanghai was an hour long boat cruise down the river that cuts between the old and new business districts that dominate the city. This was also a beautiful site, although the river was visibly polluted with garbage, and discoloured as a result. Seeing someone bathe in it along the way from the boat they appeared to live out of was a much-needed reminder that despite the lack of cultural clash among everyone we interacted with personally, there were parts even of this modern powerhouse of a city that were quite foreign to us.

The next couples were spent shopping and eating KFC, almost exclusively. Conveniently the downtown shopping strip was called Nanjing Street, which after coming from the city of Nanjing made this easy to remember. It’s a massive pedestrian-only street perpetually packed with crowds of tourists and locals alike. The visible retail outlets were all expensive foreign brands, much like the malls in Nanjing, but you could only walk a few feet before being interrupted by a vendor attempting to bring us to suspicious back alley shops near by. And like in Beijing, it’s these shops where the fun is. Houses compartmentalized into secret room after secret room, everybody dedicating one to each of watches, DVDs, shoes, tshirts, and purses. And every now and again you’d get an offer for “lady massage” as well.

Speaking of lady massage… well, our last night in Shanghai, the majority of us wandered over to a club some 15 minutes away called I ❤ Shanghai. Why that club? You’ll like this: Filipinos drink free Monday nights! (and we had a Filipino in the group). Sadly, we missed Wednesday, when white girls wearing devil outfits (horns and a tail at least) drink free, but we made do. We played pool and darts, I got to complain to the new program head about the instructor we all love to hate, Johanna, and it was all around a good time. Then a few girls came in, sporting skirts that would have surved better as belts, with underwear clearly exposed both above and below them! We avoided these girls for quite some time, but eventually we ended up mingling with them. Bottom line, they didn’t actually say they were prostitutes, but either they were prostitutes or I was really, REALLY good looking that night. They tried following us back home, and I definitely ditched them at the last second and went to bed. Sadly, BCIT payed for a lot of drinks that night, but by 2:00 am there were few places to buy water, and I didn’t trust the tap water there to drink. Luckily my hero Ian managed to find a place selling water in the middle of the night, and probably saved me from a hangover.

The last morning in Shanghai, I wandered around the electronics markets for a while, but more than anything it was the roads and the traffic that impressed me. One interesection had nine lanes in one direction, eight lanes in another, all with a second highway stacked above the first. The smaller interesting highway had no less than six lanes per side as well, leaving an intersection with no less than 30 lanes involved! Traffic throughout Chinese cities is astounding, with people habitually honking their horn the moment you occupy a space that you’re not required to. Interestingly, people don’t appear in the least offended to be cut off, it’s only when you occupy space without an obvious benefit to anyone that their patience is tested. As for speed, while the top speeds don’t exceed our own, in urban areas people will happily travel at three times the speeds we would, with a few centimetres separating them from the vehichles, and the people around them. Traffic signals are ignored in all but the most critical intersections, passing lanes and seat belts are just there to humour the tourists, and people seem to travel in large flocks with a safety in numbers philosophy. I did in fact see one minor accident, with a man on a motorcycle crashing into a girl crossing the street, but fortunately both managed to walk away, and the salesperson following me tirelessly for the last few minutes never even blinked before continuing to insist his products were the cheapest.

The maglev train to the airport is also worth mentioning. Again, a far smoother, roomier, more comfortable ride than I’ve ever seen in Vancouver. The fact that it utterly destroyed my land speed record, reaching 431 km/h, was a mere bonus. And the Shanghai airport, while not quite as impressive as Beijings, was still visibly larger than Vancouver’s, and more tourist-friendly in my mind. I ate an extravagent restaurant that in the end charged me 180 yuan, an unholy amount in any country, and left for a very flight home, and my first flight across dark skies. We were in Alaska by the time the sunrise became visible, and a beautiful site it was. The sky wasn’t merely pink or orange: the entire rainbow of colour was clearly visible, from red to green to blue. I stared out at it for at least twenty solid minutes, watching the skies evaporate as the light stretched up over me.

China was an amazing experience. The people, the food, the culture, all of it. This has been somewhat of a documentary for my own records, a journal to reflect back on years later, and I know it doesn’t properly convey which points stand out in my memory now, and I don’t do some of them justice, but it was indeed amazing, and I would go back in a heartbeat. Still, when I finally saw the light of day on Canadian soil, not in Vancouver but back in Terrace, I was overjoyed. Beautiful, cloud-free skies, a cool breeze and 20 degree temperatures greeted me, along with both family and friends. I even sat next to a very friendly woman from Saskatchewan that had never flown over British Columbia’s coast before. She was amazed by the sight of every mountain along the way, and I was equally excited for the opportunity to explain to her how wonderful I found home to be.

Updated Apr 23, 2023 3:15:59pm

Jun 18, 2008 6:41:38am