Round The World and other travels
A frequent flyer's collection of trip diaries
This is: Shanghaied in Tuscany!
Go West!
Today's sight-seeing objective was geographically quite straightforward: go up to the main shopping street of Nanjing Road and keep heading west, first to People's Square and then further into the Jingan district. After an Executive Lounge breakfast, we were soon ready to get moving. Despite being so busy, the main pedestrianised part of Nanjing Road proved to be a relatively easy place to walk. Well, that is with one exception. Ever since arriving in Shanghai, I'd become accustomed to the greeting Hello, Rolex? Don't get me wrong, the hassle factor tended to be very much at the low end of the scale and I soon learned to accept it as just one of those things. Here, however, it was a little more intensive and the range of goods on offer seemed to be wider. So it was more a case of Hello, Rolex? How about CD or DVD movie? iPod? iPhone? What you need? Shoes? Suitcase? To keep it all in context, I'd say that Hong Kong's Nathan Road is probably worse. Just before reaching People's Park, which adjoins the square and merges into it fairly seamlessly, we actually ended up following one hawker back to his shop as, with the sun breaking through the morning haze, Bruce decided that he really needed to acquire a hat. The mission was accomplished, following some good-natured negotiation over the price.
In
People's Park / People's Square itself - we never managed to work
out the boundary between one and the other - we walked around for a
while, taking in all the interesting buildings, which were mostly
museums. The most notable feature, however, was the number of young
people who approached us for a chat. There was absolutely no
suggestion of any ulterior motive or scam; they simply wanted to be
friendly and practise their English, which was generally very good
indeed! It was another sign of the changes taking place in this vast
country.
After sitting down for a while, and following a tip taken from my guide book, we steered ourselves towards an unlikely-sounding attraction: the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre. It turned out to be excellent, exceeding all expectations. I'm not sure why they don't go the whole hog and designate it as a museum. The undisputed highlight was a breathtaking, detailed model of how the city, in all its sprawling vastness, is planned to look in 2020. A collection of decades-old Communist Party propaganda posters, openly described as such, ran it a close second.
After all that, rumbling stomachs
indicated that lunch should be the next item on the agenda. Metro
Line 2, which had been so useful on the Pudong side, once again came
to the rescue. We rode it one stop further west, from where it was a
short walk to ... another branch of Crystal Jade! The previous day's
Dim Sum had been so utterly delicious that we decided to repeat the
experience. I think we slightly over-ordered on this occasion, but
nevertheless managed to clear it
all
away. The original plan had then called for further westward
progress towards the Jingan Temple. Bruce's guide book, however,
didn't rate it at all and instead recommended veering a little off
the beaten track towards the Jade Buddha Temple. It would leave us
far from any metro station but, having read what the book had to
say, I was convinced. So we headed up the side streets in a more
northerly direction, passing an establishment on the way that
boasted a rather startling name.
Despite the inadequacies of our map, which proved to be merely an approximation to reality, we eventually found the temple. It was fairly impressive, but also very commercial, a gift shop forming a sizeable part of the premises. We were lucky to witness the ceremonial burning of several boxes of what I understood to be offerings for deceased relatives.
Having seen enough, we decide that it was time to call it a day. We thought we could probably make it to a metro station in around half an hour, but with the realisation that we both had tired feet and that it was starting to rain, decided to flag down a taxi instead. It was fun trying to get the driver to understand where we wanted to go. Even the name 'Westin' meant absolutely nothing to him. We thought we had succeeded by pointing it out on our map especially when, at one stage, we were heading straight for the landmark building on an elevated section of urban highway. Despite our gesticulations, however, the driver took the wrong exit and dropped us at the entrance to the Old Town, maybe a ten-minute walk from our objective. It underlined a strong piece of advice for anyone visiting the city: if you're contemplating using the taxis (which, incidentally, are amazingly good value for money), always get somebody to write down your destination in Chinese.
We eventually made it back to base, the rain thankfully still at the spits & spots stage. Deciding that we'd done enough walking for one day and seeking a break from Oriental cuisine, we had dinner in the hotel's excellent in-house Italian restaurant. It was particularly incongruous for me, having just completed a four-night stay in the country.