Friday, August 29, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Shanghai
Fat baby and friendly dad in antique town Shanghai. That area is bad, but the streets nearby it are really cool. If you just walk east -- or probably in any direction (actually west was good, too) -- there are tons of "real" streets, with real neighborhoods. We ended up walking down into this bird/animal and plant market, where they sold fighting crickets, and birds in 19th century wooden cages like an old Garcia Marquez setting, and men and women both played poker, and it seemed like probably nobody ever left. Then we hit a street with lots of interesting but not quite appetizing food - except for the man who ran the shop selling fruits and fruit juices. Good business model. Fruits out front - fresh - and in the back, get the fruits blended up on the cheap. Then we saw a huge park, Shanghai street basketball, then the tourist area, then an amazing cheap eating area near that. Then we went home.
The second picture is a gross dish. A Shanghai specialty, I have been led to believe. I don't know. A thick orange goo of oil with fried tofu skins containing soft delicious (well, not gross) tofu. But we couldn't eat it. We could drink the 3 yuan Suntory beers (big bottles), which came to like 50 cents or less. But the place was gross. And the longer we stayed the more it seemed like a bad idea to be there. Some young gangsters, like our age, sat in the back. The waitress hated us. One of them.
Shanghai!
I love Shanghai. This was our first day. That morning we'd flown in from Beijing. The previous night we had stayed in Beijing at my friend Frank's house, after having made the bus trip from Tianjin to Beijing. We were a little worn out. But Shanghai was sunny with blue skies.
Not that we were in the highest spirits. It was early afternoon, our first full day in China, and we hadn't sorted our accommodations for the night. But we soon figured it out, and found ourselves overwhelmed (in a good way) by the culture shock of being somewhere so incredibly different than Japan.
It was still our first day, so we had no idea what was really going on, but everything seemed shocking and exciting.
Tianjin Port
After over 2 full days at sea, we arrived in China around 2 pm of the third day. You could sense the proximity to China when, even upon waking and going outside on the morning of the third day, the air and water quality seemed a bit worse. I don't think it was an illusion.
The massive Tianjin Port was so crowded that our ship had to wait in a queue, it seemed. We stalled for a bit, then finally pulled in.
Immigration was a drag. I always get really nervous entering new countries, and this time they took me (and another guy) aside for further questioning. They took my passport to a backroom, which, oddly, we could kind of see from where we were standing, and we could tell that they were scrutinizing our passports, with magnifiers, I guess to authenticate them. But the process lasted for 45 minutes. We were just waiting. Actually, they were very friendly to us, but it was a bit unnerving, what with the beefed up security for the Olympics. I hadn't shaved in a few days and so I realized I must have looked potentially other than innocent. I will definitely shave when possible before entering strange countries from now on.
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