Tongli was more or less a bust, a dead town turned into a tourist trap that’s expensive and a pain to get to. It sucked, and I got rained on, but extended leisure was good for me. I returned to Shanghai with my brain feeling a lot less like something that might get its picture on a box of cigarettes, and got back into the tourist vibe. I have more pictures than words about the rest of the trip, which you can see some of here (as well as a quick impression of Tongli here). Shanghai is a city I could live in if I spoke any Mandarin. Who knows…
Tag Archives: china
Shanghai
God, what a city. My friend Eve asked me to rank each city I had visited on a scale of 1 to pineapple, pineapple being, obviously, ideal. Pixian is a squash of some sort, Chengdu is a nice tangerine, and Shanghai is a straight-up honeycrisp apple (off the charts, if you’re not following. It might have just been a me and Eve thing).
After my last night in Chengdu with Johnny and his friends, I slept about four hours and then in fits on the plane. The first thing that happened, staggering into Shanghai, was I met a bunch of Canadians. Small world, hey? I was sharing my hostel room with 5 of them, and there were 5 more next door (side note on hostels: I’ve stayed in a grand total of 6 in my life now, and liked one of them). Anyway, we decided that the thing to do was of course to get drunk. Recall that I was one day out of Pixian at this point and getting drunk was still definitely in my ballpark. Down the street from the hostel was a convenience store where you could buy nothing but cigarettes and Tsingtao. At this store, beer cost about 60 cents a bottle.
Well.
I made some friends that night. One of them was an early riser named Diego, who wanted to go to the Shanghai Museum the next morning. It was on my list as well, and I figured I ought to go with company while I had the chance. The crew of Canadians was leaving at the end of Sunday, and as Diego had said pointedly a few times, they still didn’t have train tickets. Diego struck me as the long-suffering leader of the very raggedy group, and was frustrated in the extreme by no one wanting to get up in the morning to go to the museum. After another four-hour sleep, just he, I, and another guy, Brian, were off. We got “pancakes” at little spot on the way that I’m not sure whether to call a restaurant or a street vendor. It was set in a building, but had about four square feet of floor space. The woman inside seemed comfortable enough, and made what I think is my new favourite street food. I went back twice. The pancakes were really a sort of fried wrap thing with eggs in them and bacon and spicy red pepper sauce and hhhhhaauuuuugh. China is great in that way, the street food and cheap little restaurants are always amazing.
We ought,” Diego mentioned, “to get on those train tickets.” Brian nodded and gazed thoughtfully into the distance.
The museum had cool things in it, but I was at maybe 8 hours of sleep total and a fair bit of alcohol in the past couple of days, so a lot of them scared me. Even now, though, they’re pretty creepy:
As we left the museum, Brian got some texts from the rest of the group. They had woken up, apparently, and gone to get lunch at a very famous dumpling restaurant. They had a half hour wait ahead of them, but if we went to meet them, we would be just in time to not have to wait. Things were working out the way they rarely did, I thought, not knocking on wood. When we got to our meeting point, the crew were nowhere to be found. Diego made some calls, frequently repeating “where” and “train tickets”. They had already eaten. We had noodles at the nearest restaurant, which turned out, in true Shanghai style, to be quite good. There were also some good walks taken during and after this quest for lunch.
“Guys, we need to get train tickets.”
At this point, I thought we had spent more time talking about buying train tickets than actually doing it could possibly take. I was wrong. Around an hour later, I left the group at a ticket office, trying to figure out who had brought ID and money with which to purchase tickets, and who had not, apparently hoping the tickets might be free. Often, on this trip, I’ve wished I had other people with me. One is probably too few for this kind of thing, but now I also have a handle on a number that’s definitely too many.
I didn’t do much else interesting that day, being pretty close to dead on my feet. Things had gone a little bit too Fear and Loathing, and it was time to get my life back under control. I went to Mao Livehouse, a music venue that is apparently pretty hip. There weren’t many people there, probably thanks to it being Sunday, and there were just a few people playing some acoustic Chinese/American hybrid music to an early close. I got some new stickers, so that was cool.
The next day, I would head to Suzhou for a bit of R&R.
Chengdu and Pixian
Pixian is a suburb of Chengdu that I heard a few people refer to as “the country” despite it having a population density higher than you could find anywhere in the Maritimes. There in Pixian is Chengdu Technological University, and there at CTU was me, this past month, and not much else besides. I had expected to be somewhat closer to Chengdu proper, but just go ahead and add that to the list of things I had expected. What Pixian did have in spades, I will say, is cake. There was a bakery a couple of blocks down from the hotel I was living in that made all kinds of things I liked, but especially this cake that tasted like vanilla pudding. It was, I think, my primary source of lipids in China, because I could get roughly a pound of cake for around two dollars, and cookies and things too.
Chengdu was a much more interesting town. On the weekends, I would go in there for a couple of nights and look around. There were too many disjointed things happening to tell a non-rambling story about it, but there are some pictures up on Tumblr.
It may shock you to learn that when I was in high school, I skipped more than a few classes. I think the statute of limitations has expired on this by now. The thing is, I had so many classes that I gained absolutely nothing from, that were just a waste of my valuable youth. My old friend Simon was a particularly good class skipping buddy, and I still remember laying in the grass outside the Charlottetown Mall, eating licorice and looking at the sky with him. It was one of those perfect moments, the kind of genuine happiness that comes in a year a number of times you can count on your fingers. Besides that, I really think I learned more of lasting value on those days than I would have in class. Coleridge knows what I mean (“Lines Written at a Small Distance from My House, and Sent By My Little Boy to the Person to Whom They Are Addressed”):
One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.
My second Friday of teaching was the nicest day weather-wise of my entire stay. If you were talking to me at the time, you know that I was still really struggling to teach effectively. If not, what you need to understand is that these students did not speak English. Maybe a little, but to boil it down to a yes or no, no. When the sun came out in the afternoon, I thought about laying in the grass and looking at the sky. The grass that day finally looked green in the sunlight, not the grey-brown I thought it was. You can guess the rest of this story, I think. We spent that afternoon on a soccer field, to which the students brought snacks and beer and a kite like they were drilled on it twice daily. That made me some more friends among the students, which got me to a bar called Helen’s in Chengdu that weekend, where beer is just 100% free between 9:00 and 10:00 (aka how many beers can you drink in an hour). I feel like this afternoon outside was the best decision I made in my entire time in China.
The line for free beer forms on the right. Also on the left and in the middle. There are no lines in China.