On Sunday most people on the eclipse tour were awakened at 4:30 to get ready for their trip to the airport. So were we, by mistake.\u00c2\u00a0 Flying to Beijing six days before the Olympics from a territory with “unrest” is probably not a quick trip through airport security. We, on the other hand, had the entire day to go back to the places we’d found interesting things and buy heavy fragile souvenirs. Our train left about 6:30, and merely forty-four hours later, after stopping only twenty times, we had moved 2500 miles across the country from Urumqi to Shanghai.<\/p>\n
The train had its disappointments. This is not a popular route, and especially not with soft-sleepers despite its long duration. The car was presumably old, which meant that there wasn’t as much room under the seat\/lower bunk for luggage; the electricity didn’t work in either of our compartments, and the air conditioning didn’t work diligently in Ray’s. We weren’t able to get into the same compartment: each of us was sharing one with a family which included a small kid who slept with his mother. The kids were incredibly cute, so it wasn’t so bad. And much of the scenery was pretty awesome.<\/p>\n
We arrived in Shanghai yesterday, and have gotten just a taste. Actually, two tastes, of pretty nice restaurants — we’re treating ourselves since it’s our last nights in China (except Hong Kong) and we’ve been in the Wild West for awhile. Last night, we went to the Whampoa Club, which is a view restaurant on the Bund. It had nice Art Deco styling, probably vintage 2003, and as we ate some competent fancy Shanghainese food, I was able to watch out over the Huangpu River at the buildings which had been turned into giant video screens, and at the brightly lit river cruise boats going back and forth, and even at a huge orange crane directly in front of the window working on a road construction project of some sort. Ray was facing the other direction, so he missed out.<\/p>\n
Some of the dishes included a martini glass filled with chopped tofu and preserved egg, little baskets with minced pigeon and pear, hot and sour soup with lobster, smoked fish, and red-cooked eel and pork. Dessert was a delightful mango and grapefruit “soup”.<\/p>\n
But tonight’s dinner, at Fu 1088, was the best meal we’ve had this entire trip. Every room in this three-story Victorian house has only one table; the private dining is quite nice. It started with a tea smoked egg, and drunken chicken, which were served at the same time; then there were two strange but delicious soups, one involving bamboo pith, and the other squid roe. We had king prawns in chili sauce, poached spinach sprouts, and a very unusual but tasty preparation of “monkey head mushrooms with crispy milk and oat flakes”. Dessert was black sesame tiramisu, and a glutinous rice ball in pear syrup.<\/p>\n
On the way back from dinner, a block from our hotel, we encountered a fish market on the sidewalk, in front of a restaurant.\u00c2\u00a0 Presumably we could have picked anything from the tubs and had it cooked up inside.\u00c2\u00a0 There were several weird-looking things, including some white “sea vegetable”, lamprey eels, various clams and snails, squids and squid accessories (ie roe sacs), and many fish.\u00c2\u00a0 There were also frogs and a couple of guinea fowl.\u00c2\u00a0 If we’d stayed here longer it would have been nice to eat this way one night.\u00c2\u00a0 A couple of young Chinese helped us figure out what some of the items were, and explained that tomorrow they were going to the US consulate to apply for visas for a trade show in Chicago in November where they would sell their medical packaging equipment (used to fill capsules, put pills between plastic and aluminum foil, etc.)\u00c2\u00a0 We told them to bring warm clothes.<\/p>\n
Today we found that the contemporary art had been moved from the main art museum into its own new separate museum. There was one piece there which featured an eclipse, which we thought was pretty special. We happened to meet the manager of the museum in the cafe, who pointed out the solo exhibition the artist of the piece is currently having, in a cute little art ghetto in which many old warehouses have been turned into galleries like, say, in the Mission, or in Bethnal Green.\u00c2\u00a0 We went there and met the manager, and saw many other examples of this guy’s work.<\/p>\n
The place we’re staying merits description as well.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s called the “New Harbor Apartments” and it came from Expedia.\u00c2\u00a0 The rooms really are apartments, with kitchen and living room and bedroom, and you get to take your own wash to the laundry room and put it in the machine and get it back in two hours rather than a day and a half as in full service hotels.\u00c2\u00a0 Even allowing the exorbitant Internet rate, it’s about $90 a night which is cheap for a big city, especially a location which is right in the center of town.<\/p>\n
In Beijing and a few other places, we’ve handed a taxi driver the place we wanted to go, written in Chinese, and he said “No.”\u00c2\u00a0 We don’t have the language skills to find out why he said no — was it because we were Western?\u00c2\u00a0 because he wasn’t familiar with how to get there?\u00c2\u00a0 because he didn’t want to be in that kind of traffic?\u00c2\u00a0 because he was illiterate and couldn’t read the Chinese writing?\u00c2\u00a0 We’ll never know.\u00c2\u00a0 Anyway, at one point I thought of a tactic to deal with this and we had an opportunity to use it today.\u00c2\u00a0 When we handed the “Take me to New Harbor Apartments” card to a taxi driver and he said no, I asked Ray to take a picture of the placard with his photo and number on it.\u00c2\u00a0 He immediately said yes.\u00c2\u00a0 Try that if it happens to you.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow we leave for Seoul, and we’ll experience the glory of the longest maglev train in the world, which attains speeds of 430 km\/h on a seven-minute, twenty-second ride to the Shanghai airport. We’ll let you know how exciting it was, as well as the trip on China Southern Airlines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Sunday most people on the eclipse tour were awakened at 4:30 to get ready for their trip to the airport. So were we, by mistake.\u00c2\u00a0 Flying to Beijing six days before the Olympics from a territory with “unrest” is probably not a quick trip through airport security. We, on the other hand, had the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}