Long march

I woke up this morning and for the first time couldn't be bothered being in China. It's really only because I had a tantrum-inducing never-ending metro journey home last night, when my feet were already sore from a couple hours of exploring the streets around my office. Let's just say it was partly my fault, partly Shanghai's. At a metro station halfway home I could not for the life of me find the connection to the next metro line, so took a metro back where I'd started from, glowering at the metro map which I decided was a LIAR, all the while being stared at by a middle-aged Chinese man with long fingernails who was probably wondering why the laowai (foreigner) was so grumpy. Then I may have taken the next metro in the wrong direction, which didn't brighten my evening. Anyway, five metros and an hour and a half after leaving the office I arrived back at my hostel, three kilometres away. And went to bed in a sulk.

But in a few hours I'll put on more comfortable shoes, get back on the metro, and it'll be fun again.

So I started work yesterday, here's my building - my newsroom is on the 38th floor:

It was a hot, hot morning, I arrived at the office sweaty and unglamorous. Over the day the smog/rainclouds closed in, so the high-rises for miles around disappeared, one by one. Surprisingly, I don't notice the smog as something horrible to breathe, the air smells different to New Zealand but doesn't feel dirty. Here's a photo from the office, to be fair taken through a dirty window, but you can still see the smog:

I have no idea how far back the high-rises stretch - miles, I'd guess. But on the ground around my office, the Jing'an neighbourhood, it doesn't feel like you're in a metropolis. There are old-style brick Chinese houses, only two or three stories high, which have mostly been knocked down in the rest of the city. There are also gardens and men selling dumplings on the street, and lots of little restaurants and clothes boutiques.. which I didn't take photos of. But here's a photo of where I had lunch:

A little restaurant in an alleyway off Weihai Road, the "media" street my office is on. I had walked past fancier places but they were so packed, I couldn't face going in. At this place I just asked for rice and they loaded it up with lots of yum vegetables and mystery meats. I had a real "oh my god I'm in China" moment here, it was nice. However, I've been banned going back by my Chinese friend Lydia, who says this kind of place is dirty. Oh well.

Work itself was okay, everybody's really nice but I don't have much to do yet. The editors are keen for me to connect with the expat community, which the mostly Chinese newspaper staff doesn't have a strong bond with. However, as Rachel Hunter might say, that won't happen overnight. It's quite good then, that next week is a national holiday, Golden Week - the office is mostly closed and I'll have a chance to connect with some laowais.

The lovely Lydia, who is a business reporter at the Shanghai Daily, took me out to dinner for a Shanghai specialty, fried dumplings with a meatball and lots of delicious juice inside them. They were the best thing I've tasted here so far, although quite perilous to eat. They're so yummy and popular, there was a line outside the door and people bagsing our table while we were halfway through dinner.

My dumplings and curry soup. That isn't Lydia, she wouldn't let me take a picture of her, it's some random lady across the table from us.

The dumplings being made.

After dinner we wandered along Nanjing Road West, the second-swankiest shopping street in Shanghai, lined with giant department stores and fancy western luxury shops like Bally, Loewe, and, er, Marks and Spencer. Back in Shanghai's 1920s heyday Nanjing Road was called Bubbling Well Road, and was lined with the mansions of obscenely rich Europeans and their equally obscenely rich Chinese business partners. I'll go back with my camera soon and find some remaining mansions from this time.

Bonus photo: a stuffed toy shop stuffed with stuffed toys near the office that made me laugh.

Super(marche)

Did I mention Shanghai was once known as the Paris of the Orient? The occasional strong-urine wafts are not the only thing which put me in a French frame of mind here:

This is a supermarket ten minutes' walk from my hostel in Wuning Road, it's painted as Paris on the front, the Cote d'Azur on the other. Check out the teeny-tiny people and motos below the Eiffel Tower to get an idea of the scale - it's five stories high.

To get to the supermarket you cross a Chinese version of Paris' Pont Alexandre III bridge, lanterns, white columns, gold statuary and all.

Inside the supermarket was a whole bunch of fun stuff:

Meat!

Meat jenga!

There were also live fish in tanks, but I got told off for trying to take a photo of them.

Pretty dried stuff in baskets

Big vats of dried rice with interesting bits and pieces mixed in

50% mysterious generic alcohol for $2

A whole aisle of different types of dried mushroom

I also ordered and ate my first Chinese meal in a restaurant in the supermarket complex - milestone! It involved a phrase book, some pointing, and the result was a rather spicy Chinese interpretation of Vietnamese pho. Yum! Also, a man smiled at said "ni hao" to me, made a nice change from the usual furtive-glance-then-ignore.

It's so hot tonight, which makes walking outside pleasant, at dinnertime the streets were just as bustling and noisy as daytime, but the lights made everything quite pretty.

Barbershop poles, Shanghai-style! Almost tempting to get a haircut, until you read this: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=483718&type=Metro#

That's a story from the paper I start work at tomorrow morning. Will be nice to be in a newsroom again, it's kind of odd not knowing what's happening in the city/country - the hostel has no TV.

All right, this uploading photos malarkey takes a fair amount of time on hostel wifi, better go now and figure out where my office is and what I'm going to report on.

Oh all right, one more.

Grafitti outside my hostel

I'm loving it

It's 24 hours since I landed in Shanghai - here's what I've been up to.

Landing at Pudong airport was quite bizarre - it's surrounded by fields and then a wall of smog, it was eerie not knowing where the city was, if it was just behind the grey haze 50 metres away. I got picked up by one of the Shanghai Daily reporters, Wing Tan, and we drove the hour into the city. Yes, turns out Pudong airport is way in the wops.

On the ride in I saw in the flesh many of the landmarks I'd only seen in pictures - the Oriental Pearl tower, the "bottle opener" financial centre (more below), the red upside-down pyramid of China's expo building. The city's absolutely huge, with towering apartment and office blocks from horizon to horizon, but I think most is commuter suburbia, with the CBD proper being smaller, but still massive.

After landing at my hostel, I went for a jet lag wander in search for food, and I'm afraid, reader, I succumbed completely to stereotype.

So I can report a Big Mac tastes just as delicious to the weary traveller in Shanghai as it does anywhere on earth.

Never fear, breakfast next day was back on track:

Yummy dumplings and fried bread things with pickled vegetable (I assume) slivers at my hostel. You'll notice a knife and fork however, I'm still semi wimping out.

As I was up before dawn (jet lag) I decided to head off to the centre of town early to walk around. My hostel is in Putuo, which is just outside the CBD, and I felt I hadn't really seen Shanghai. It seems, however, like there's no real centre of the city - every second street is a shopping street, some bigger than others. There's People's Square, which I haven't seen yet, and the Bund riverfront area, but there doesn't seem to be a defining Lambton Quay-like street that the CBD activity is built around.

Here's some stuff I saw this morning in the Bund, the riverfront which was the swanky port area in 1920s Shanghai, when it was in the international (British) concession.

Photo to illustrate traffic - look at this photo and then imagine every second moto driver is has their horn set to "permanently on". Cars stop at traffic crossings, but not bikes or motos, so you have to just barge in amongst the cross traffic. In the background is the Oriental Pearl tower - I'm approaching the river.

Ta da! This is Pudong, the financial area just across the river from the Bund. So the photo doesn't really capture it, it was quite cloudy/smoggy as you can see, but the buildings are only about 100 metres away from where I was standing and they're huge! The tallest building is the Oriental Pearl TV tower. At the back to the right you can just see the top of the financial centre building, which has a big hole in the top, apparently according to Feng Shui this lets the bad wind through. It's the tallest building in Shanghai, half a kilometre tall, and the world's third tallest building I think.

Then you turn 180 degrees and right behind you is the Bund, where you can see buildings that were formerly elite British drinking clubs, HQs of foreign trading companies and customs buildings. The tallest building is the Bank of China building, and to the right of it is the former headquarters of opium traders Jardine Matheson. History wahey!

Not Chairman Mao, as I originally thought, but general Chen Yi. Thanks internet!

The clouds cleared slightly for a second

So then I wandered in the few streets back from the Bund, here's some stuff I saw:

Bamboo scaffolding

Nice old guy mending and selling shoes

Every second footpath is crammed with parked motos - this one seemed to be held together with sellotape

I'm still too freaked out to go into most shops, this one was colourful enough for me to stick my head in for a photo though

A typical shopping street - like Paris, there's plane trees lining lots of roads - I guess Shanghai was the "Paris of the Orient" when some of them were planted, although they're actually quite small come to think of it.

Trinity Cathedral, known as "Red Temple" - I couldn't figure out how to get in. There was a hilarious security guard near the gate who was lolling asleep in his chair, but he kept waking up just as I went to take a picture of him. There's lots of green in the city centre - I'd often come across tiny parks or tree-lined streets.

Mmm... grandmothers

"Golden Cage" - now a bank, once home to the captive concubines of a colourful Chinese entrepreneur, according to my guide book. Should that be gilded cage?

Huge Gap ad - sure, that's how I imagine Manchester in 1969...

Giant Apple shop - full of people testing out iPads. Also the scene of me not being able to find the metro stop for half an hour and getting increasingly unglamorously sweaty. There was a huge metro train smash yesterday, 240 people hurt apparently, so line 10 was closed. Which also led to me getting a replacement bus through the Bund area for part of my metro trip - really need to learn the word for "excuse me" when getting of bus, I only know "xiexie", thank you. Thank you for getting out of the way!

Yep, it's China!

OK you've probably had a photo overload now, and I have to figure out how to get food - help!

Middle Earth to Middle Kingdom and other cliches

I'm going to Shanghai tonight. It'll be hot, it'll be frantic, the food will be great, the language will be a...challenge - in other words, I have no idea what to expect. I can't wait, I'm terrified, I've hardly thought further than arriving at my hostel. I'm leaving with cliches, let's see what I find.

Many thanks to the Asia New Zealand foundation - Charles Mabbett and Rebecca Palmer in particular - for creating and funding this opportunity. Without this scholarship I doubt I ever would have visited China, and I'm really grateful.

Thanks also to Katie Foley, my friend, ex-colleague and Shanghai alumnus - I'd be much more of a frenzied mess if not for your advice and cheerleading. Xiexie!

See you on the other side!