Shanghai Photos - 2

Shanghai Photos - 1

China or the Nation at the Center of the Earth - Shanghai

After another day at sea during which I attended some really interesting lectures on early twentieth century Chinese history and on the state (read fate) of journalism today we arrived off the coast of Shanghai Saturday morning.

Shanghai is located on the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtze and is the biggest city in Asia.  We started up the Yangtze Saturday morning and did not reach Shanghai until mid afternoon.  All the while, we passed miles and miles of container ports, shipyards, power plants and docks.  The rivers were clogged with traffic.   We joined an endless line of ships, mostly container ships, going upriver while another seemingly endless line of ships passed going downriver.  Buildings, many of them high-rises, sprawled in all directions to the horizon.  It wasn't so much an actual horizon as much as until they disappeared in the smoggy mist.   If the air quality was this bad after a weeklong national holiday, what would it look like on a normal day?  Pea soup?  My sinuses burned and I had coughing fits the whole week we were in Chinese air.

We docked mid afternoon and as soon as the Chinese officials cleared the ship for debarkations, Michael and I took a shuttle bus to Shanghai Old Town for a quick walk around before our last dinner on the ship. 

We passed the old International Concession, the Bund (the former European financial district), and the French Concession and stopped in the Old Town where the Shanghai Chinese lived during the period of foreign domination.  From the 1830's to the late 1930's the British, French and Americans had enclaves in Shanghai and other Chinese cities.  After the Chinese lost the Opium wars in the early 1800's they were forced to accept treaties giving foreigners rights to set up exclusive economic zones in many of their coastal cities.  Shanghai became the western influenced "Paris of the Orient."

In recent years, the Chinese government has established special economic zones in Shanghai and other Chinese cities.  Shanghai has regained its reputation for glitz and glamor, but this time the Chinese are in charge.  The Old Town is old China as envisioned by entrepreneurs looking to make a Yuan Renmimbi from the tourists.  As the daylight faded, the old style buildings lit up with strings of multicolored lights.  Men and women hawked their wares from shop fronts and Michael and I were approached every few feet by shady looking characters offering designer watches and handbags.  When we made it back to the shuttle bus, the guide assured us that the Chinese make the best designer knock-offs in the world!

There are, actually, some historic sites in the Old Town but we sure didn't see them on that first visit.

We debarked promptly at 8:30 am the next morning.  Michael had arranged for a private guide to give us a four-hour tour of Shanghai.  She was waiting for us on the pier as we left the ship.  The tour desk people had advised us not to leave luggage in a taxi so our first stop was the Radisson Hotel, Shanghai.  Taxis proved to be cheap.  Our guide, she said her American name was Mary, called a taxi for each stop.  We found another when we were finished at each site.  The total cost was less than $20.00 American.

Our tour took us back to the Old Town with its maze of alleys and cobblestone lanes. Most of the tourists, and there were lots of them, were Chinese from outside Shanghai.   There were long lines at the noodle shops.  We crossed an historic zigzag bridge to the Yu Yuan Gardens.

The gardens were crowded as they always are but not as packed as they would become later in the day.

The gardens are actually an estate built in the 1600's by a Chinese court functionary.  They were later expanded and embellished by subsequent owners.    The interior settings and the landscaped courtyards were stunningly beautiful. At one point, we walked through a windowed passageway.  Each window had been carefully set so that it showed a vista reminiscent of a classical Chinese painting.  I took lots of pictures.

Next, we visited the Jade Buddha Temple.  It is famous for its rare statues of Buddha each carved from a single piece of white Burmese jade.  Our guide explained how Buddhism is practiced in China.  This is different in some ways from Japan or Korea.  The practice also differs somewhat from what I had seen in Singapore and Vietnam last January.  Nonetheless, the similarities outweigh the differences.  I took many pictures here, too but none of the jade Buddhas.  No pictures are allowed.  The temple is in actual use.  It has an adjacent seminary that, according to our guide, houses about 100 monks.  At the beginning of the hour, in this case 11 am, we could hear them chanting in the distance.

We got another taxi and drove  across the river (actually under the river in a long tunnel) to the new area of Pudong.  This is a glitzy high-rise city area that has been created in its entirety since 1990.  We saw the Oriental Pearl TV and radio tower that has become the symbol of the new Shanghai.  Once the tallest building in Asia it is now only the third tallest.  Nearby are the tallest, the World Financial Centre at 1600 ft, and the Jin Mao building, the second tallest at 88 stories.  We went to the promenade next to a huge convention center for a view across the river to the Bund, the historic European designed former financial center of Asia.

We finished the tour at the Taipinqiao shopping and restaurant area.  This is a former traditional residential area that has been redeveloped to house a variety of Chinese and International restaurants and shops.  After a quick look around, we returned to our hotel to rest.

Michael and I were pleasantly surprised by our hotel room.  The hotel upgraded us to a suite on the twenty seventh floor overlooking Peoples Park.  It was super luxurious with electronic controls for everything including a shade in a window between the bathroom and the bedroom.

We lunched at a noodle shop I discovered in the guidebook we had brought.  We ordered by pointing at the menu items.  No one spoke English. 

Later we walked about a mile along a pedestrian mall that led to the Bund and the riverside. There were crowd of people everywhere.  After a leisurely walk long the raised esplanade, we took a side street back to the hotel.  That walk was most interesting.  We passed through a neighborhood of nothing but electrical supply stores.  There must have been at least a hundred stores, each run by what looked like family members.

Michael and I had dinner at a fancy restaurant recommended by the hotel concierge.  Here one waiter spoke some limited English.  Both meals we had in Shanghai were excellent.  We were sensible, ate only cooked food, and drank only bottled water.

We took an after dinner walk around Peoples Park.  The opera house had the most interesting architecture.  The government buildings looked like government buildings everywhere with the addition of soldiers standing at attention by all the entrances.

In the hotel suite, we admired the light show.  Many of the skyscrapers, the highways and public spaces were lit with cascades of colored lights.  Michael thought this a demonstration of conspicuous consumption, a testament to China's new wealth.  I had to agree.  Too bad the soot from all the power plants generating the electricity contributed to the haze that obscured the view in the distance.

Monday morning we took the maglev (magnetic levitation) train to the airport for our flight home.  The good part was that it was only an eight-minute ride to cover the twenty-mile distance to the airport.  The bad part was that we had to drive miles and miles through heavy morning traffic to get to the station in Pudong. The station had no elevators so Michael and I had to wrestle four pieces of luggage each up the escalators.  Our taxi driver had tried to tell us in Chinese, with hand motions,  that it would be quicker and less expensive for us to let him take us all the way to the airport.  He was right.  One cannot, however, pass up the chance to ride a fancy train.

The trip home was routine and long.  The most interesting thing at the Shanghai airport was the way the officials handled the crowds at immigration.  Chinese don't stand in lines.  They push ahead and are generally rude to everyone.  To maintain order we were all corralled into little pens of fifteen to twenty people.  The officials let out as immigration stations became available.  Strange, but it worked.

Altogether, it was a wonderful trip.  I experienced new and wonderful sights and events.  I have not written much about life on a cruise ship.  That would be a whole other topic.  I will only say, a person can get used to the luxurious life.

Beijing Photos - 2

Beijing Photos - 1

China or the Nation at the Center of the Earth

Part One

We arrived at Tianjin, the port of Beijing, China before dawn on Wednesday, October 6.  The first thing I saw when I looked out the cabin window was a large building wreathed in fog.  My sinuses were acting up.  It was clear that the haze was full of dirt and chemicals.

We weren't really in Tianjin. That city is located about ten miles inland.  We were, however, docked at a huge container port, even bigger than Busan.  The port was still under construction.  There were also a complete city, highways, train tracks and industrial sites under construction and hundreds of acres of swampland being filled in for more building sites.  The vastness of the project was overwhelming.

Michael and I had scheduled two full day tours, one to the Great Wall and the other to Beijing.  As a result, we spent two days traveling by bus three hours in each direction to and from the Beijing area.  The smog stayed thick the first day and lifted slightly the second day.  There was construction all the way to and in Beijing itself.  China is now using more construction cranes than any other place on earth.

Michael had heard from his friend Ray, two days ahead of us taking essentially the same route on the Seven Seas Navigator that the Navigator trip to the Great Wall never made it there as there was a several daylong traffic jam leading to Beijing.  There are many millions of newly prosperous people in China and they all want large automobiles.  These cars clog all the roads.  We heard stories of a recent ten-day traffic jam.

Fortunately, we did not see any major traffic tie-ups.  Our Chinese tour guide told us that the air was relatively clear and the traffic relatively light because China was nearing the end of a week long public holiday and most people were on vacation.

We stopped for a Chinese style lunch and shopping opportunity at a jade factory in Beijing before proceeding to the Great Wall.  One of my objections to the tours offered by the cruise line is that they ALWAYS include shopping opportunities.  It's probably how they negotiate a reasonable price (for them) for the tour.  I did find out that when traveling with a group including many grandmothers, shopping opportunities are for some the highlight of any tour.  Those grand kids are getting some strange gifts from Asia.

The Great Wall, or as our guide said the Chinese call it, the Long Wall was certainly great.  We went to one of the less visited but nonetheless busy sections northeast of Beijing.  We had been traveling for hours through the flat delta of the Yellow river.  Suddenly rounded mountains loomed.  Then we spotted the wall through the haze.  We Silver Seas tourists had several hours to look at and climb the wall.  I surprised myself by making it up to the first watchtower, a climb of about 400 feet steeply up.  The worn stone steps were tall and irregular.  I found the climbing difficult.  The view, when I finally made it, was impressive.  I kept saying to myself, "I'm on the Great Wall of China!"  Michael had scampered up ahead of me.  I found him sitting on the steps almost at the top of the climb, really, really exhausted.  He had momentarily forgotten that we had been at sea level for most of a month and he had lost his Colorado conditioning.

We repeated the long drive to Beijing again Thursday.  This time we got an early start and missed the traffic.  The drive was straightforward.  Beijing has ring roads and spoke roads so access to the inner city is relatively easy when there is little traffic.

The Forbidden City is a majestic monument to China's past.  I immensely enjoyed our several hour tour.  Traditionally the Chinese say that the Forbidden City has 9,999 rooms.  It is immense and we probably saw only a quarter of it.  At any time, a good portion of it is under renovation and is off-limits to tourists.

When we arrived at 9 am, the tourists were mostly foreigners.  By the time we left, shortly after 11, the place was becoming filled with wall-to-wall people, mostly Chinese on vacation.

Our next stop was supposed to have been Tienanmen Square.  The avenues surrounding the square were blocked off due to the national holiday.  We saw nothing of the square though the guide described what we should have been seeing.   Michael's blog at http://cbu-nrt.blogspot.com   describes our experience well.  I also agree with most of his comments and analysis about China.  They really do think they live at the center of the universe and everyone else is peripheral.

We drove across Beijing to a Swiss owned hotel for a buffet lunch featuring both Chinese and western food.  Michael and I of course opted for the Chinese dishes.  I had Peking Duck for the first time.  I found it rich and tasty.  It was interesting, and to me somewhat strange, that the servers served the men before recognizing women who were at the serving station first.  Chinese beer is good but their wine needs a lot of work.  Tea is as excellent, as expected.

Our visit to Beijing was to have concluded with a drive by and photo stop at the 2009 Olympic venues.  We circled the area but did not stop.  The guide's narration indicated that the Chinese government doesn't quite know what to do with the buildings.  They may tear them all down except for the "Bird's Nest" stadium and the "Water Cube."  The water cube will survive because of the swimming world records set there.  The stadium may be somehow re purposed.

Our two busloads of cruise passengers were taken instead to an unscheduled stop at a silk factory and another shopping opportunity.  A large number of Silver Shadow's guests objected.  We did get a portion of the tour cost back due to the missed locations.

Modern Beijing doesn't look like any Chinatown I have ever visited.  It resembles big cities everywhere except for the heavy smog and constant construction.  The Chinese living in the cities appear to be doing very well economically.  The young adults don't remember Mao or the Cultural Revolution.  They do know that they are expected to be a-political and concentrate on making money.  They have been taught that "real" Chinese history started in 1949 when Mao declared the "new China."  Except for believing in "luck" the young Chinese don't seem much connected to their history or culture.

Korea in Less than Four Hours

When the Silver Shadow sailed into Busan, formerly Pusan, I think I expected to see a beach resort.  For more than fifty years, Pusan has been an R & R site for U.S. troops stationed in Korea.  That is about all I knew about it aside from the tour book statement that it is a large container port.

It is definitely a large port.  We docked at a pier several miles from the city center.  The shuttle bus to the center of the city took us past a bustling seaport, huge shipyards busy building ships and many residential neighborhoods that look a lot like Chinatown in New York except that the signs in Korean don't look a lot like Chinese.

Although the cruise line offered a number of tours, most included temples and shrines in which were not particularly interested.  Nor were we interested in a tour of a porcelain factory.  Michael and I decided to do our own tour of central Busan on foot.  I think the experiences we have enjoyed most on this cruise have been our own explorations of how people live in the exotic cultures we have seen.  I definitely include the Alaskan ports in the exotic culture category

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The absolute highlight of the morning was our visit to the Busan fish market.  We saw more kinds of mostly live fish and seafood than I have ever seen in my life.  There were any number of fresh caught and dried fish for sale on the sidewalks for blocks surrounding the market.  The market itself occupied a two-story building that seemed half a mile long.  Tanks of wriggling creatures met the eye in every direction.  I think the live sea slugs were the creepiest.  Many fish I could not identify, nor would I have any idea how to prepare them.  There was a restaurant area on the second floor along the windows facing the bay.  It had very low tables and benches that were barely above floor level.  Camera shy women worked at stalls along the aisle.  They were setting up shop for the lunch crowd, busily slicing, dicing, and dropping fish parts into kettles and pans.  Had it been later in the day I might have been tempted to have lunch there.  I have included a photo of some shopkeepers lunching over the live fish.

Several blocks in from the main drag was a huge multi block open-air market.  Vendors on each street block sold similar items from storefronts that were more like booths than proper stores.  I remarked to Michael that it looked like an open-air Wal-Mart.  He replied, "Where do you think Wal-Mart gets its stuff?"  It's true.  The goods for sale looked exactly like those found in U.S. discount stores.  I didn't see anything less expensive than it would have been in the U.S. except for some Rolexes and Calvin Kline, Gucci and the like knock-off merchandise.  Later I saw a number of fellow cruise passengers toting high-end merchandise packages back to the ship. I hope whatever they bought doesn't fall apart the first time they wear it.

In Japan, souvenir merchandise was mostly labeled "made in China."  In Korea, not so much.  The Korean gift items were better quality than the Japanese China-made items.  The open air market wasn't as much a tourist trap as a market selling to locals.  I enjoyed watching the food vendors set up and the men with push carts of produce.  One of them just about ran over Michael.  He was not about to yield to any pedestrian.

We visited the Busan Tower, an observation point in a park on a hill in the center of downtown Busan.  The views from thirty storys up were spectacular.  In every  land direction we saw a city of very modern buildings surrounded by miles of high rise apartments.  The skyscrapers, the container port, the shipyards were massive.  Next to the tower, there was a museum of world musical instruments.  It is a small gem.  We especially (Michael especially) enjoyed playing various drums and marimba like instruments

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Korea was far less polite and regimented than Japan.  It, too, is very prosperous.  The Koreans are much more influenced by American culture.  The shuttle bus back to the ship had a video of a Korean Shakira singing and gyrating over and over.

Our visit was much too short to make any real judgments.  I would, however, like to go back and see more of the country.