On Shanghai

Shanghai is one of those cities most people know about. I first learned about Shanghai from the letters of C. S. Lewis to his brother. We didn't have much time, just an afternoon really, to sight see. So we walked the Bund. The Bund reminds me of Guangzhou's Shamian Island on a more massive scale except less colorful. There aren't really any buildings the color of creams. There weren't a lot of trees.

Nanjing Road, the pedestrian shopping street, was nice. It is, without contest, better than Guangzhou's and Chengdu's shopping streets. And the actual road and storefronts is better than Wangfujing in Beijing. Wangfujing is rather bland on the outside, but for actual shopping Wangfujing probably takes the prize.

A surprising thing was so many hotels not taking foreigners. We weren't on holiday so we stayed at a Chinese budget hotel chain. Turns out only two or three of the hotels were approved by the PSB to register foreigners for the night. In the end we found a hotel close to Ikea.

Shanghai struck me as a more sprawling city. More so than Guangzhou. Less so, perhaps, than Beijing. I admit though, that we didn't spend any time at all in Pudong, so I suppose we weren't really in the heart of the city.

Shanghairen are polite. The subway was better than Beijing's. Living in Xidan, a stop away from Tiananmen East, I was on Beijing's Line One. Which is rather old. And if I had to go eastwards during daytime, I was always subjected to two human waves of migrant workers and their families getting on at Tiananmen's two stops. So perhaps I'm prejudiced against Beijing's great subway.

The food in Shanghai is decent. The bookstore was nice, but I'd rank it third after Guangzhou at second and Beijing's at first. Shanghai is supposed to have a decent chain of private bookstores, as opposed to Xinhua the state run chain. I didn't get a chance to visit one of these. I'm also not sure if they have a Bookworm or not--not that Bookworms are any good as bookstores.

Still Beijing with it's state run foreign bookstore on Wangfujing, and the private bookstore in the mall around the China World Trade Center struck me as far superior. I hear it said, that most of the publishing houses limit their foreign book distribution to Shanghai. This might be the case. There were some Penguin Classics translated into Chinese. Something I hadn't seen before, but all the imported books seemed standard. They did have more Tuttle books than most. They did have copies of the Jin Ping Mei translated for sale. Something I hadn't seen before.

The taxis were efficient. One of the car models was a nice roomy VW faux SUV. Not as comfortable as Hong Kong's purpose built cabs, but the best I've seen on the mainland.

The train station was impressive. We came into the station just by the east airport. Nanjing's train station was also impressive. But I suppose that's the problem in China. The infrastructure is impressive and the private sector is treated like a ginger stepchild. Shanghai is notorious for this. More than 70% of Shanghai GDP comes from government controlled enterprises. And I got the sense that budget hotels weren't approved to register foreigners more to limit their ability to compete than my ability to stay where I damned well pleased. 

Anyways, those are my unedited thoughts on the topic.