Und der Herr sprach...

Everyday adventure - Shanghai

Hi everyone! Shanghai is huge! And I have never seen so many people at the same time! It is loud and sometimes it’s very stinky. If I say adventure I really mean adventure in a Life-risking way! But you will get that when I tell some stories about my first week in shanghai. I arrived last Tuesday at Pudong Airport. Through the customs and out. The customs actually are no big deal as long as you have a visa. Some guys from India or somewhere else right in front of us didn’t have one so we had to wait for some time. J Outside we (my colleague and me) went to a taxi rank and tried to get a taxi. After a few minutes waiting (at an international airport) a taxi came and we got in! “To the Sports Hotel please”. Sounds easy for me. But if you can’t speak a word English it is a big thing. Good thing that I printed out the address in Chinese. So we started off to city and hopefully to our hotel. Big street with 5 lanes in both directions. Never make the mistake and go by taxi on the front passenger seat! They drive like hell here. “Don’t use the break! Use the horn instead!” We then arrived, still alive but with grey hair, at our hotel. The took us 60 minutes and we had to pay 160 RMB (~16 Euro). Taxis are very cheap. You can get everywhere in Shanghai for a few Euros. But you have to have strong nerves. ;-) In the evening we had dinner then with our colleagues from the Chinese office. I ate lotus flowers, dried fish and chicken claws. The taste was quite interestingly. I have to advance my ability to eat with chop sticks. That was a big problem to eat with the sticks without loosing half of the food on the way or getting a cramp in the fingers. After the dinner we made a Shanghai-Fast-Taxi-Bar-Sightseeing-Tour. We went to at least 6 places all over Shanghai. That was great fun and now I have the business cards of these places. That is still necessary for me to get where I want. You show the address on the card to the taxi driver and there you go! I tried it by saying the name of the streets. No way! The first taxi driver didn’t even try to understand me so I took out the card again. The second one took me to a street that sounds similar for me but wasn’t the one I wanted to go to. So I had to show him on a map. The detour cost me 10 RMB (~1 Euro) so it was OK! Wednesday: Office day! In the evening we went to a good Chinese restaurant and ate Peking duck. After that we went into a club “viproom”. Good location. Loud and good music! Thursday: Fake market! That was a funny experience. You have to haggle like there is no morning. Example: Price tagged for a tie – 380 RMB. In the end my colleague bought 6 ties for 300 RMB. But if you know the prices it is fun! You can get everything there. Bags, watches, sunnies, DVDs, …! The clerks only now 5 to 10 words English: “Wanna buy bags? Watches? Many, many cheap! Gucci! Rolex!” If you haggle you doing that with a calculator. They type a price – you do! And so on… After the market and DVD shopping (~0,8 Euro each) we went to Dragon Fly! A really good massage studio. One Hour foot massage! Ahhhhhh! Great! From there we went to Hong Kong Plaza. There you can buy Electronics for cheap. But you have to haggle! ;-) At 7.00 p.m. I met the landlord and moved in my apartment. Right after that we went out again. Friday: This day we walked a lot. Pudong, Nanjing Road, Fake market and Huaihai Road. Saturday and Sunday: Now that I am alone for the first time here in Shanghai I completed to unpack my luggage. I tried to switch the air condition on. The remote control is labelled in Chinese so it took me 10 minutes to make it run and to set the right temperature. ;-) This morning I went to Starbucks to have breakfast. Good to have starbucks here and it is only 2 minutes away from my office and on the way from my flat to the office! Excellent! Then I went to IKEA! Yes, they have Ikea here. I bought heaps of clothes hangers and some other stuff. That’s it for now. One more thing you really have to know in Shanghai! Be careful crossing streets. Even if you have green light the cars turning right are still driving if the have red light or not. So you can sometimes see that there are like 100 people crossing a road and at the same time 5 cars pave the way through the crowd. Ok! Enough for now! To be continued… Some more photos are up! Click here

posted by Arne @ 4:01 am