Shanghai

Social networking sites are hard to access in China: so I email Tony and he uploads

Expo

Shanghai is hosting the Expo next year, which means that right now the whole of Shanghai is getting ready. Roadworks, building works, ripped up streets etc as she gets ready to put on her best dress. This means that the olafactory assault is massive. At most points in time, I can’t identify what we are intaking as animal, vegetable or mineral. Often, I think it is the mineral, industrial, possibly toxic stuff that turns my stomach. Shanghai ’s greatest attraction is The Bund it is a beautiful promonade, so the guide books tell us. We have tried and tried again, but it seems that it is inacessabile due to the remodelling.

A Persistence of Touts

Debbie and I have gone completely Chinese, we have converted. This means that we have given ourselves over to the desire for consumer goods. We went to the clothes market, the department stores, the street shopping strips and big famous garden. All of this, including the big famous gardern, it turns out, is one big point of sale paradise. We know that there is another Shanghai, not underneath this city, but on top of it. There are thousands of touts, all of whom seem to have one job, which is to get the customer to go up the narrow staircases to "Shanghai on the second floor". Tomorrow we may do this, there we expect to find hundreds of touts enticing us up the narrow staircases to the goods on offer on the third floor.

After adjusting ourselves to the reality of our novice status, we shopped like fools. Bags, nic nacs, really stupid toys, novelty items, wallets, pearls, pearls and more pearls. Right at the end of it, we willingly put ourselves into the hands of a tout who promised us that the quality of the bags we were looking at was absolutely inferior, copies of copies, rather than the infinately more desirable copies of the orginal. He led us to a secret bag shop with a 30cm thick door which was locked behind us. Debbie started muttering about the white slave trade, I started in on the leather goods.

First the Devil, now Debbie and Greta

We were later led down a back alley, past a litlle girl and her father washing cockles, and mussels alive, aliveo. This might have been their kitchen, then around a dog leg turn, and possibly an actual dog leg and into another secret shop. The same group of tourists who we had seen in the first secret shop were also there. By this time, we seemed to have collected a small group of touts. I don’t know if there is a collective noun for tout, but there should be. In the end, both groups of shoppers had whole entourages (or should that be entoutrages) in tow. This meant that there was not enough room to swing a cat, much less an orange Prada handbag with both long and shot straps, a neat outside pocket and a matching wallet.

Dinner

We discovered another secret: the English menu and the Chinese menu. I discovered this when a girl smiled at me as my eyes popped out of my head when her dish arrived. Quick as a gluttonous westerner, I was at her table asking her to point to the menu to indicate what she had ordered. Quick as a Chinese restauranteur, the boss had a whole posse of waiters accompany me back to my seat indicating that her food was not for me. Eventually, we were given the Chinese menu which came untranslated, but with big glossy pictures. We were allowed to order, but were not allowed the same beer as all the other patrons because ”they had run out”. In the end, we ate heaps and drank lots of beer to cope with the chilli.