Originally written March 27, 2011
Here I am sitting down quietly trying to recount all the things that happened to me on my first day on this Asian adventure. This is somewhat difficult as my day has spanned a total of 27 hours of awake time (a new record for me) and my mind is all bleh.
Leaving Toronto was pretty uneventful other than I got to try Toronto’s airport hover train or whatever they call it (hover train sounds way better). First stop: Vancouver. On my way over I decided to watch Avatar: The Last Airbender knowing it will probably suck but hoping for something good out of it. Result: It shaved 2 hours off my trip. Seriously though, the movie sucks.
Arrive in Vancouver around lunchtime (TO time) and have some delicious Canadian Chinese food, now that I’ve had my first real Chinese meal, I can no longer call what I ate back home “Chinese food”. All lies!! Finally, hop on board for a terribly long 13-hour flight to Shanghai. I don’t think I’ve ever been confined to such a small place for such a long time. I couldn’t sleep, movies were boring and I was too tired to read. Tried watching Harry Potter 7 but since I didn’t see 3-6 I was a hell of confused, so stopped that after 30 mins.
Finally, I arrive in the skies of Shanghai and all excited of course I stick my face in the window to look below…smog, all you see is smog. Drop 20,000 feet in altitude and there’s still smog! What’s wrong with this place!? The captain said it was a clear day for Shanghai so I guess clear for them means when smog blocks the sun instead of rain clouds =/. When we did get low enough to see some of Shanghai I got a glimpse of the massive ports and trans-continental ships moving about their business. Was quite an impressive view, even from the air. Once landed everything was pretty standard up to the part I went to leave the airport. We walked through a mob of people all holding signs and trying to find those they were waiting to pick up. It was like walking down a red carpet. Also plenty of “taxi drivers” are hidden amongst the crowd trying to abduct you. I soon realized avoiding eye contact with the crowd lowered the chances of them trying to abduct me. +1 Jay travel skillz.
The next leg of my journey was a shuttle bus ride throughout Shanghai to bring me to my hotel right in downtown Shanghai (a very beautiful place). Things I noticed on my way in are
- They paint their guard rails beautiful shades of green, blue or red. It really makes the city look nicer and I think there might be some significance to the colour coding scheme. More investigation is required.
- Bike safety is definitely not government regulated. You want to ride a scooter/motorcycle without a helmet? Sure go ahead, everyone else does it. You want to bring your 3-month-old along for the ride? Sure! No problem, just tie her behind you and have her 4-year-old sister hold her tight (this isn’t far from the truth).
- Stopping on the side of the higway to pee in a sewage drain appears to be socially acceptable.
- There is some unknown law about shuttle bus’ having the right of way all the time, anytime. Seriously, our bus driver just takes left turns at lights and the traffic stops for him, if they don’t he just honks. Pedestrian in the way? Who cares, honk at them too and don’t stop.
- I’ve noticed a lot of roofs have this cylinder thing on top of it with a flat rectangular piece sticking out of it so it looks like a scroll being unrolled. It kind of looked like a solar panel but we’ve concluded it isn’t. More on this I will learn.
Finally the creme de la creme of my day: a dinner night out at a true Shanghai cuisine restaurant offering an authentic taste of Shanghai. Our whole group walks into this small room of the restaurant where there’s a big round table in the centre. In the middle of the table is a glass plate that’s probably around 2-3 meters wide. The idea of the course is that dishes are placed on the glass panel and you just spin it to pick at the dish you like. Pretty fun, think Indiana Jones and temple of doom.
Now here’s the fun part, we had about a total of easily over 20 dishes to choose from and I can assure you that I have never even seen 80% of these dishes in my life. Being on an adventure of new discovery of course I took it upon myself to taste the most bizarre dishes which included.
- Chicken feet with some spicy chilli sauce (not much to chew on)
- Mushroom mix, while not gross by any means I think this was the first time I had a true Asian mushroom dish and it was really good
- Jelly fish – not quite my thing
- Tiny shrimps with heads/legs – I think the point was to eat them whole as they were so tiny and picking at them seemed like a waste of effort. I ended up ripping the tail, head and eating the body with the legs
- Eel, fishy yet tasty
- Frog – surprisingly quite delicious, a bit spicy and didn’t really like having to sort out the bones from the other stuff in my mouth
- Clam – there was a white part, a pink part and some beard all attached together… so this isn’t your typical clam.
- Duck skin – this too was quite tasty
The experience was fun but I didn’t really enjoy any of the dishes enough to say “let’s go eat Shanghai food now!” anytime soon. Plus I introduced my stomach to so many new and odd things all at once I will most likely be spending a good part of my night trying to pass it through my system :(. This saddens me terribly.
It’s now 9:10pm here and I need to get some sleep to make up for not having a night (there was no “nighttime” in my Saturday night). Then it’s up at 7 tomorrow and off to work followed by another adventure in Shanghai!
Stay tuned…
