We had a quick, two-day transition from Kobe to arrive in Shanghai, China. The city is a massive shipping port that lies some thirty miles up the Yangtze river. Since I was planning on leaving the ship in Shanghai and returning via plane to Hong Kong, I set my alarm to 0500 in order to watch our transition up the river. It was a cold, grey morning and as we slid slowly up the river. Massive apartment buildings share the river shoreline with commercial shipping ports, gigantic dry dock facilities and mored vessels of all types. It took us the better part of three hours to make our way upriver to the incredible downtown where we were set to dock. I've been told that Shanghai hosts ten of the fifteen tallest buildings in the world, including the third tallest tower which serves as a television transmission station for much of eastern China. These giant skyscrapers dominated both sides of the downtown as we slid alongside the breakwater.
Clearing customs went fairly quickly and we were in fact ushered off the vessel a full hour earlier than scheduled. This day I was joining a biology class that was set to tour a local food market. This has a very different meaning from going down to Smiths Market in Utah. A fifteen minute bus ride brought us into a commercial district not much-visited by any tourists. The market was crowded into a dark partly covered alleyway jam-packed on both sides with stalls selling just about any fresh foodstuff you can imagine, and quite a few you probably cannot. Citrus and green leafy vegetables shared spaces with bulbous purple fruit with green tufts. Bags of rice and other grains sat beside giant tubers and roots. Live fish and all sorts of marine invertebrates swam about in styrofoam coolers with aquarium bubblers keeping them alive. Prawns, crabs and other seafood was also available boiled on the spot and even in some cases in a dried form. Deeper into the market whole cows had been rendered into their component parts and there was even a station where you could watch a live clucking chicken reduced to its component breast, legs and wings. If you want to serve chicken wings, you are going to have to buy a lot of chickens… Coming from (mostly) the US, I don't think a lot of students had ever had to connect their meat to the actual animals they come from. This was an eye-opening experience for many of them and we may have created a couple of new vegetarians in the process.
Following our time in the market, we had a traditional Chinese lunch at a local restaurant. We sat ten to a table with a giant "lazy Susan" in the center. Dishes of steaming food were brought out and you just spun the wheel and took what you wanted. I learned that you use the big end of the chopsticks to serve yourself and then flip them over to eat. The food was delicious and seemed to never stop. In all of my restaurant dining experiences in China, I found that I was full far before they were done bringing food. Following lunch we returned to the vessel and I had the afternoon and evening free.
I hooked up with a small group of staff from the ship and we set out to do a bit of exploring by foot. I was scheduled to depart first thing the following morning for Beijing, so I wanted to see at least a little of Shanghai that didn't involve chickens losing their heads. We set out from the vessel and walked along the river waterfront admiring the tall buildings and crowds of people enjoying the day. This time of year is Chinese New Year and many people have time off from work and will travel, mostly to where family live. Shops were doing a brisk business and it felt a bit festival-like on the streets. We walked for quite a while until we found ourselves in a local market where we wandered around admiring the fantastic decorations for the New Year. We are in year of the Dragon about to enter the year of the Snake. There were lanterns and other lit displays everywhere. Loud music played as large dioramas of flying sword fighters battled above illuminated ships, flowers and animals floating in a large lagoon crisscrossed with boardwalks filled with people. It was very cool and we were shoulder-to-shoulder with the throngs admiring the displays. The entire evening we were the only white people I saw who weren't on our ship.
Eventually we got to the center of the display where there was a two-story traditional looking building that turned out to be a tea house. Most of the signs were in Chinese, but there was a small sign that stated that this tea house was "said to be the oldest in Shanghai". So, I don't know if it is the oldest, but it's said to be… At this point, our group was down to four and we went upstairs and found a table overlooking the bright lights of the New Year's display. After some smiling and pointing we eventually ordered tea. The names of the tea had English translations and we each ordered a different type. I think my favorite tea name was "Love Story between Flower and Butterfly". So much more pleasant than "Lipton" or "Green", don't you think? Each of us received a small teapot and then the table got a plate of steaming tofu, some small cookies/pastries and a whole plate of quail eggs. These are thin-shelled eggs that are boiled. You don't peal them, you just pop them into your mouth whole. They taste like a hard-boiled egg, with some sort of unidentified spice. They are a bit crunchy as the shell is thin, but still there.
After our tea experience, we wandered among the shops a bit and then found a cafeteria-style restaurant where the food is cooked right in front of you and you just pick what you want and pay. Very convenient where you can't speak the same language as your waiter and the menu isn't in English. We had to do some guessing, especially for the two vegetarians in our party, but everything we got was quite good. We ate and made our way back to the ship, admiring the bright lights on the tall buildings we had passed in the daylight earlier in the day. We sat for a while in the Glazier Lounge on the bow of the ship admiring the skyline and were treated to an interesting sight. At 10:00 p.m. in Shanghai, they turn off the lights. Entire blocks of gigantic skyscrapers went from brightly lit in neon colors that have never seen a rainbow, to just off - like turning a switch. In a matter of minutes, you could only see streetlights, the occasional office light with a late night worker and the small blinking white lights that warn off aircraft. It was kind of spooky. Guess they were trying to tell me it was time for bed…
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