Like a Glittering prize / Always on a clear day

Warning: Shanghai virgin alert.......

The train from Shanghai’s airport to the city was very fast.

In fact, they claim the Maglev train is the fastest in the world and since you hit speeds of 430 km/h it’s hard not to find that rather believable. Yep, it’s an impressive tube of high tech and the level of that tech is nailed when one passes the train going the other way at a joint 860km/h..faster than most jets.

The whole world shudders when that happens.

That said, the bits at each end are a disaster. To get on the train you trudge about a  kilometre through poorly signposted tunnels, with virtually no trolleys in sight (we found one eventually, with a bumpy wheel), to buy your tickets ($6 each...can’t really grumble about that) and are then faced with a grey, non air-conditioned, standing room only waiting room. When the train is ready to board you then battle, now trolley-less, through a massed rush to a single narrow escalator (no lifts a-la Hong Kong, Singapore or KL) and, once down, face an unbending conductor telling you loudly and very firmly in either shrill Shanghainese or Mandarin (don’t expect me to know which) which door to enter (the one farthest away naturally).

At the other end you are dumped in an industrial wasteland / building site some distance from the city centre, face another narrow escalator, a walk across a few  roads to a taxi rank and then 45 minutes in relentless traffic, admittedly over some of the more astounding bridges I’ve ever seen, to your hotel.

And that really sums up China, I guess.

Shanghai is astounding. There is no other word for it...well maybe mindblowing. Either way I’ve seen nothing like it and I’ve been to many of the world’s larger cities. There is nothing quite quite the same as sitting at M on the Bund, where Brigid took me for my birthday brunch, high up amongst a row of large early 20^th century commercial buildings, in which, clearly, no expense was spared in design or construction by the financial institutions of the occupying powers in the years before it all came tumbling down, now topped by large Chinese flags, looking across the Huangpu River, with its boats with massive electronic billboards to the futurism of Pudong’s skyscape. It’s a city of not just massive contradictions but overwhelming visual drama.

There are, they say, 1042 high rise buildings, with new ones every week.

 

We were lucky in Shanghai, we had the guiding hand of our old friends, Philip Kelly and Tracey Lee, who’ve been living there for some months, to lead us. It doesn’t matter how many guide books one owns, local knowledge is, as always, absolutely everything.

So we found ourselves, on my birthday evening (Philip having given me, as a gift, a magnificent print of a photo he’d taken of Detroit meister, Paul Randolph..Brigid gave me a MacBook Pro 17” but that’s another post)  at an astoundingly good  Hunanese restaurant, Lost Heaven, where we drank New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc whilst eating, and at pretty good prices (Shanghai, like Hong Kong, was not by Western standards expensive, even at the higher end) and from there to Constellation, a long narrow bar with a killer cocktail list that could easily have slipped out of that golden late night era that was Auckland’s High Street circa 1995 (you had to be there I guess).

The next night we were taken to LAN, a four story bar / restaurant complex designed and themed by Patrick Gilles and Dorothée Boissier in a rather dramatic way, from the Jellyfish Tank to the infinity long room. The place was surprisingly empty which suited us and we were taken on a guided tour of the whole place and wandered from theme to theme, and ate (modern pan Asian ..but isn’t everything) for probably a quarter of what it would’ve cost us in anything approaching the place in Australasia.

My earlier experiences of China were in the south..in Guangdong, and the psyche seems quite different further north. Whilst in Guangzhou I found the populace as a whole extremely gracious, helpful and generous. Shanghai is different though. There we found the pushiness and rudeness that we’d been warned about earlier but not encountered. People pushed, no threw, you out of the way, they yelled at you in what I can only assume is the legendary local dialect, and the driving....in particular the taxis, who seemed unable to see a red light no matter whether it had been red for one minute or three and simply careered through pedestrian crossings with horn blaring, and people jumping in every direction.

A bit like Bali really, except here every does it. And at least in China there seemed to be some rules and some people trying to enforce them.

And we saw fights...lots of them...the most dramatic being two guys in a pet market fighting over something which ended with one throwing turtles at the other! Not for the faint hearted. Clearly the Shanghainese are a little more highly strung than their southern compatriots.

The river divides the city into two clear halves. There were several ways to cross the river..taxi of course, the ferries, and foot and bus. But we chose the most exciting. This was my birthday after all.

Just about every guide to Shanghai recommends the train under the river. Why do  they recommend it? Is it the thrill, is it a glass viewing tunnel (which would give one a view of brown sludge judging by the river), is it a tech blast?

No, none of those..the recommendations all come because it is so unbelievably awful it can’t be missed. So we had to do it.

In Shanghai terms it was quite pricey..about US$4 a head, but after wandering around trying to find the booth, we handed over the dosh and got our tickets. They included a complimentary pass to the Shanghai Museum of Sex!

And down we went, we three and three happy German backpackers, until we came across the train, except it wasn’t really a train it was a wee capsule and in we all went and off we went through a tunnel lit with what locked like a neon lighting show left over from some early 20^th Century future tech show. It was, as they promised, so truly awful it needed to be seen. And then, just to emphasis that point, two blow up rubber ghosts popped up and everyone began to laugh.

  And it was over. We decided to give the Sex Museum a raincheck and we walked out into the sunlight and the base of the Pearl Tower, with busloads of Chinese tourists swarming around, touts offering to take your photo (folks from the villages, bussing in for the Chinese National Day holiday, likely don’t always have digital cameras for those shots to take back to the village) and a bunch of milling Australians looking for the Bund.

We wanted to go up the Jin Mao Tower, the 5^th highest building in the world, partially so we could look at World Financial Center, recently opened and the 2^nd tallest in the world, partially because the other had huge queues and partially because the deco-ish geometric stainless steel structure really appealed.

 Wondering into the wonderfully named Superbrands Mall, a faceless relic of a Stalinistic past, like the No.1 Department Store across the river in Nanjing Lu, we worked out, as we were buffeted by the holiday crowds, that both the map and the eye showed a short walk to the Jin Mao and headed off.

It wasn’t to be. We walked across the road and were quickly diverted into a loop into the other direction. We walked and followed the signs which said in several languages that we were going the right way despite our eyes telling us we were walking away. At issue were vey large road works which seemingly are part of the massive (and I mean absolutely massive) building projects that are redefining central Shanghai, partially for the Expo 2010, and partially just because that’s the way it is: In China they build and do so in a way we can’t comprehend in the rest of the world.

So we walked..we walked further and further away, through the spotless, groomed parks that fill the city, across multi-laned roads, dodging taxis accelerating through red lights into scattering pedestrians, until eventually we swerved back and, having watched a fight between a courier on his electric tricycle and a office person in his pressed white shirt, we got to the base of the 5^th tallest building in the world. The sign on the side said ‘no climbing’ so we decided not to and went it.

One of the things I like most about very tall buildings, and I’ve done a few, is the speed of the lifts. The lamented WTC in NY had, until now, the fastest I’ve experienced but the Jin Mao, from the basement (why is it that lifts to the top of tall buildings often leave from the basement?), is like a rocket. Seeing that this was the week that China had put another man in space, it seemed somehow appropriate. I wonder if the thought occurred to the two lift attendant girls who were busy checking their hair and makeup in the stainless steel walls on the way up? No, I guess not.

The view of course was incredible and I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. I bought a badge I think (I like a souvenir) but lost it. It said something about Pandas but there were none there, that I’m sure of.

We decided to get a taxi back and headed across to the French Concession to eat more. The day before Isabella and I had walked main drag in the Concession..looking at the Hugo Boss and Gucci shops before wandering south. I had an urge to visit the famous site of the first Congress of The Chinese Communist Party which was a block or two in that direction. Brigid had gone fabric scouting and I needed to see this, at least so I felt an affinity with my Shanghai Tang red stared baseball cap I’d bought a few days earlier and because, well, I was in China, so you do these things.

Bella and I wandered past antique stores, Starbucks, several rather pricey looking design stores with Stark and Herman Miller chairs, a Porsche showroom and a cluster of expensive cafes and restaurants until we came to it. It was free to enter so we went it, with me trying, under my breath, to explain to Bella what this placed was about. It was impressive, fusing technology with understated design and it did some justice to a place, regardless of your politics, where one of the most important political parties of our time fused it’s first manifesto. We walked through until we came to a life-size diorama of the congress, with it’s dozen or so participants. Standing at the table was a young man. Isabella asked who that was..Mao Zedong I said. Wasn’t he an evil monster Bella asked very loudly?

I shut her down rather quickly as several stern young men looked angrily in our direction. Were we headed for re-education or a lifetime of floor scrubbing in some western new town.

I rushed her downstairs where the looks seemed to have abated somewhat and I bought a souvenir..a Mao keyring and we walked outside where I noticed an Amway presentation in the park over the way. It seemed oddly appropriate as was the fact the CCP’s congress happened in a precinct with some of China’s most desirable property now and we sat down in a Coffee Bean cafe new door to ponder these things and the fact that Mao no longer appears in any High School text books in the city.

And that’s Shanghai I think. A vast vision of the future overwhelmed with it’s long past history but not quite sure how to treat it’s more recent past. Or at least as best as I  could figure out in a week there.

As in Guangzhou I had no problem accessing most web sites. I read Wikipedia’s Tiananmen pages and watched video of both that and Tibetan protests. My friend Philip said that in his exclusively, aside from Tracey and he, Chinese residential compound, the free internet periodically came up with a blocked page, but if one waited a minute or two and tried again it usually came up. Any censorship seemed very half hearted. I, on the also free, very fast broadband in the serviced apartments we were in, was able to access everything aside from Huffington, who notoriously pissed off the Chinese some time back. So is the blocking of websites overstated? I can’t say that, but on both my visits to China, in two regions, I had no real problem in or out of hotels.

What else? Well I loved the cynical twists on revolutionary art and communist icons which we saw in the hip young designer shops in the back alleys of the French Concession...Mao with first generation gameboys and the like. And I wish I’d been able to comprehend some of the literature in the vast Chinese language bookshops..although I could look at the graphics books with some awe. As I did at the high end DVD copy shops with it’s box sets of art-house directors (I bought a box of 43 Hitchcock movies, beautifully packaged for around US$30, and collections of classic music videos for a buck a disc)

Then there is the long neon Vegas like overstatement of the designer mall strip that is Nanjing Lu, complete with hustlers offering you watches, strange roller-skating devices, bags and them scuttling as a cop arrived.

And even a week wasn’t close to enough...on the last day we discovered the missing modern art museum...missing because every day we’d run out of time and missed getting there. So, with Beijing and the north beckoning too I think Shanghai will be a destination I’ll need get to again, hopefully rather sooner than later.

The never-ending joys of being in Asia....

Technorati Tags: China,Shanghai

You don't know how lucky you are

Courtesy of my old friend Peter (we went to school together..that's how old)....

Peter's blog is an often go-to for me

Confucius has a puzzling grace

The defining moment of the last two weeks in China and Hong Kong came not when I wandered into the Vegas-of-the-Orient (at least as far as the night-time electricity bill goes) that is Shanghai’s Nanjing Lu for the first time; not when we climbed the 88 floors of the deco steel framed Jin Mao tower (with an internal lobby of the same height); not when we indulged ourselves in the cuisines of the world (often at incredibly low tariffs); and not when we watched the Chinese National Day fireworks, all 23 minutes of them, from Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak. Although all those things, and much more, floored me...and I’ll get to some of them, in this post or next, none defined my trip.

No, the defining moment for me was far simpler. It happened outside the little boutique hotel in HK’s Cheung Wan district, on our second to last night, a few days back, when I got to call the police.

It’s a silly thing, but I’ve been building to it for a while. Back in a mall in Kuala Lumpur, hot, bothered and very tired in June, I lost it and threatened to call the police after a dispute with shop staff over an attempt to, how shall we say, rip off a customer. Hell...I wasn’t even the customer, but that’s beside the point. It was an invigorating moment though and many is the time, especially here in Bali, where one would like to ‘call the police’ to sort out the petty retail rip offs that seem to be the norm rather than the exception. Unfortunately in Indonesia, you’re more likely to end up having to pay the cop as well.

I can be as hot tempered as John McCain (but I don’t want to let that irrational volatility near any red nuke-linked buttons...thus putting a gulf between John and myself).

However I finally got my chance. A taxi picked us up from the airport train at Central Station, and, laden with bags from too much shopping in the lanes and markets of Shanghai we stuffed ourselves in, putting bags on laps and the like.

Upon arrival at the hotel, a fairly short distance, he demanded over double the displayed fare...too many bags he said. Since a) he’d not helped us in any way, b) he was demanding monies for our shopping bags and Brigid’s handbag and so on, and c) it ran contrary to the wording on his displayed tariff sticker, we said a resounding no and proffered the correct fare. After starting in English, he started yelling at us in Cantonese and gesturing wildly...refusing to let our bags go. Call the police I screamed…and he did...thinking, and this is conjecture, that we’d happily hand over the rest of the cash to this rather clearly praying-on-tired-tourists rogue instead of facing the cops. Having faced down, once or twice, the cops of Bali and Kings Cross, both of who are philosophically, and in practice, closer to Kowloon’s triads than the Hong Kong force, I wasn’t worried.

And neither should I have been. The clearly bemused officer who turned up a few minutes later was both pleasant and keen to move on. First up he said that the taxi driver spoke no English…which was somewhat odd as he’d clearly had a grasp of the tongue a few minutes back. Secondly he too was confused as to how the guy could charge as he did based on the published tariff but said that it was written so as to be open to some liberal interpretation. We stood our ground, the cop didn’t quite know what to do and little happened until I pulled out a notebook and began to write the driver’s taxi number and name down….this non-English speaking driver seemed to understand the phrase:

I’m going to report you to the Tourism Authority and ask that they revoke your license.

With that, he grabbed the correct money and took off in a hurry, no doubt back to the station looking for less feisty passengers.

All of this is rather irrelevant, unless of course you were a participant or one of those lucky bystanders who saw us all yelling at each other.

But the story does take this somewhere else in that I was / am intrigued by the policeman’s uniform. In 2008 the constabulary of the Special Autonomous Region of The People’s Republic of China that is Hong Kong has a uniform that is, except in detail, exactly the same as the iconic uniform that British colonial police forces wore across the Empire in the last few decades of it’s life.

Which to me really sums up Hong Kong. I absolutely love the place...it’s one of the most exciting, vibrant and cosmopolitan bits of dirt on the planet. So much has been written about HK, there is little I can add beyond the fact that every corner you turn ramps up that excitement just a little in a way I’ve rarely found in a western city, aside from maybe New York, but that’s a big maybe (but found have in the east in a few places…for me I guess it’s those formative years as a toddler in Singapore).

But for all that it’s an oddity stuck in a time warp placed in a bump located in a pimple on the torso of a superpower. I’m sure at many levels things have changed quite dramatically since 1997 but on so many levels they haven’t too. It’s so very hard not to think of Hong Kong as a part, still, of the British raj. It looks, thinks and behaves like a bastion of the old empire, albeit a part that, in 150 years, the British never really quite managed to extract absolutely from China. Take Stanley, on the southern sea facing coast, the name aside, you’re still in the cafés drinking Newcastle Brown Ale on a boardwalk that, if you overlooked a couple of tiny details, like the PLA garrison on the point (much smaller than the British had in the same barracks I’m told) you could be in Brighton.

For the city, a small dot, against the mammothisity (I invented a new word) of China next to it is both futuristic and rooted in a past that is supposed to be long trashed. But I suspect that it’s that past, the British Empire and the stern administration of that from dusty Whitehall, that gave the city it’s future. Singapore, Malaysia and India are evidence too, that for all the uglier side of British colonialism (The Opium Wars for example….you go to war with a country if they resist your attempts to subjugate them all as junkies), they were the least ugly of all the European powers when it came to pillaging. I wandered through, of all things, the Hong Kong Medical Museum (the Sun Yat Sen one I wanted was closed) and in places like that the pride and the sense of lineage with their past, which is uniquely Hong Kong, is fairly evident.

Of course, after wondering about all that then you go back onto the streets and do the things that people do when visiting a place where 70% of the world’s luxury goods are sold…shop, and eat the food….Gunga Din’s in Wyndham Street offered us fantastic, complex, North Indian; and then the next night we stumbled across Cecconi’s in Elgin Street (we were actually looking for the place next door…Brigid wanted to study the walls but we happily walked into the wrong door and sat down anyway), which not only floored us with it’s food (like the Pan seared scallops with cauliflower puree, sundried tomato and chorizo…oh yes…) and service, but actually wiped one of the main courses off the bill at the end as a bonus. Or the food found on the streets or in the MTR stations. As our friend Felix said, in Hong Kong not only do you get what you’ve paid for, but often you get far more than you’ve paid for.

And sometimes you get less

The common wisdom is that Hong Kong is very expensive …they’ve not been to Australia and New Zealand. Maybe it is for the average Hong Kong salary / wage earner but so much was ludicrously inexpensive and little was beyond what you expect to pay in Australasia…even the ever present designer goods (a pair of Armani jeans was about half what you’d pay for a pair of Workshop jeans).

And our hotel room, a tech hotel, no less with every gadget known to mankind, including free blistering fast in-room wi-fi, was about $100 a night…then again if you really want to do things like the shoddy overpriced tourist trap of the Peninsula Hotel’s High Tea, it can get pricey, especially when it includes stale. I guess it’s your call…..

But as a Hong Kong newbie (this was my second visit) I just loved wandering the streets with my mouth open, I loved Hollywood Road with its Chinese antiquities (both real and not) and the Communist memorabilia on Cat Street (mostly as phony as the claim to such in the mainland these days), and walking the god knows many stairs up from Hollywood Rd to the elusive Sun Yat Sen Museum

And I watched the psychological tussle between saving ones physical self and going into just one more shop that Typhoon Hagupit caused amongst so many young Hong Kongers down there in the shopping mayhem and mecca that is the chaos of Causeway Bay.

The shopping generally won out as did the taxi drivers who tossed an extra $20 danger charge onto the fare…I bet that prick from Central Station was there.

 

Technorati Tags: Hong Kong,Asia

They promise a love of a lifetime / funny thing / then they change their minds

Since we are looking backward, here's a little more.

Once upon a time my wonderful wife, Brigid, was a photographer, for amongst other things, a couple of style magazines in Auckland and contributed to their who and where pages. Thus, in our various archives we have hundreds of negatives and we're slowly developing these. The first of these I've posted to a Facebook group dedicated to the people that used to spend far too much time at Cause Célèbre & The Box...which was actually one club despite the name..or at least a club of two halves.

You can't get to the group unless you're a Facebook member but the album is here. There are many more and we'll slowly scan and tweak those in future weeks, but suffice to say, some are quite incredible and really capture the times.

Once I get these done, I'll bang together a section on my site dedicated to these (many are not club shots but they document an era that is poorly currently notated and recorded online...how about putting the Planet Magazine archives online..Grant? Jason? Russell?).

What really hit me was the number of faces I've not seen for so long...I used to know everyone in these shots pretty well, and of course, a few like my buddy Roseti, Karlos, and the original wild man, Darren Dempsey, died far, far, before their times and are very much missed. RIP guys

Technorati Tags: Cause Celebre,The Box,Brigid Grigg-Eyley

She.Is.A.Wacko.

But this is vaguely funny nevertheless..from Dutch TV.