party of polaroid friends

I was once again the lone traveler for day two of my Shanghai travels. In some ways, traveling alone gives you the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want, but there are also definite downsides. You can't comment on things to anyone else ("wow, look at that view"; "what were they thinking?"; "which way were we supposed to go now?") or get help making decisions on where to go or what to do next, and eating meals alone at restaurants isn't exactly the most fun activity, especially when you find yourself reading the Lonely Planet Shanghai guide from cover to cover just for something to do. However, I feel I make the best of it, mostly by being a good map-reader, taking time to make decisions, and talking to myself.

My first stop was the Jin Mao Tower 88th Floor Observatory. An absolute rip-off at Y70, but these things usually are. And anyway, I had money to blow, and I figured it may as well be on something like a great view of Shanghai from high up. Of course, there are things I could complain about - the haziness, the expense, and the other tourists - but it was interesting to look out over Shanghai from that vantage point. Shanghai is a huge city, not only population-wise (at the largest city in China, it is home to the same number of people as the entirety of Australia) but also in how much land it covers, and the amazing thing is that there are still development zones all over the city. A lot of the old city is being left alone now, but especially on the Pudong side there is lots of construction (right next door to the Jin Mao Tower is the site of the World Financial Center to-be). From that high up you can see the low-rise of the Bund and the high-rise of Pudong, and the rows upon rows of apartment buildings (some towers, others just six or seven stories tall) in complexes that are color-coded and the very vision of Chinese apartment life. I'm sure it's more spectacular on a clear day, but it was far better than the day before, when rain clouds obstructed the tower from view almost entirely.

Having started a little later than imagined, I lunched as soon as I got out of the Jin Mao Tower, over at the Super Brand Mall near the Riverside Park. The Super Brand Mall itself was something to behold - a real mall, in the sense that most Westerners understand it. I've been to lots of department stores in China, and buildings that seem more like shopping alleys packed into a lofty building, but not a real mall. This was a real mall, with all the brand names; not necessarily top-end brands (there's a mall like that in Xi'an), but middle-class brands like Quicksilver, H&M, and Mudd. The food court was standard: McDonalds and Hungry Jacks, Starbucks, and some other Asian food restaurants. I opted for the Thai restaurant, which was mentioned in the Lonely Planet city guide, and had my first Chinese Pad Thai - much more shrimpy than I like, but still very tasty.

From the Super Brand Mall, I made my way to the Riverside Park, where I wandered along the promenade looking over at the Bund daytime view. It was an interesting view, with the boats carrying advertisements and all, but nothing quite so spectacular as in the evening with the light show. Thinking of light shows, I finished my wander at the northern end of the Riverside Park and decided to check out what the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel was all about. The Lonely Planet city guide describes it as "a strangely pointless attraction", and notes that the flashing lights are "extremely under-whelming, unless of course they manage to induce an epileptic fit in one of your fellow travelers." I don't think I could agree more. It's definitely under-whelming, and sort of a waste of Y30, but I suppose you have to see it to believe it. It doesn't take very long, and the lights are too bright to make you feel like you're anywhere but a stupid tunnel going under the river, and even though they try to tie it together with different sections ("heaven and hell", "magma", "fossils", and "space lights" are the few I can remember), it doesn't really work and left me wondering "... what the hell was that for?"

After that fiasco, I took one of the walking tours in the Lonely Planet backwards from the exit of the tunnel. It is harder than you can really imagine to piece together a walking tour backwards, but only in knowing what you're supposed to be looking at. The map was easy to follow, but the instructions on what to look out for, what to take photos of, it was difficult to piece it all together. In any case, I managed it, and it was a lovely walk called "Beyond the Bund" that touched on a lot of old, untouched architecture from the early twentieth century. Since the writing of the edition that I have, a lot of the buildings have been marked as Heritage Architecture buildings and have plaques on them, which will undoubtedly be in the upgraded versions of the book, but I had to piece it all together myself. I saw some gorgeous pieces of architecture, a lot of which were banks, but there were a few buildings that used to be brothels and clubs, and there were also a couple of churches along the walk. A really enjoyable walk, but it didn't really feel like China most of the time - much like most of Shanghai.

After the walk, I ended up at Yan'an Donglu, which was the street I needed to be on to find the Shanghai Museum of Natural History. The Lonely Planet guide described it accurately as a "dusty museum" in a "drafty old building with bad lighting", but I'm not sure whether they meant to put it down or not. I found it a really enjoyable place, a building that obviously had a lot of history, and a museum with interesting and different displays from other natural history museums I've been to the world over. Definitely, as I noted to myself, the best Y5 I've spent in China. There were, as the book says, "a scary assortment of pickled and stuffed animals", but it was fascinating in its scariness. The main hall was the best by far, however, with huge, towering dinosaur skeletons found in Sichuan, a woolly mammoth skeleton from the Yellow River, a mummy section with two corpses from the Ming dynasty, and a section called "The History of Early Man" or some such title, documenting the history of human evolution, the rise of civilization, and the separation and distinctions between races. The latter was definitely most interesting, even if I couldn't understand it (as it was all in Chinese, but for introductions to different sections), and had the most creepy pickled animals - human fetuses from one month so six months old.

After gathering myself from museum foot, I wandered back up to Nanjing Donglu to look for a cafe to kill some time. The one in the Lonely Planet was a bust, so I found another one and sat around for a while (and did the aforementioned reading of the Lonely Planet city guide in full), had a mug of hot chocolate, and decided on my course for dinner. My feet were not holding out very well; when I got back, there was the biggest blister on my little toe I have ever seen, and I had been limping from hurting my right foot somehow since about halfway through the walking tour (I was about to cry from pain walking back from the museum), so I decided I would have an early dinner near home and call it a night. Nearly an hour in the coffee shop and I managed to make it all right to the Metro, changing lines, and a ten minute walk from the station to the restaurant I had picked out on Huaihai Lu.

I had Italian for dinner, a nice grilled sandwich and a glass of wine and coffee for a reasonable Shanghai mid-range price (ie, not Y12, but not Y200 either), and decided that I wasn't really disappointed I didn't have any Chinese food in Shanghai because... well, to be honest, I haven't found much Chinese food here, and what I have seen has been fast food crap which is inevitably bad fare. I did get decent order-in the first night with Fergus, but I wouldn't have liked to take my chances by myself when there were decent recommendations in the Lonely Planet anyway. Dinner was nice, I did some more reading of the Lonely Planet guide, and managed to let my foot rest enough that it was all right to take the walk back to Fergus' place. It was a good thing, too, because a taxi would have been annoying and expensive, and the walk was nice. It had been a really nice day, weather-wise, so it was still warm in the evening, and the streets were all lit up with shopping centers and advertisements, so it was good to get out and have a wander.

Then I made it back, uploaded my 80 photos from the one day (Luca took all the photos from the first day), and rested my feet up good.

One thing I've discovered: Just because you're in a foreign country doesn't make holidays any more interesting. At least when classes were on here, there was something to do, something to make me get out of bed for, get out and about and make me do start moving for the day. Now, there's not really much but lunch. The trouble with not having a lot of money left and an unfortunately extended stay in the country is that I haven't been able to get around and travel until the end of my stay here.

That said, the boredom won't last much longer, as I'm off to Guangzhou in ten days!

And okay, I'm not really bored. Just that most of my activities seem to center around food, which is fine because Chinese food is awesome and probably the thing I will miss most about the country, but it makes me feel a little lazy. I've done a few things, but they're not particularly interesting. I'll let you in on the highlights, because detailing the time I spent five hours watching Battlestar Galactica with Malcolm doesn't really make a good story.

AUSTRALIA DAY 2007!

It doesn't really deserve a big header like this, because it was a pretty standard evening, but I thought I'd highlight it because it was probably the most interesting thing to happen this week. Which isn't really saying a lot about the rest of my week, but that's all right.

Early on in the day, I went into the admin office here at the Chinese language program to pick up my grades (average of 80 all around) and get the low-down on my visa stuff. Mr. Wang said I could just take my stuff in and they'd fix it right up, so I got the address from them, got my pieces of paper together (of course, I hadn't bothered to find a place to photocopy it the day before, but there were plenty of places in the city). So I caught the bus with a Japanese classmate of mine who was going to get some professional photos taken of her because a friend had given her a free pass (they look expensive, usually used for wedding photos), and managed to find my way around to this mysterious place.

Once I'd gotten my photocopies done, filled out my forms, gotten a receipt and everything, I was told that it was too early to put it in! The woman behind the desk told me I could come back later, three days before I left the country (impossible, but I figured I'd explain it there), and fix it up then. So all that trip and worrying for nothing! Even though Mr. Wang said he had called the office up to let them know I was coming in. Oh well!

That evening, celebrations started late. We went to a hot pot restaurant, but we got there a little late so we were waiting around for a long while. As we were waiting, this little toddler kept walking around us with her mother, and after a while, encouragement on both sides, he decided it was all right to wave at us. After that, he wouldn't stop looking at us and waving. It was adorable, and of course I can't resist when babies wave at me, so I was there waving and making faces while everyone else in my group sort of stared at the kid and wondered what it was staring at.

The hot pot was good, as usual, and we found out that beer was included in our fee, so we all had a few beers and were a little tipsy by the time the evening came to a close. We discussed many things, amongst them Australia and the way civilizations seem to evolve and why they all evolve differently (we of course lacked Niki, the anthropologist...), and decided after dinner that playing video games would be a good way to spend the rest of the night. So we got some whiskey and mixers and went back to Sarah's room to play Katamari for what was near to six hours.

So there wasn't a barbecue, warm weather, pool activities, boat races, or fireworks, but at least there was beer?

OTHER THINGS

During this time frame, I:

1) went out with a girl Mr. Wang had introduced me to, named Yvette. I took Malcolm, Sarah, and Luca out with me and we had a great lunch filled with snack-type food, had a walk around the city, and spent hours in an all-you-can-drink tea shop playing Chinese checkers, connect-five, and chess. Made our way home via the large supermarket which lacked any DVDs I was looking for.

2) looked for DVDs for my family. They put in an order the last time we spoke for me to pick up as many Oscar nominated DVDs as possible, so I went on three separate attempts to find as many as I could (I had a short list and got 18/26!), at our local guy, at the Saige Computer City (where Malcolm picked up his repaired camera), and out at Xiaozhai. It was fun to go on a scavenger hunt, and I picked up a few other ones I was looking for along the way.

3) finished Fever Pitch, which was an absolutely great book. It sort of justifies a lot of the obsessions I've had over time, and just little parts of my personality, though maybe it shouldn't, but I've really enjoyed it. It's sort of frustrating, as a young person, to read someone's autobiography like that though, because I keep wondering when I'm going to get that sort of perspective. Maybe I'm just impatient.

4) downloaded lots of music (such good music I will probably buy the CDs when I get back to Australia), played around with my Facebook, and also started watching Battlestar Galactica with Malcolm. These things are known as "time wasters".

5) got my Chinese travel agent friend to get me my ticket to Guangzhou, which was today, and it was a pretty good deal. Y420 (+Y50 fee for him) for a 26 hour train ride on hard sleepers around Chinese New Year? I think that's just about perfect, really. I have to get another ticket on return from Guangzhou (which I wasn't actually expecting to do, but the expense won't be bad), and figure out someone to get my ticket to Shanghai from Steve while I'm away, but that shouldn't be too bad. So, ten days and I'm on my way to Guangzhou and a change of pace!

PLANS FOR THE UPCOMING 10 DAYS

I'd planned a photo scavenger hunt with Malcolm, so we'll probably get going with that next week. It's mostly to beat boredom and get me out and about while I'm still in Xi'an. I've seen a lot of things already and I'm comfortable with a lot of places, but I guess this is like a last-ditch effort to push me out of my comfort zone in a city I feel quite safe in already. We've got challenged for ourselves including: crazy fashion, street food vendors, leftover Christmas decorations, and bridal photo groups. None of these things are difficult to find, of course, but we're going to make sure we don't go to the same old places to find these things. So that should be fun, and it doesn't really matter if we actually get everything on our lists, but at least we'll have gone out and done something.

It's not really my going away, though, because Niki and I will probably have a joint going-away (she is moving to Beijing, hopefully, by March) in the time between my getting back from Guangzhou and leaving for Shanghai, and while Sarah and Luca will be away during that time, they're going to come and potter around Shanghai with me for a day or two. I might do some preparation for leaving, like packing some things I won't need to use, but I'm pretty sure my time wasters will take care of the little free time I will have, and anyway I'll have nearly a week back in Xi'an for last minute things so it's not really important I get all those things done.

And I've just forgotten that I had laundry going, so it's probably done and I should pull it out before I go to dinner!