Shanghai Reality - ZhuJiaJiao - the suburb

So I'm supposed to meet Lin Ying at some statue near people's square on Nanjing road. We decided on 10am. So I take off around 9:20, not sure how long it'll take me to get there. I'm walking down Nanjing road and it's still early, so the bagwatch guys have nothing better to do than follow me. So I've come p with a very effective strategy to get rid of em.

The bag watch guy approaches you, you wave the "I'm not interested" wave. This does not deter him, he'll still say bagwatch at you. You say "no thanks". Most of them don't give up. T-shirtdvd they say, and that's when you pull out the "Boo Yow". They typically stop, and repeat bu yao (or however you spell it). The delay in their walk this gains you typically means that you've now escaped their grasp. The problem with saying boo yow first is that they expect rejection, so you have to trick them... first no thanks, then boo yow. Of course this method is not fool proof. But it's better than most other methods.

Now I'm at the statue. I'm a little early, so I sit around, people come up to me and offer me bagwatches and tshirtdvds I tell em no thanks and since I'm not moving they seem to give up faster. Strange that. So as I'm waiting, I hear some yelling. A big fat Chinese guy who is shirtless is yelling stuff. He's about 150 meters away from me. He totally looks like a drunk guy from an old Chinese movie. So as he yells what I can only assume to be obscenities, he undoes his pants and starts peeing. Right there on Nanjing road, in front of hundreds of people, the guy is taking a leak. Not only that, but he's yelling stuff the whole time. This guy must have had a lot to drink because by the time he's done there's a huge puddle on the ground. Finally he pulls his pants up again and waddles off.

Crazy fat guy aside, the place is pretty quiet. Tons of people walk by, many of them stop by the "statue", it's not really a statue, it's just a stone sign that says Nanjing road walkway in Chinese. Anyways, people stop to take their picture with the sign, I don't get it. It doesn't really prove you were there, it's pretty easy to photoshop yourself in front of a sign like that, but whatever. Around 10am, Lin Ying shows up.

We start walking towards somewhere, she seems to know where she's going. She asks me how come I don't have an umbrella. It's sunny out, and she's using an umbrella to make shade for herself. I figured that she (and many other Chinese girls) used umbrella's to keep cool. So I told her that Shanghai was so hot, that even the little bit of shade an umbrella would supply would be useless to me. Plus the sun would give me a tan. As it turns out, that's exactly what she's trying to avoid.

In China, white skin is important. She told me that there's a poem that says that it doesn't matter how ugly you are, if your skin is white it will hide your ugliness. So white skin is beautiful. There's creams in China to make you whiter, and white makeup is popular (but too expensive for most). The cheapest way to make yourself white is just to not get a tan. I told her that in America there's creams to make you darker, people even get fake tans or sit in tanning booths. She found this hilarious. I mean, why would anyone want a tan? Crazy huh...

So after we both laughed at the culture differences we figured out that we were lost. What a great guide Lin Ying turned out to be... she seemed to be more lost than found. Anyways, we finally figured out where we had to go (at least her Chinese is way better than her direction sense). We asked a few people and ended up at a bus stop. Odd. I thought we were staying in the city. The way she had described this place it sounded like old Montreal.

So we line up for the bus, and when it's our turn to get on, the seats are full. So we get back off, she says we'll wait for the next bus. Ok. More people get on and then she says "oh, the next bus is in 30 minutes, but if we get on, we have to stand." I'm ok with standing, it's probably a short ride if it's in he city. So we get on the bus. "The bus will take an hour" she says after we get moving. Don't you think that that would have been an important piece of the decision making process of waiting for the next bus? I think it would have been a key piece of information.

So the bus ride is pretty long, so we chat and get to know each other. I'm going to condense all my knowledge on Lin Ying in this section, because I don't remember when I asked these questions. Basically we chatted the whole day because her plan was to practice her English. So here goes. She's 26, has a boyfriend of 2 years now, she's not sure he's "the one", and she didn't want to tell me how many guys she's dated before. She just graduated with a masters in computer science and started at Telenav last month. She lives in a room she rents from a family, this family rents another room to another girl. I think there's 5 people in a small house that the family rents. She has a sister, which means if she ever has a child it'll be a single child unless she leaves China. She doesn't think that it's possible for her to leave China (I'm not sure if it's because she doesn't want to leave her friends and family or because she doesn't think she has that option at all, it was unclear). She might want kids later. She wants to live near a mountain range or near the ocean, even preferably both. She likes warm weather and thinks that her home town is really cold because it hits -10 Celsius there. She's never been out of China, and she wants to go to Hong Kong, possibly next year. She only gets 2 weeks vacation and she works long hours. She normally spends her weekends cleaning, doing laundry and sleeping. She sees her boyfriend almost every day because they live very close. The only days she doesn't see him is when she works late (which happens more often than she'll admit I'm sure, I've seen her at work late almost every day). Her given name Ying is short for Y ing or something, Y is yes, and ing is working. So it means hard working. She likes food, she eats a lot. She's always the last one to finish the food when she's out with friends. She loves snacks, she thinks that most Chinese women love snacks (at least more than men do). She thinks she's big (she's gotta be at least a size -4 or something, she's tiny). She was happy when I said she was tiny, which is really true. She probably weighs 100lbs wet. She loves shopping too.

Ok so if you've skipped the "everything I know about Lin Ying" then you should start reading here again. We got off the bus and we were in what she called a suburb. It was more rural than I expected. Apparently this town might have been used in mission impossible 3. So a bunch of bicycle taxis are lined up just outside the bus station. And since Lin Ying really has no idea where we're going we take one. So that he'll get us to the place where we want to be, the old section of town. It took the old guy about 5 minutes to get us there, so it was pretty close, he biked slowly. She paid him 5 rmb, which is probably more than it should have cost, but whatever.

We get to the old town, and it's tiny little streets, about two meters wide, and shops on both sides. Tons of people are walking in the street but Lin Ying says "Oh, it's so quiet, I thought it would be busy on the weekend." Ok so apparently if you don't have to push your way through a sea of people then it's not busy at all. Odd. The stalls all sell similar things like paintings, jewelry, food, candy, toys, nothing I haven't seen before really.

We turns down a few streets and the shops start getting odd. Grain, food supplies, vegetables, turtles, utensils, pots, pans.... wait turtles?! That shop was selling turtles. I go back. Yup, right there in large wash basins, hundreds of little turtles. They came in 4 sizes, but the smallest size was the cutest. They were the size of quarters. I took pictures of em with my finger in there for comparison. My finger looks huge. I don't know what the turtles were for, I assume food because as I look around I see that in other wash basins there's crayfish and snails. Who would be cruel enough to kill little tiny turtles and eat them though? Oh right... me. Before you go on a rampage, I didn't... but I would. There was at least two hundred little turtles... they wouldn't all survive in the wild anyways.

Ok enough with the turtles, let's move on. The place had a river running through it, not that I'd ever want to touch the water, it was a sickly opaque green colour. The river boats were cool though. We never got a chance to ride one though. Oh well. Anyways, we hit lunch at a tiny shop. Just outside the shop, the lady was smashing open snails with a rock disk as a base and something big and flat as a smashing tool. Interesting. They send us upstairs in this tiny house to grab a seat.

We sit down at the table and the dishes are wrapped in plastic... I mean your tea cup, bowl, plate and spoon. They're all in a plastic shrink wrap thing, with stuff written on it. It's to be more hygienic or something. We order chicken feet (cold with no sauce, ok but not great) veggies (tasty) chicken soup (pretty good) and pork wrapped in some sort of leaf (really tasty). We also got a giant bottle of orange drink. It was so hot that I didn't eat much. I think heat is pretty much one of the only things that kills my appetite. I drank a lot of the orange stuff though.

Off we go back to the small alleys filled with shops. Lin Yin sees a needle point type stitching that she likes. The shopkeeper says 160 rmb, Lin Ying says she wouldn't pay more than 80. So we leave but the shop keep follows us and keeps yelling lower prices. She got darn right mad by the end of it. Anyways, the shopkeeper lowered her price all the way down to 60, but by then Lin Ying didn't want the item anymore. Anyways, we saw it again and again, the same exact one, in many shops. Price offerings ranged from 180 to 80. Because it wasn't as unique as she first thought, Lin Ying didn't want it anymore. She did end up buying a lot of sweets from different shops though.

The last bus leaving there was at 4pm, so we decided to head to the station at 3 to make sure we got on. We get outside the little alleys and find ourselves on the street with a signpost that has a map on it. Lin Ying reads the map and declares that she has no idea where we are and where we have to go. So I look at the map. I've been working with maps since I was a kid (thanks mom & dad). Clearly the "You are here" dot is where we are. And the little bus drawing is where we want to be. But what direction do we have to head in? That's what Lin Ying can't figure out. So I decipher the map, at least it has English street names, and there's English street signs. Ok we're at a T junction, so it's not too hard to figure out which way's north. Fair enough, let's go. "How do you know it's in this direction?" "Because I read the map" "But the map doesn't tell you which direction to head in" "Well, I figured it out" "Are you sure?" "Yep" "Really?". So why is it that people think that because I'm white I wouldn't be able to figure out a Chinese map? This isn't the first time someone's been surprised that I can read a map in China. Anyways, I got us to the bus station, and she said something along the lines of "Maybe you should be my guide" which was pretty funny because she volunteered to be my guide for the day and she keeps getting lost. Fun times though.

At the bus station some lady wants us to get on her bus. Lin Ying says it's not the express bus but we have lots of time so we can take this one, there's more stops and it's slower, but it's cheaper and we get seats for sure. Fair enough. On the bus we drive through many suburbs, real ones, and I got to see a lot of the real Shanghai. It's huge, dirty, run down and not at all attractive. Downtown is much nicer, but only the rich people live there. The again, with a city that has a population equal to half of Canada, it's bound to be a mess. That's right, 20 million people in Shanghai. The place is huge. People think that a 40 minute commute to work is short, an hour being the average commute. Crazy I tell you.

I figured out we were at the last stop the bus was going to make when the bus driver turned off the engine. We got off the bus and started walking. Lin Ying's first reaction was "I don't know where we are" followed quite rapidly with "I wonder why the bus stopped here". Awesome! Lost again in a Shanghai suburb no less. So we look for a subway station, but even though there's one on the map, we couldn't find it. So I get tired of roaming and we hop in a taxi. 20 minutes later the taxi drops us off near Lin Ying's old school. So we were nowhere near her school before, but I still have no idea where we are... at least she does.

We head to one of her favourite restaurants for supper. She used to always go there as a student. We had really good stuff, duck and pork and tofu, everything was great. The pork was kinda like cold cuts of all sorts of parts most of you folks never eat. There was tongue, stomach lining, lung and other bits I couldn't identify. When I asked Lin Ying what the parts of the pork were she said she didn't really know, they were "inside meat". So I told her the parts I could ID, and she said "Maybe we shouldn't talk about this while we eat". Lol! So it's ok to eat tongue and lung and stomach lining, as long as you don't say that's what you're eating? So funny.

Supper was pretty good, once we were done we headed out. Rain. Crap. Lin Ying has her little sun umbrella that also works for rain, but there's no way I fit under there too. And it's raining pretty hard. We run across the street and hide under the bridge. We walk along the road looking for a cab. We get to the intersection, and there's tons of people under the bridges. In China there's bridge everywhere... they're all highways. They run above the regular streets.

We get a cab and head to a shopping center nearby so I can buy an umbrella. Once we get to the mall, Lin Ying declares that she will do some "window shopping". Something I had taught her earlier that day, well at least the name for it. She failed miserably at window shopping. See, window shopping is a kind of shopping in which you don't try on clothes or buy clothes. I don't like shopping with Trish, much less with strange girls. But I have to say that this shopping trip was educational. Lin Ying bought a shirt and this is how it worked out. She tried on the shirt. Looked at herself in the mirror. Asked me what I thought (I said it looked cute). She tried on a different size (I think, it looked the same to me). Decided she wanted it. Got the lady to cut off the tag for her (ok, I've never see anyone wear a shirt they just bought right out of the store). Then the lady handed her a piece of paper. She ran off, leaving me there in the store. Came back a few minutes later. Gave another piece of paper to the lady and the lady gave her a bag with her old shirt in it. So it turns out that shopping malls in China have tons of tiny stores (like the electronics place) but for some malls you get a bill from the store, you go pay it at a central cash register and you bring back the receipt to get the item.

Anyways, when I finally bought an umbrella it was the same thing, paper - pay - receipt - item. Apparently I bought a good brand of umbrella. In China umbrellas are so popular (because of the staying white thing) that they have brand name umbrellas and fancy umbrellas. They had some ranging from 30 rmb to 250 rmb. Who in their right mind would spend $40 on an umbrella?

So we leave the mall, and with our umbrellas we walk to her school. Roaming around on campus was pretty cool. I've never seen so many people out in the rain before. It wasn't crowded like it would have been if it wasn't raining, but it was pretty crowded. The campus was awesome. It has a river and a park and a bunch of cool looking buildings. She said that dorms house many students per room. A lot more than 2 students per room like most of the dorms in America house. Strange but whatever, space is at a premium in China.

She decided to take me to try sheep meat. So we roamed around and the first shop she wanted to go to seemed to have vanished. It could have been in the hole in the wall that is now under construction. Oh well, we go look for another place. after we find the place, she orders one skewer of sheep meat. She tells me it costs 1.5 rmb because that's always the price. I had her 2 1rmb coins and smile. She pays the man and he pockets the coins. Pretty obvious from my point of view, I'm white. Had I asked what the price was he would probably have said 3rmb or maybe even 4. But she asked for change, and the guy looked all insulted and said that each skewer cost 2rmb. I tell her to give up, it doesn't really matter anyways. The sheep skewer tasted pretty good, though the meat was really fatty. A lot of meat in China is fatty though.

So we're near her house, and she needs to get home, so we call it a night. Seeing as I'll be leaving the country the next day, I figure this is goodbye for a very long time. So I ask her what the custom for saying goodbye is in China. She didn't know the word custom, but that wasn't really a problem, she has a translation program on her phone, so I spell the word out for her. She looks a little confused and shows me her phone, the phone has things like ceremony written on it. Close enough I say. And she says she's not sure what I mean. So I ask her how do you say goodbye, and she obviously answers goodbye. Doh! I tell her that some people hug to say goodbye. Hug, yet another word she doesn't know. So I get her to translate it with her phone. Lol! The face she made was hilarious! I think she understood what I mean by now, but she said something like "Oh we don't do that!" and then she said they waived goodbye. Who knows what the custom is in China, maybe there isn't one, but the look on her face was priceless. Hahahaha. For 26 she seems pretty innocent. Though really I don't know what her phone said "hug" was in Chinese.

Finally we find a cab and I hop in and wave goodbye. Off I go after telling the cabby where I need to be. Little did I know this would be the scariest cab ride ever. I was minding my own business when suddenly the cab lurched a little and the slowed down. Weird. Then the cabby brakes on the highway with nobody in front of us. Ok... this is getting a little worrisome. So I try to put on my seat belt (half the cabs don't have seat belts). This cab had one, but it didn't work. Great. I look at the cabby and he is straining to keep awake. This guy is pretty much passing out while driving. Then I hear him snore. I look at him and he's awake (I think) and he pretends that he didn't snore but that really he was snorting up some spit, so he spits ot the window. He keeps repeating this every time he snore. Which is like 8 times too many. Then we're finally off the highway. He's still passing out but at much slower speeds, so this is better. Then we pass by a guy pulled over by some cops and he starts laughing.

The guy is getting pulled over for being drunk. My cabby is laughing at a guy for drunk driving when not 2 minutes ago this guy was driving while sleeping. Crazy cabby, but laughing is better than sleeping. So I nod and say PiJiu (or however you spell beer) and the cabby nods and starts rambling some Chinese at me. He laughs, I laugh, everyone is happy. He keeps rattling stuff in Chinese, he probably though I understood him at least a little. His thoughts were pretty easy to follow because he was making jestures. I laughed along with him until we got to where I wanted to be, he pointed, I said dui dui (dway dway) which means yes yes. He drops me off. I go to pay him and I notice his meter rate is 3.6 instead of 2.1. Odd. The ride had been way too long, and 41 rmb won't kill me, so I just paid him and got out.

I hadn't been out for more than 30 seconds when a lady walks up to me and starts walking with me. "Hullo" she says. "Hi" I reply. Then she whispers "sex massage", well I guess I hadn't been offered everything before, I thought I had, but never had anyone offered me a sex massage. Mostly I got bagwatch, tshirtdvd, shoespants, ladybar, ladymassage (which is most likely a sex massage anyways), also I got hashish marihuana. Never a sex massage though. So I say "No thanks" but she had a reply "Not me, you can pick girl". Apparently if I didn't want to have sex with her, I could get my pick of girls... right, yeah. No thanks lady. She didn't follow me very far, she said things like any girl you like and very good girls. Thanks but no thanks lady. Making sure I still had my wallet I left her at the street corner and cross on over to bagwatch land. A couple of bagwatch offers later I made it to the hotel.

So, I get to the hotel and I have a message from Trish saying that my flight is cancelled. Great. I head to the office to call the airline. My flight is canceled they booked me through Tokyo with a 2 hour layover and a huge amount of extra flying time. 13 hours of flying is more than enough for me, I don't want to fly for 17 hours, thanks. So I ask the lady if I can book for Monday instead. Yes, good. I do that. And so, Sunday I'm still in Shanghai.

It's late now, and I need to pack, but eventally I'll post today's (Sunday's) adventres.