Some of you may remember our wonderful trip to China, sponsored by SCOLA, in the early 1990's! I found the following, from a cousin who is there now, interesting and thought you might too.
Sincerely,
Irene Starr
http://www.keyboardhelp.net
============================
When I went to Beijing in 1984 my flight stopped briefly in Shanghai where we went through customs. We deplaned by walking down a little stairway and strolling across the tarmac to the customs shed. There was room for about a half-dozen airplanes. Friday night when we arrived at Shanghai airport our plane taxied past several half-mile long arrival buildings lined with huge airbuses, 747s and mega-aircraft. The sleek modern buildings were huge. ..... maybe the biggest airport buildings I've ever seen. We deplaned into marble floored modern halls and took rolling sidewalks to customs and baggage claim. It was so efficient that the seamless process only took moments. At the baggage claim our bags were waiting for us. We piled them onto FREE luggage carts (at least $5 in the USA) and walked to the 200 mph MagLev Train that took us to central Shanghai.
Shanghai looks a lot like a disheveled bowl of spaghetti. Streets following age-old trails are intersected almost randomly with expressways, overpasses and tunnels. The surface in-between is littered with buildings and heavily punctuated with high rises ranging from 40 to
80 stories. The high rises seem to be involved in a competition to see which can be the most outrageous to draw the viewer's attention. It's not unusual to see a 70 story romanesque building next to a an equally tall modernistic thing that looks as though it was transported from Las Vegas. Both may be swathed in neon and blinking in an exhibitionistic manner.
We're staying in a hotel on West Nanjing Road, a kind of 5th Avenue type of location. Certainly not typical of all of China but so extensive that it's clear there is money and modernity in abundance. We spent much of yesterday walking down Nanjing Road marveling at the stores .... every high-end brand on the planet seems to have its own presence here. There is one two block area where all of the high-end watch companies such as Rolex, Panerai, Breguet, Blanpain, Tissot, etc have their own mega stores. The walk was a visual feast. We went into aptly named China Number One Department Store which truly glittered inside where there was a sea of boutiques offering the world's finest brands. Meanwhile, on side streets we were treated to glimpses of an older China with laundry hanging from balconies, shoe repairmen working from the backs of their bicycle mounted mini-shops, open air eateries and stalls. The street is punctuated with huge, gorgeous parks and finally becomes a pedestrian way. Pedestrians! There were hundreds of thousands ..... we couldn't believe the throng enjoying the beautiful spring day, milling in and out of the stores, licking ice creams (Hagen Daz no less) and snapping photos of each other. It could have been Hyde Park, Central Park or Gorky. The big difference was scale, hugeness, incredible numbers of people.
The walk down Nanjing road eventually brings one to The Bund. This is Shanghai's old waterfront on the Huang Po River. Nowadays the waterfront is a modern raised walkway-park that fronts the river ..... on this broad park-walkway (about the width of a football field) is an outdoor viewing, strolling area for crowds of people who watch the boats plying the Huang Po. Across the Huang Po sits the city of Pudong, a huge new city of skyscrapers that looks to be about the size of Chicago, except thirty years ago Pudong wasn't there. We enjoyed lunch from a terrace looking out at the Huang Po, Shanghai and Pudong. All the while we watched the crowds below and the endless promenade of ships up and down the Huang Po. There were ships of ocean liner size, small pleasure boats, barges and everything in-between. I've never, absolutely never, seen such a busy waterway. Amazingly this continual traffic of ships and boats somehow avoids collisions and make their ways along. The Huang Po empties into the Yangtze only a mile or two from Shanghai. Since the Huang Po is considered only a modest tributary, and it's the size of the Mississippi, I can't imagine what the Yangtze looks like.
After crowd watching on the Bund we took a ride on a motorized rickshaw kind of thing to the DongTai Road open air antique and curio market. The ride was pretty scary because the scooter could only go about 20 mph and we were in a sea of faster, larger vehicles. As they passed us we were wondering if we'd fall out the back of the tiny thing ..... it was a memorable ride made all the more memorable because the driver tried to overcharge us by claiming the fare was to be doubled since there were two of us. We held our ground and only paid for one so he settled for just charging us too much for one person. Of course, at the time, we didn't know that his one-person fare was about double what it should have been! So, having negotiated to cut the fare in half we only overpaid by about double :)
At Dongtai road there was everything for sale from Mao's Little Red Book to live crickets. We enjoyed looking and avoided buying. As the sun set we taxied back to our hotel. So much for day one in Shanghai.