Worst Kept Secrets

We left for Shanghai on Monday morning, and at first glance the Nanjing train station did not look promising for easy travel. The place was PACKED. It’s a holiday week for a lot of people due to National Day, and the boards showed all the trains as sold out. This isn’t the end of the world - you can always get a standing room only ticket - but it’s not a whole lot of fun. We had to do that on our way back from the U.S. this summer, and being stuck next to the bathrooms on a crowded train will really make you wonder exactly what these people are eating that produces such a frothy, richly complex aroma. However, this went smoothly enough - Chris pulled out a miracle by wrangling a couple of seats for us on the next train (we think we got special foreigner reserve tickets or something), and we had plenty of time to grab McDonald’s next door and catch our train without running or getting stressed. The CRH train really might be the difference between my experiences traveling in China and those of people who’ve been here longer and traveled more. It’s a slick, fast, clean, two hour train ride in comfy seats with lots of leg room.

Anyway, we got to Shanghai, and followed our usual Shanghai train station routine - I parked with the luggage on a bench while Chris went to get our return tickets, which he did with no hassle while I absentmindedly went through my standard list of worried fantasies about what I would do if Chris disappeared and left me stranded by a trashcan and some homeless guys (. Then it was off to our hotel. We stayed at the Nanjing A*Live Design Hotel. The hotel was Chris’s find, and it was a perfectly nice place to stay - great location, a nice room with a pretty view, and a Starbucks on the ground floor. Our bathroom came stocked with the usuals (soap, shampoo, paper slippers, toothbrush and toothpaste, a razor, and sanitary wipes labelled Her and Him). There was also an array of sex toys, which surprised me a little. I mean, I think it’s fantastic that a hotel would think to provide free condoms - China’s great when it comes to birth control, and I think that the U.S. could take a lot of lessons from that. But in addition to the condoms, there was a cock ring and several packets of a “traditional Chinese medicinal preparation” designed to “keep your passion hot.” Now, as I said, China’s all over making birth control easily and freely available, but when it comes to STDS…. “the contents will prevent the spread of infectious diseases, with no side effects!” Aiiieee…

We didn’t have much of a plan, so we decided to take a walk from the hotel to the Bund. The street near our hotel was a really nice, leafy area with sculpture parks, coffee shops and cafes, and strollable sidewalks. Along the way, Chris got attacked by a woman trying to shine his shoes. It started with Chris’s polite Chinese equivalent of “no thanks,” but the woman kept following and trying to grab his shoes. It ended with her actually smearing white shoe polish all over him and us fleeing. We also saw people crouched on the ground with blankets spread out selling jewelry. I was mildly interested in the first one we passed, but then I noticed that everyone’s spread was almost identical. Beads, dangly earrings, Bhudda heads, antique-looking mortar and pestle sets, etc. I don’t quite understand how that works as business.

The scenery changed drastically once we hit People’s Square and started down the pedestrian shopping street Nanjing Dong Lu. Honestly, Times Square or Picadilly Circus have NOTHING on this place. It was a holiday week, so the crowds were in full force. Every three feet or so, someone would offer us a watch, DVDs, or handbags, and there were a few people just standing in one place screaming “HASHISH!” (so much for China’s infamous zero tolerance drug policy?). There were people EVERYWHERE. You could barely turn around without nearly knocking someone over. Other than the expensive brand named stores (I realize Shanghai’s an enormous city, but is it really big enough to justify an Omega watch store on every block?) and the counterfit watches and handbags on the street, vendors were out in force selling HUGE balloons, light up devil horns, glow sticks, and just about every toy you might expect to see in the discount bins in Wal-Mart. I kept seeing people walking around with huge inflated mallets, and wondered if they were supposed to be some kind of harmless stress relief. I found myself desperately hoping to see someone go absolutely beserk with his/her Minnie Mouse encrusted balloon cudgel.

We made it all the way to the river, by which point the crushing crowd had taken a toll on us. We weren’t forming coherent sentences, we were exhausted, and there was nothing to do but throw ourselves back into the throngs of slowly ambling people and ride the current back to the hotel.

We recharged and planned our next move. The Lonely Planet Shanghai 2004 Edition had this to say about the French Concession: “The French Concession was once home to the bulk of Shanghai’s adventurers, revolutionaries, gangsters, prostitutes, and writers”, so that was pretty much a no-brainer. The plan was to get to the area, choose a splendid restaurant, and drink ourselves silly on Maoming Road, which Lonely Planet told us was a “nightlife magnet.” Problem #1: the “find a restaurant by walking around” never works. That’s exactly how you wind up with about twenty options, and you finally get so hungry and overwhelmed that you slink into Papa John’s instead. Problem #2: In China, 2004 might as well be last century. The Maoming Road described in the guidebook doesn’t exist anymore.

[Nanjing has a Papa John’s, and a Starbucks, and a Subway, which were three things we got super excited about in Shanghai, but none of them are in our neighborhood, and so the only classic example of American laziness, convenience, and corporate packaging we regularly get into is McDonald’s. I guess if we visited Nanjing and stayed in Xinjiekou, we’d have a similarly exciting experience of familiar and easily accessible chains.]

We had a shamefully good time glutting ourselves on pizza and garlic butter (although it grieves me to report that the garlic butter sauce suffered in translation), and then charged off down Maoming Lu looking for the insanity. We went up and down the street, looking for the tell tale signs of staggering youths, vomit in the streets, weaving taxi cabs whose patrons’ drunken hollering was audible as far as the sidewalk, etc. Instead, we found a Disney English Training Center, the Teddy Bears Collectors Shop, and a row of tailors with names like The Executive and Candor. I’m about as interested in men’s fashion as I am in women’s fashion (the idea of shopping as a recreational activity normally makes me feel a little nauseous), but these were good-looking suits. If you need some swanky men’s business apparel, I’m telling you: Maoming Lu’s got you covered.

Anyway, we were about to give up when we finally found a tiny little section of a block that included a couple of bars and two or three restaurants, and decided we were tired of walking anyway. So we got a table at Blue Frog, right next to the huge open door/windows, and watched the empty sidewalk and drank bloody marys and tom collinses. It was actually a really pleasant, quiet, friendly place to drink. It wasn’t crowded, the music was decent and not too loud, and it made a really nice counterpoint to the craziness of the Bund.

We also saw a guy pulling an enormous wagon full of the biggest teddy bears I’ve ever seen in my life down the mostly deserted street, peering forlornly into Blue Frog seeking customers. It was just such a pitiful sight - I probably would have bought one if I wouldn’t have had to lug it around train stations.

After we paid our alarmingly high bar tab, we walked back to the hotel. That’s where we noticed a sign for a pub in the basement of our building called Windows Underground. We were on the verge of calling it a night, but figured we should at least stop in and have a beer. We headed down the stairs into a laser lit cave furiously thrumming with industrial trance, a sardonically smiling bar tender, and cheap beer. I don’t really know how to describe the atmosphere - Chris said that he felt like he “should either be snorting blow or sucking blood.” Between the blackness and the strobe lights and the lasers flying around with the truly satanic tunes blaring, the place simply had to be a front for some kind of unimaginable crime. However, the clientele looked innocent enough - a group of young, trashed girls, an American shooting pool, little clusters of friends playing dice games and laughing in corners. One beer turned into several, because we kept getting cracked up at how freaking hardcore the ambiance was. Then we crashed out.