Travel Notes 1: Shanghai

Perhaps I’m starting this journal series 18 months late but at least now than never.

Earlier this year I spent a full week in Tokyo, partly for work partly for holiday. It’s instantly fired into second position on my favourite cities list, behind Cape Town of course. A few weeks back I landed in Shanghai and got a lot of similar vibes to Tokyo. But even in my limited time there, there was something about my memory of Tokyo, the culture, the food, and especially the cars that was missing in Shanghai. Nonetheless, I have a couple of impressions of Shanghai and of Chinese culture in general that I felt worth writing about.

Firstly, like in the movies or what you maybe read online, there are cameras everywhere. And I really mean everywhere. To access any public transport, rent a bicycle, by food or get a taxi, they need full identification of you and your passport. They want to know who you are, where you are going and for how long. All the time. Across every road, every few kilometres, is a big gantry with cameras, and flashes that blind you with every pass, keeping track of which car is going where, for how long, who owns it and who is inside. It’s quite frightening in some sense, but then again not concerning in another sense because everyone is in the same boat. But from a privacy and data point of view, sincerely questionable.

But in return the services all work like a dream. I was able to live-track the location of the bus I needed to take to get to the metro station right from within the Apple Maps app. And to pay for anything, you just need one single app that sorts you out on every front. Why don’t we have this in Europe? One app, for messaging, banking, transport, food, data, holidays. It’s so easy and works so well. But again, I wonder what kind of tracking is happening because of it. It’s as much ingenious as it is spooky.

Another oddity I’m still trying to work out is the oven gloves scooter suits. There’s no other way to describe it. Despite the hot, humid weather and the lack of rain, every person who is riding a moped, a scooter or a motorbike has a large set of oven-glove-looking bags wrapped around the handle bars, and those are attached to a large bib that the rider wears. Nope me neither. No idea.

Food. I was apprehensive of this before I even got to China. In all honesty, I don’t think I had enough time to fully explore the Chinese cuisine, nor did I have someone who could direct me with my western pallet, but after my first meal with meat, with odd texture, smell, and flavour, I stuck with eating vegetarian for the rest of my time. A bit of a shame, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

The highlight without a doubt was the downtown Shanghai skyline, especially at night. It is a sight of unbelievable scale. The number of people, both tourists and locals soaking up the views, taking selfies, and strolling along the promenade, or Bund as it’s called, was quite baffling but equally understandable. With the second tallest building in the world being flanked by tens if not hundreds of further skyscrapers in a full 360deg ring around the Bund is quite something to see. Perhaps only the UAE could rival views like this, but even then I think Shanghai might have a bit more character than those Arab cities. Either way it was worth seeing twice on separate evenings.

Aside from a local backstreet tea tasting experience that the shop owners connived me to do after stopping me on the street, and a very 1930’s American jazz bar that I went to with my colleagues on our last night being an absolute vibe - taking me straight back to my high school jazz band experience - it felt like Shanghai was missing a little something, a bit of identity. Maybe I was just so spoilt with Tokyo, I’m not sure.

In the end that small experience of otherwise massive China was valuable and fascinating, but it won’t be on my holiday list any time soon.