31st August -Shanghai

I touched down at Shanghai Pudong Airport at around 10.30pm and started my fourteen day trip in China and North Korea. After rotting for nearly a year in the army, I considered this trip to be a key highlight of my boring life this year. I have heard and read a lot about the economic transformation in China over the years, but I have never been to mainland China, except for the short student exchange program in Shenzhen that was organized by the prefectorial board in secondary three, and I wanted to have a first-hand feel of the place. Shanghai, is of course, the key economic center of a resurgent China and a good barometer of the economic vitality of the nation. It would be interesting to know how different it is from Singapore and have a sense as to whether it will become a key economic/financial hub alongside Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore.

The Shanghai Pudong Airport has the quality and standard that you would expect from an airport in an economically-developed city. It is linked to the city by the Maglev, which is the fastest train on earth with a speed up to 430km/h (apparently the Germans and Japanese are not building it because of safety considerations, but the Chinese don’t really care. After all, what’s the big deal when a trainload of people die in a country with one billion people?) It didn’t take me a long time to retrieve my luggage and take the bus to the hostel near Jian An temple. I took the bus to Jian An temple as it was the easiest and most cost-efficient option according to the information provided by the hostel.

The ride to Jian An temple was rather uneventful, but I couldn’t help noticing the woman sitting next to me was connected to the internet using her laptop. Perhaps this stemmed from my innate prejudice that the mainland Chinese were less technologically sophisticated as Singaporeans, it took me a while to process the information of a technologically sophisticated Shanghainese chatting using Skype, with the glistening skyscrapers zooming past me.

It was a pretty long walk from the Jian An temple station to the hostel. After about ten minutes of walking, I stopped at a local cafeteria for supper and picked the rather safe choice of Yang Zhou Chao Fan. It cost me 10rmb and didn’t really taste that great, for it comprised of rice, slices of hot dog and carrot. Then again, a hungry man should not complain.

Gosh, I just realized I am going too much into the details. Anyway, I reached the hostel at around midnight through a rather dark and rather dodgy passageway. After registering myself at the counter, I went to the four-bed shared room that my friend booked for me. The place looked small and cramped and it didn’t help that a rather sketchy old man greeted me and replied that he was from the moon when asked about his hometown. This, coupled with the fact that I had sore throat that day and wasn’t feel too well, were enough to make me fork out an additional 160 rmb to get a private room for myself. With the benefit of hindsight, I had a good night’s rest and it was worth the money as I woke up the next day feeling refreshed.