What's my problem? China's convenient stores don't work like SE Asia's.
When I opened my eyes, the sun was already starting to rise. It was six in the morning. I was in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room, in an unfamiliar city, in an unfamiliar country. I wrapped the heavy duvet around me and buried my head in the pillow.
"Mrrrrraaaaawwwwwwhhhhhhhh," I emoted, muffled by the pillow, as I stretched my limbs.
After a few moments of staring at the ceiling, I stepped out of bed and looked out the window. I was lucky. My room faced the river, so I could see all of the crazy architecture on the Pudong side of the river. At six in the morning, though, all of the shops on the street below were still all shuttered up.
It's amazing how light can change a place. The previous night, the streets seemed sketchy, dark and ominous. During the daytime, the streets just seemed like streets, like it was anywhere. People were walking to get to and from work. There was no litter. Cars drove by.
After cleaning up and checking my e-mail, I was out the door by eight o'clock.
Throughout all of my travels, I have always been able to locate foreign, pay as you go SIM chips for my cell phones in convenience stores. Whether it be at 7-Eleven, Lawson's, Circle K, AM/PM, FamilyMart or Kwik Stop, I've always been able to find them there. I must have walked into eight or ten convenience stores and I couldn't for the life of me get a prepaid SIM card.
Now it was important that I get this SIM. Flashback to a year and a half ago. I was in Hoi An, Vietnam, where, after my German roomie moved on, I decided to split a room with a gorgeous girl from Shanghai. Over the past year and a half, we had kept in sporadically; a message here, a message there. As I tell most of the people that I meet on the trail, I told her that if I were ever in the area, I would make a concerted effort to go and see her.
This has worked many times before. One time, I had a two night layover in London on my way to Amsterdam to see my pal Ed. I used that layover to see my friend Lianne, who I had met in Cinque Terre a few years earlier. Two summers ago, I took my one day off from work and flew to New York City to meet up with my friend Jade from Australia who was passing through. So, for me, a big part of coming to Shanghai was to reconnect with the friend that I made in Vietnam.
As I searched frantically for a SIM card, I went in and out of shops until I got to East Nanjing Road. Nanjing Road is one of the biggest high end (with mid and low end too) shopping roads in all of China. They have everything from Cartier and Tag Heuer to Louis Vuitton and Gucci. The eastern most six or so blocks are all pedestrian, so there are crowds of people, little trollies to take pedestrians from one end of the pedestrian arcade to the other.
It was there that I ducked into a China Mobile store. I thought that, of course, I would be able to get a pre-paid SIM card there. No dice. Apparently, in order to get a SIM card there, you need to sign up for a plan. In order to sign up for a plan, you need to have a resident identification card. I didn't want a plan and I didn't have a resident identification card, so I was shit out of luck.
As I walked down East Nanjing Road, I was still on the lookout for SIM card, but all I saw were Giordano's, Adidas and Starbucks.
The day that I was in San Jose, before coming to China, I was at a Japanese dollar store with Linh. In Boston, and in San Jose, I had been looking for travel chopsticks to take with me, because I knew that I would be eating a lot of street food. I would be eating at a lot of places where I would be using those crappy, wood, break-apart chopsticks. I just wanted a better pair to help me save the environment. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good pair in the States.
However, as I walked down Nanjing Road, I spotted a Yunhong Chopsticks shop. Now, I knew nothing about this company. I knew nothing of the fact that I would see this shop name in almost every city that I visited. I also knew nothing of how to bargain in China. I also didn't realize how much more things cost on Nanjing Road than they do in other places.
So, I go into the Yunhong Chopstick shop and I see them. I see exactly what I had been looking for. These travel chopsticks were ebony and stainless steel. They came apart and the tips packed into the handles, so they were half the length when put away, and came with a ripstop nylon case on a carabiner. I knew that I had to have it.
In southeast Asia, I was used to bargaining out in the night markets or even in some of the malls where people were hawking black market goods. I never really shopped at any name brand stores, so I had no clue that I could have bargained. There was a price on the chopsticks, so I assumed that since there was a price written, that's the price it sold at. I later found out, not only was I wrong about having to pay a written price in a shop, but I found out that I probably paid way too much. I ended up paying a hundred and something renminbi (aka RMB or Yuan). It was the equivalent of around thirteen dollars. I justify buying the chopsticks at that price several ways.
1) They were EXACTLY what I was looking for.
2) I'll NEVER have to buy another pair of travel chopsticks.
3) I was ignorant.
4) The chopsticks WERE made of ivory and stainless steel.
5) There was a pretty girl selling them to me.
That's right. I said it. There was a pretty girl in a business suit selling them to me. All of her fellow shop girls didn't want to talk to the lao wai (foreigner), because either my Mandarin was just so bar or they were ashamed of their English. But, the cute girl muddled along in broken English and I muddled along in broken Mandarin. I think if I could have tipped her (literally and figuratively), I would have.
It was also good that I bought the chopsticks from that girl, because after I paid, I was able to ask her where I could find a SIM card for my phone. She pointed me down a street off of Nanjing Road, doing her best to motion with her hands on where and how far to go.
Still on my way, I stopped into two convenience stores just to be given the same answer that they didn't carry SIM cards. After a few blocks, I came across an intersection that had a number of street food vendors. There were people selling food out of carts and some that had corner store fronts. I asked one of the vendors where I could find a SIM card and she pointed me down the street parallel with Nanjing Road, at a tiny little storefront.
Inside the storefront were all sorts of telephone parts, from old dusty rotary phones to old Nokia's. It looked like a phone graveyard the size of a shoebox. Inside the shop, there was a skinny old man along with an old woman who was fast asleep on a chair. As I walked up, the old man greeted me with a toothy smile that was black around the edges. He wore a thin light blue, almost white, button down shirt, a pair of dirty chinos, and plastic sandals. He seemed affable.
Note: My Mandarin is awful. I do not speak standard Mandarin. My grammar and syntax is all fucked up. So, what I was saying to this guy was followed by strange looks from him and effort on his part to figure out what I was saying.
Me: "Ni you mei you... uhh... SIM card?" (Do you have... uhhh... SIM card?)
Him: (something I didn't understand in Mandarin.)
I pull out my phone, rip off the back plate and battery, and show him.
Him: "Ahhhh... You. You." (Ahhhh... I have it. I have it.)
He ducks under his counter display case of grossly outdated phones and pulls out a stack of square envelopes the size of CDs or DVDs. He looks through the stack and pulls one out. It says China Mobile on it.
Me: "Ji kuai?" (How much?)
Him: "Yi bai kuai." (One hundred Yuan)
Me: "Wo ke bu ke ye kan kan?" (Can I see it?)
Him: "Ke ye." (You can.)
I opened the enveloped, inspecting it carefully. It was printed with a price of a hundred RMB on it and didn't seem to be tampered with. I pulled out the card and popped out the chip and put it into my phone.
Me: "Wo yao kan kan zhe ke ye gong zuo." (I want to see if this will work.)
The phone works! So I immediately pull out Isa's phone number and call her.
Her: "Wei?" (Hello?)
Me: "Isa, It's Jason! I'm in Shanghai! What's going on?
Her: "Jason! I'm not in Shanghai right now. I had to leave town for work. I'll be back in a few day."
Me: "Aww, man! That sucks. So when do you think you'll be back?
Her: "Wednesday or Thursday."
Me: "Okay... Well, this is my number. Give me a call when you get back into town and we'll get together for dinner or something."
Her: "Okay. I talk to you in a few days."
Me: "Bye!"
Needless to say, I was a bit down about the fact that I wouldn't get a chance to see Isa. I had only planned on staying in Shanghai for four days, but I'll be damned if I get to Shanghai and I don't see her.
It's still morning, and I had my primary goal for the day out of the way, so my mind shifted to my constant goal: to sate my hunger. Being the guy who delves straight into the culture, I knew where I had to go. So, I paid the man with the mossy smile and the affable way about him and headed back to the crossroads where I saw the street vendors.
On one corner was a fruit vendor, another corner had someone with a cart selling, something I don't remember, but the money corner had a woman selling buns filled with pork or veg and shumai that was filled with sticky rice. If I walked just past the bun lady, there was a couple who were making fresh scallion pancakes.
At EXNE, we had scallion pancakes on the menu. The sous made the dough, put it through a pasta roller to roll it out as thin as humanly possible, brush it with oil, sprinkle on the scallions, roll it the short way so it looks like a long, long snake, then coil that to make a ball, and squish it to make a pancake.
The couple in Shanghai had a different method. The wife would have the dough in a snake the size of my arm, girth and length. She would then cut off pieces the size of my fist. With each of these fist size dough pieces, she would use the heel of her hand to smear the dough into pieces that were three inches wide by five or six inches long and flat. She would brush with oil and sprinkle with scallions, roll it up so it looked like a cinnamon bun and would hand it to her man. He would then take the scallion cinnamon bun, put it on the griddle and smush it with a weight that looked like a giant boardgame piece. It seemed so much easier and quicker than what was happening at EXNE.
The scallion pancake stand
The strips and scallion cinnamon buns
Pressing the pancakes
First breakfast in China? Fuck yeah!
That scallion pancake cost me one and a half Yuan. Let's break that down, shall we? There are six and a half yuan to a dollar. That pretty much makes that scallion pancake cost less than a quarter. It was probably the best quarter that I have ever spent.
From there, I walked back to Nanjing Road and walked the promenade all of the way down to its end where it meets People's Square and People's Park. On the way there, though, I saw all sorts of crazy things. There was one store that had a huge saltwater aquarium with sea turtles and sharks. There were people dancing with fans for exercise, and everyone was taking pictures.
The view down Nanjing Road
Strange people dancing
Turtle in the aquarium
A lot of the time, the way I approach cities is that I will just wander aimlessly. Maybe not completely aimlessly, but I won't really say to myself, that I have to go somewhere. I spent a good few hours wandering around People's Park. The park itself is huge. It has green areas, museums, restaurants, an amusement park and sitting areas. It even has metro stop entrances all around it. At one part of the park there were at least a hundred children and accompanying parents feeding pigeons. It was pretty cute.
Kids feeding pigeons
I entered People's park on the north side and exited on the south side, and after consulting my book, I figured that I would go try to check out Cybermart. It was supposed to be a good spot to pick up cheap electronics. I was kind of in the market for a new phone, but I really didn't want to spend all that much on it.
I look at the map in my Rough Guide to China, and try to figure out where it is. It looks pretty self explanatory, but when I get there, it's nowhere to be found. I keep walking around and walking around thinking that I might have missed it. I walked around until I found myself at Xintiandi.
Xintiandi is a little area with high end shops and restaurants that are housed in buildings designed to emulate the shikumen style of building from the 1860s. I had been walking and looking for Cybermart for quite some time, so I decided to take a load off, enjoy some coffee, and do a little reading.
It was a beautiful day outside. There were people all over the place and I was happy that the coffee house had an outdoor seating area. To be honest, I didn't pay much attention to my book or my guidebook. I spent most of my time watching people and trying to listen in to what they were saying. For every conversation in Mandarin, I heard at least one in English or French.
I found one conversation particularly interesting. It was between an older white guy and a younger Russian woman. It had seemed as if they were on their first date. It was totally sketchy and lecherous. I think that the only question in my mind about the little date was whether there was some payola involved.
After a good hour or so, I decided that it was time to get a move on. So, I headed east towards the old city. I had no real intention of going into the old city. I just kind of wanted to go into that general direction, because it was just south of where my hotel was.
On my way there, I found what I had been looking for and nothing that I had been looking for. Cybermart. That's right. Cybermart had moved, and it just so happened that I walked right by it on the way to the old city. Since I was still in the market for a new cell phone, I walked in. Immediately, I was accosted by vendors. People are trying to wave you over to their booth. People are guiding you over by hand. It's a lot like Panthip shopping plaza in Bangkok. You almost feel dirty the way they're trying to usher you over and sell you stuff. They don't even know what you want or need. They just want to bring you over in case they have something you want.
Cybermart is split up into four or so floors. So, I went up to the cell phone floor. Let me tell you something, there is a lot of crap out there. There are a lot of crappy knock offs out there. You know, things that say "Sumsang," "Nokeea," and "Marola." I knew that if I was going to buy a new cell phone, I would want it to be a smart phone with the Android operating system. That meant that I needed to buy a real thing, not a knock off. It turns out that the real ones cost even more in China than they do in the States, so I bugged out among all of the grabbing hands telling me that they would give me a special price.
When I finally got to the old city, I was thoroughly disappointed. Sure, there was a lot of cool architecture, but it had all been converted into one giant tourist trap. There were hundreds of vendors all selling the same crap. And when I say crap, I mean, craaaaaaaaaap. If this crap was measured in terms of equine crap, this was no pony crap. This was full on clydesdale monster crap. It was here that I first uttered the words that I would say regularly throughout my trip, "Who buys this crap?"
As I made my way into the center of the old town, I found myself in the City God's temple. It was a pretty impressive functioning temple in the middle of the city. What impressed me most about this temple was that it had a Buddha for every birth year. I think that there were around seventy of them, at least, and like the Chinese zodiac, it goes in cycles. I know that there are more than a dozen of them, so I don't remember exactly how long the cycle is. There were some very cool ones, and some that were rather milktoast.
City God's Temple
One of the cooler Buddhas
The Buddha of my year
From there, it was an easy jump to see Yu Yuan Garden. Yu Yuan is a classic Ming Dynasty garden. What's extraordinary to me about this garden is how big it is despite the fact that it's in the middle of the city. It's not like People's Park where it's big and open. It's more of a garden of chambers. There are gates and doorways that lead to open spaces with either water features, rock sculptures, trees, or green area. There are pavilions to sit in, fish to feed, places to feed your desire for quiet contemplation. I was constantly surprised by how big the garden was. I felt like it was the never ending chain of gardens. I heard that during the height of the summer, Yu Yuan is packed, and it's body to body (and not in a good way). When I was there, there were people there, but it wasn't by any means crowded. I think I hit it just at the right time.
A pavilion at Yu Yuan
Some of the stonework in the paths of Yu Yuan
Roof detailing
Tell me this isn't awesome.
After I got out of Yu Yuan, I was crazy hungry. I knew that there were supposed to be really good xiao chi (small eats) in the old city, but my guide book wasn't really all that helpful in getting me to them. I saw a sign for soup dumplings so I immediately went in. When I got there, there were no soup dumplings to be found. I was kind of irritated, but I was so hungry that I stuck around. I ended up ordering some other boiled dumplings there, but in reality I probably should have left.
Meh dumplings.
After the snack, I was really zonked. It was around five in the afternoon, so I retired to my hotel to take a brief nap. It was totally what I needed, but when I woke up, I was hungry again. So, I walked back down Nanjing Road, hoping to find something tasty. I walked a long time, and found myself near the West Nanjing Road metro stop. Over there, there were a bunch of restaurants that all looked affordable. It turns out that during my time in Shanghai, I would spend a great deal of time in this area, but this night, I made a bad choice.
I looked for a place that had a menu that I liked and that had a relatively busy dining room. It ended up being a noodle bar. I don't even remember what I got there. I was so meh about it.
What was excellent was the walk back to the hotel. By the time I was finished, the sun had finally set. In fact, it had taken me so long to figure out where and what I wanted to eat in addition to eating slow, that it was about nine at night before I was finished. It was dark out, but as you walk down Nanjing Road, you get the feeling that you're in Vegas. The lights coupled with the architecture is, in a word awesome, and not in a cheesy way.
The crappy thing about walking down Nanjing Road at this time of night is that you get harassed. I had read the guidebook before stepping off the plane, so I knew all of the scams. Just on the walk home, on the pedestrian promenade, a couple of girls came and begged for food, though they didn't look poor or homeless at all, two sets of other girls tried to get me to go drink coffee or tea with them to "practice English," and three guys tried to get me to go with them to see girls for a "sex massage." It was unbelievable.
By the time I got back to the hotel, it was half past ten and I was beat. I spent a lot of time walking that day and I still hadn't adjusted to the time zone. So, even though it was a Friday, I was spent.
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