My best travel guides to Shanghai were actually articles written by two Philippine STAR lifestyle columnists – Celine Lopez’s "Shang-Hey!," December 13, 2001) and Kathy Moran’s "Shanghai Surprises," (December 16, 2001). Celine was my guide for shopping while Kathy was my guide for sights. Bringing their articles along was one of the brightest things I did this year. When we couldn’t find the Yu Yuan Gardens because people couldn’t understand our broken Mandarin, all I did was show them the photos in the tearsheets. Five more minutes of wandering, and we would’ve all turned blue in the zero-degree weather.
Or should I say below-zero-degree weather. In its December 26 issue, Shanghai Daily, Shanghai’s English language broadsheet, reported, "Temperatures hit record low."
The article went, "...A record low of minus 2.3 degrees centigrade – the coldest day this year – was recorded yesterday, local meteorologists said..."
In fact, my husband, thinking it was San Francisco weather, brought only a wind jacket and literally turned into Frosty.
Everyone who has gone to Shanghai has shown surprise and admiration at how developed and cosmopolitan the city has become. The first things that strike you, and I suppose these are the first things that strike every Pinoy who travels to various major cities, is how big and modern the airport is, and how vast and smooth the road network is. Compared with the Shanghai roads, our Manila roads can give moon craters special meaning.
However, something not so funny happened at the spanking, new Pudong International Airport in Shanghai suburbia. Aside from my family, we flew in with my brother, his wife, my sister, her three-year-old daughter and her yaya. My sister’s daughter and the yaya shared one luggage and upon arrival at the airport, the luggage never appeared. We had flown in straight from Manila. There was one piece of luggage left going around the carousel and the yaya said that it looked like their luggage. It suddenly dawned on us that someone took their luggage by mistake. We looked at that last piece of luggage on the carousel and the name tag showed a doctor’s name with a Parañaque address. If this was the guy who took our luggage by mistake despite the fact that his own luggage had a name tag, then I can just imagine how many times he switched medicine labels and babies in the hospital.
My first instinct was to take the guy’s luggage, but my husband’s legal mind intervened. He said that if the doctor’s luggage contained contraband items, I would be locked up in a Shanghai jail forever. Besides, it would already be great suffering for the doctor to discover that if he wanted to change clothes, he would need a sex change to get into the yaya’s clothes and/or a time machine to get into my three-year-old niece’s jumpers.
Fortunately, the person who took our luggage returned it the following day.
I wish I could do a travel guide, but when you have a father who has been in business for 60 years and a mother who has been tending to gardens for the past 50 years, your itinerary looks like this:
Day one: We drive two hours to an industrial park in Kun Shan, visit a hypermart, have lunch, and drive for another two hours back to Shanghai.
Day Two: We drive two-and-a-half hours to Hangzhou, southwest of Shanghai, to see the famous West Lake. We hire a tour guide who says he can speak English but when we get to the place, suddenly he has a sudden attack of stage fright and refuses to speak a single word of English. And so he explains everything in Mandarin and only my mother understands what he’s saying. We all regret not having taken our Mandarin seriously in school.
On the way back, the tour guide gets lost, and our driver curses him to death. We get stuck in the middle of a small road full of delivery trucks. It turns out that the tour guide knows the way back by boat, but doesn’t know the way back by car. So it takes us three hours to get back to Shanghai.
Day Three: We visit more industrial parks.
I suppose sitting in a vehicle on the road for hours to get to industrial parks and a lake is not everyone’s definition of a vacation. But there are a few things to learn:
1. The entire world is investing in China.
2. Despite the economic boom and the increase in the number of factories and office/residential buildings, China manages to keep its cultural sites, parks and lakes intact and well-maintained.
In fact, people who have not visited China in the past 15 years still think that drinking water is scarce and that people still urinate in canals. Well, no longer. In Shanghai, mineral water is sold everywhere at very reasonable prices and in every public place I went to, I managed to bump into only one canal (This deserves another article.). The toilets are modern. You either have the regular toilet bowl or one that’s "underground" but flushes. You choose whatever is to your liking and whatever you are used to. This is still better than in Manila where we force people to use modern toilets without teaching them how to use them and then later on find so many footsteps on the toilet seat. You wonder how these people manage not to fall into the bowl.
In between Day Two and Day Three, our dad told all of us six kids to enjoy Christmas Eve and gave us money to enjoy the night. My brother suggested Xintinadi, a trendy new restaurant and entertainment complex. The place was so jampacked we had to move to another place. We made it to Park 67 (or was it 97?), which was equally jampacked. It was a miracle we were able to find a table in one of the bars. California Club, I think it was. The dance floor was so packed that the only way you could dance was to move your shoulders up and down and bend your knees.
I ordered two shots of my favorite drink, Kahlua and cream. Unfortunately, the waiter took the phrase literally and gave me kahlua with two inches of whipped cream on top. I called him back and told him in my broken Mandarin that cream actually meant "milk" and I used my pointing finger to show that I would be stirring the drink. Well, the waiter literally stirred it. What came back was my same kahlua concoction but this time the waiter had poured the drink into an osterizer, and so now I had kahlua and whipped cream shake. For the second time in the trip, I regretted not having taken my Mandarin lessons seriously in school.
Finally, I had to call the Captain Waiter since he was the only one who could speak English. He profusely apologized for the mistake. For me, the incident was too hilarious to get mad about.
The following days we spent checking out the Shanghai Museum, Shanghai Art Museum, and the former residences of Dr. Sun Yat Sen and his wife Soong Ching Ling. I am particularly fond of looking at homes of famous people, especially the rooms where historical meetings were held or historical pacts were signed. At the place of Madame Soong, they displayed copies of correspondence between her and her sister Soong Mei Ling, wife of Chiang Kai Shek, and an exchange of telegrams with Chiang himself.
A brochure produced by the Shanghai Municipal Tourism Administrative Commission lists the sites of the former residences of 21 historical figures, including those of Mao Ze Dong and Zhou En Lai. As much as we wanted to see more than two homes, it was impossible due to lack of time. It would be great if we could do the same and preserve the homes of our historical figures and turn them into museums. At least the house of our national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal, is still intact. How many can claim that they have actually seen it? Oops, did I hit a raw nerve?
After attempting to look like cultured intellectuals, we all decided to do what we Pinoys know best – shopping! Try out the famous Nanjing Lu shopping street and you will see rows and rows of stores. Don‘t worry about the prices of the China-made goods at these stores – they are all very reasonable. If you are on a strict budget or enjoy haggling or simply a tight wad, there’s always the gigantic tiangge called the Xiang Yang Fashion and Gift Market (thanks to my Philippine STAR tearsheets) where you can get great clothes and accessories at super low prices, especially if you know how to haggle. This is also where my bladder forced me to use the toilet canal I dreaded, but let’s stick to shopping.
Speaking of shopping, we bumped into the chairman of a large-sized Philippine bank and he was proud of his China-made winter cap that cost only US$1. If a bank chairman buys a US$1 cap, then you know that your money is safe in his bank. On the other hand, my dad couldn’t believe that the cap he bought emptied his wallet of US$100. The first night he arrived, he didn’t realize that temperatures would hit zero and below, and it so happened that he was standing right in front of Plaza 66, a high-end mall full of designer boutiques. The only other mall nearby was another one full of expensive shops. Between catching pneumonia and landing in a hospital in Shanghai and spending US$100 for a hat, he decided it made more sense to enter that Ermenegildo Zegna store and grab that hat.
Well, I figured that it’s not everyday you go around wearing a Zegna hat, so you might as well use it.
We got back to Manila before New Year’s eve, and I expected the usual chaos. But what provided me relief was a scene at Immigration counter when a 10-year-old girl was reminding her parents to stand below the yellow line at the counter while waiting their turn, as the sign said, "Kung hindi kayo tatayo behind the yellow line," she said, "huhulihin kayo ng pulis!"
I hope that one day this girl becomes Chief of Police.