August 20, 2008 Upon my arrival in Beijing in 2004, the first thing I noticed about the city, before even emerging from the airport, was the horrid smog, the thick blanket of pollution that perpetually hangs over the city. You just had to look down the long hallways in the airport terminal and you could see it: a palpable haze that obscured the end of the terminal.
The first thing I noticed about Shanghai? The same. As we began our descent to the Pudong Airport, it was impossible to see the contours of the city until it almost hit us and we touched down, on the ground, safe and sound. At least the smog here didn’t make its way into the airport. But as soon as I stepped outside to catch a bus into the city, it closed in on me on all sides.
Shanghai is a city of many names. One of them that I heard recently: “Whore of the Orient.” As I arrived in the city and started to explore it, this nickname didn’t seem far off. Indeed, I could see her standing over the city, cigarette dangling seductively from the side of her mouth, lips lined with glitter and painted bright red, taking a puff and blowing a cloud of stifling smoke in my face, luring men greedy for vice and the riches to sustain them from both East and West.
I didn’t just paint a pretty picture of Shanghai. But this whore is pretty, in her own way. And far more complex than her surface of a shroud of smoke will lead you to believe. During my 24 hours in Shanghai, I was able to get a glimpse of these complexities that give the city its allure. For me and the “Whore of the Orient,” it was love at first sight. Perhaps not lovely to look at, but full of beauty on a deeper level. Despite my initial plans to see a few hours worth of Shanghai before catching a train to Nanjing, the city where I’ll spend the next 4 months studying, once I got on the airplane in Chicago, cracked open my copy of Lonely Planet, and started to do some more research about what there was to do in Shanghai, I started to have second thoughts. So, with the help of my copy of “The Traveller’s Bible” (a.k.a. Lonely Planet), I located an area of the city with a high concentration of hostels and decided to try my luck.
Upon arriving at the airport, I collected my baggage, bid farewell to a cool kid called Sam that I sat next to on the plane (a nuclear physicist/opera singer who was going to Shanghai to study for a semester), caught a bus to a metro to the area I’d earmarked, and set out to find a hostel. But I wandered about with one big backpack on my back and a smaller one in front until I was dripping with more sweat than I’ve shed in a long time and about ready to pass out…(exhausted gasping for breath in air thick with smog)…without finding one hostel.
Just as I was about ready to join a family of Chinese tourists on a bench to catch my breath, I saw a pack of French tourists approaching. ‘If anyone around here can help me find one of these hostels, I’m sure these guys can,” I thought. And, indeed, that was just where they were going. I found a room with 2 Danish girls and 1 Chinese woman (for about $6 for a night!) but used it basically as a place to store my stuff while I went out to explore. By the time I checked in and locked my luggage in my personal safe in the room (I include this tidbit to provide my parents some peace of mind), the museum and garden I was hoping to visit were closed.
That didn’t stop me, though. The adrenaline surging through me won out over my exhaustion and I walked and walked all over that city, along the Bund and across the river upon which it lies and down neon-sign-coated Nanjing Street, past the landmark TV tower and around some winding inner alleys, until I realized: its been a while since I ate and I was starting to feel it. So after an udon dinner at an Asian fusion restaurant (recommended by a nice guy named Stuart that I met at the hostel), I returned to my tiny 4-bunk storage space and crashed.
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