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Trip to Shanghai

Beijing, 1st of December

Due to the fact that my new company has branches in Shanghai and Guangzhou, a couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be sent on a business trip to Shanghai. So I left on the Friday and was to stay for three days in Shanghai, working on the Friday and Saturday. After reaching my hotel in Shanghai via plane, (fei1 ji1) taxi and then stepping out into the city, I was taken aback by the amount of people on the streets. Shanghai was even more crowded (yong1 ji3) than Beijing!

Lively debate

The two days of training the staff was hard work but went well, and my colleagues in Shanghai were extremely friendly and welcoming. We had dinner together on the Friday night and had a very lively discussion (huo2 yue4 de tan3 lun4) on topics such as 鈥淲hy do foreigners always have ugly Chinese girlfriends?鈥� I suggested they would best answer this question by first looking at the question of 鈥淲hy do pretty Chinese girls always have ugly foreign boyfriends?鈥�. It was an entertaining debate.

Not only did Shanghai have a fantastic variety of restaurants (including Brazilian, Indian, Western and Thai food) but the d茅cor and quality of these places far exceeded my expectations. The central part of Shanghai, looked as though it was built only yesterday. And the designs of the restaurants were stylish, innovative and modern. Service staff were appropriately decked out in colourful, traditionally themed uniforms.

The Old Town

"Luckily for me, my Korean ex-classmate kindly agreed to show me round, so our first stop was to a very popular tourist spot in Shanghai known as The Old Town. Now if I thought the normal parts of Shanghai were crowded then The Old Town was insane! There is a common Chinese expression 鈥�ren2 shan1 ren2 hai2鈥� (people mountain people sea), which could not be more appropriate to describe the scenes that greeted us. The whole area was swarming. The Old Town was a series of alleyways (hu2 tong4) and indoor and outdoor markets all set to the backdrop of fantastic traditional Chinese architecture. After being pushed and pulled by the multitude of domestic and foreign tourists, we managed to get to a lake near the Yu Yuan gardens. This lake is famous for having a bridge with nine corners, the number nine bearing great significance in Chinese culture. Had there not been so many people, all hell-bent on posing for and taking pictures, this part would鈥檝e been enjoyable, so we didn鈥檛 linger.

The little tea house

On the 鈥淣ine corner bridge鈥� lake was a wonderfully antique looking Chinese tea house (cha2 guan3), which was just too inviting not to visit. Inside we were served a kind of flower-bud tea, which expanded when hot water was added and produced a wonderfully rich and refreshing taste. It was probably the best Chinese tea I鈥檇 ever tasted. The tea-house was an extremely calming experience, allowing us to relax, look out of the window and be totally separated from the madness outside!

Art on the Peoples鈥� Square

Before I left I also visited the Peoples鈥� Square (Ren2 min2 Guang3 Chang3), which had a free, modern art exhibition (hua4 zhan3), celebrating and promoting human expression. Now, I could see what all the fuss about Shanghai was. It was only later in my trip, when I got to visit another ex-classmate studying outside the centre of Shanghai, that I saw the other parts of the city that looked much older and rundown. In fact, these parts of Shanghai were in worse condition than some of the really bad parts of Beijing. During my trip the weather in Shanghai was pretty warm. So, even though it still late Autumn I was still able to wear short sleeves, so coming back to the hard Beijing cold, certainly was a 鈥榥ice鈥� slap in the face!

Editor's note: Chris is writing Chinese words in 'Pinyin', Latin script, using numbers that indicate the tone of the word. Find out more with our course Real Chinese.

Sent by: Chris

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