Shanghai Tan

After 5 days of intensive packing and moving, the moment finally arrive: I’m boarding on Air Canada heading to Shanghai, thru Vancouver. The two of us has 10 bags in total, 5 to register and 5 to carry with us! Needless to say, going from home to the airport was more complicate than usual… But that was piece of cake, compare to all the gates and checks and scans that we have to pass thru in the airport. I always found that the airport management overdid it, while I totally understand the whole war on terror rhetoric, they’re literally treating every passenger as terrorist, until they can prove the contrary, and that certainly takes away the tiny remote possibility of comfort of taking a flight. Now all you can feel is stress, tire and scare!

Air Canada

Beside the crazy airport security procedure, I’ve been so well treated by Air Canada that I wish I don’t have to flight with them again. They’ve become so cheap that even a cracker is chargeable, 2$ please! The tiny coffee is free, that’s it! If you want to eat anything, a 6″ cold Subway sandwich is 6$, a tiny no-meat Harvey’s hamburger is 4$. There is only one big screen in the middle, and no movie, only some stupid Telus adds!

The North American airline industry is so backward that I can’t even call them a service industry, they don’t serve anymore, they only carry the bodies. If it was not for the even more unpleasant stops at American airport, I would take Japan Airline at any time, any cost!

Day 1

Arriving at Shanghai Pudong airport, the first thing I notice is the chaos: people run all around everywhere, cars don’t wait for people crossing street, vice-versa, the noice, the horn, quite a mess… This is my forth time arriving at Shanghai, and somehow this time, I no longer feel the humidity and the smell in the air, I guess I’m getting used already.

Arriving at grandma’s place, we quickly settle down, went out to open a bank account and acquire a cell phone card, and immediately my cell phone is functional, without even telling the guy what my name is!

Then we had a welcome diner with some relatives. What really impress me, more than the excellent taste and quality of the food, is the quantity. We were 8 people on a round table, we had about 10 appetizer dishes, and 10 to 15 regular dishes! Actually if we were to pile up all the dishes on the table, it would be 3 levels! At Montreal this would be the quantity to serve roughly 20 people!

Day 2

After going to the police station to register for a temporary residency, we went to lunch at the other grandma’s place. Again, for 3 people we were served the food of 8 people, easily! And as usual, we couldn’t finish half of it. Lots of people keep asking, how come during the Mao era there were famine all the time while everybody were working very hard, now that fewer people are farming, we have much much more food available, actually everything is available at Shanghai, you can hardly find anything missing here!

IKEA

Afternoon I went to IKEA, once inside, I can hardly feel anything different from Montreal’s IKEA, it’s the same exact look & feel, it’s packed with people. The only difference is that the sales people on the show floor don’t seem to be slightly interested in what we want, they’re there only for punching the order card… Sometime I wonder if sales for them only means taking order and price negociation, not much about helping the customers finding what they really want. This is specific to what I see, of course.

Day 3

We woke up quite early at the morning, went to Cheng Huang Miao to eat xiao long bao (more on this in future post). Luckly we were early (8:20 AM), the line-up is always crazy over there. It was pretty good.

Later I went to the Xin Guang photography equipment mall not far from home, it is a 7-stories mall with many small commercial booths. I bought a China-made Benro C-128 N6 tripod for 1,300RMB (~200$CAN). It has similar characteristics (even a little better) than the Italian-made Gitzo 6x Carbon tripod that costs 600$! More on this in future post…

The guy of IKEA deliver the sofa-bed (~4.5$CAN), asked if we wanted to assemble it ourselves or by them, we took the later one (3$), in 20 minutes it was done, everybody was happy!

At night we went to a all-you-can-eat sushi diner, including wine. It is not cheap, but the price is reasonable. We ate too much again, but didn’t drink too much, fortunately.

Day 4

The Internet company is coming to install ADSL connection. The whole process takes about 5 minutes and they guy was gone, I like that kind of straight forward service! Again this is not cheap, but fair.

Today I had the first nail service of my life! Apparently it is not uncommon for men to have professional nail service. I have to admit it was not a bad experience at all, I have to try to avoid being addicted to that… Because most women are addicted here…

Then I went to a hair salon, very nice one located right at Xin Tian Di. For 110RMB (~18$) I got hair wash, massage and a good caliber hair-dresser. This is not cheap at all, but with a membership card we got it at half price, that is bargain!

At night we went to a friend’s wedding, it was a very ordinary wedding, although the ending was a bit ugly (not what you think), but the food was, by tradition, excessive! I tried not to drink much, as I have to work early the next morning.

I think I will revisit the theme of food quantity in a future post, so far it has always been excessive, because we always meet people who can afford them. I have to figure out if that really is the norm here. Geez, it would put the Italian diners to shame at any day!

Sorry no photo yet… too busy to process them.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 11:11 am and is filed under Shanghai Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.