The first day July 17th.
We arrived at noon in Shanghai. The airport is huge, you could walk kilometres to the main building where immigration and your luggage waited or use walking belts. We came in a jumbo jet but there was still plenty of carts left to carry your luggage along. Immigration was a long wait where each passenger was scrutinised conscientiously by the officer in charge. If you reported having a chinese name you were required to write it down on the form.

Lots of polished marble floors. Somehow it had the atmosphere of stalinisque tombs. This was not the designers airport one would expect in a city like Shanghai. But the luggage was there when I got to the belt which had a digital overhead information panel. Customs was just standing by pro forma when we wheezed past into Ria's welcoming hands.

To our disappointment we were not going on the fasttrain, the worlds fastest, handed over personally by Helmut Schröder, and made by Thyssen. The reason was that it was still experimental and just stopped at some point far from the city and then you had to resume your journey by taxi. So we got a taxi instead. Here came the first occassion where we were glad Ria was accompanying us. The taxi coordinator directed us to another waiting row because our luggage was presumed too much for a common taxi (Volkswagen Santana), we had to wait for another bigger one. Ria argued that one luggage could be put in the front seat. She was right.

Getting aquainted
After an almost one hour trip we arrived at Ria's appartment in the so called (former) French Concessionaries area. The taxi stopped in the basement garage near the lift and in no time we entered her appartment which was a nice pad, two bedrooms,two bathrooms, living, open kitchen, the largest widescreen Sony TV I ever saw and airco everywhere. Airco is very important as temp. passes the 30¾ degrees even during the cooler weehours of the day.

After adjusting ourselves a bit and having a shower we visited the local super, just across the street and bought and got aquainted with things and services and Grace left on her own to visit the hairsalon. After two hours she appeared younger than ever, gleefully since it cost her just a fraction of what she would be paying in Holland. Downstairs was an airconditioned ATM (draw money from the wall) room which you could enter with your (smart) card. I could withdraw money from my Rabobank pass without any costs as if I was in front of my local bank in Zoetermeer, well even safer, covered and airconditioned.

In the evening we went on a walk around the area of Ria's appartment. Some of it was old and original and would soon be torn down to make place for even more appartments of 24 and 32 stories. There were all kinds of small business on the ground level of our building. A massage parlour (no monkey business), computerized laundry, a hairdresser, a real estate agency and further down the street, restaurants, coffee shops, supermarkets, convenience stores (24 hours open) and further away tailors, boutiques and a market.

Supermarkets and the daily market
Supermarkets can be small and known as convenience stores offering bottled drinks, cleaning stuff, toilet needs, icecream, cookies etc. Bigger ones also sell medicine, bikes, small electronics, fresh fish, have a fresh bakery and sell other things likes books, cd's and DVD's and of course larger collections of everything you can find in the smaller one (theyopen from 8.00 to 23.00 hours. Department store supermarkets have more luxury items and for instance Carre Fourre markets are like others all over the world. There is a vast amount and choice of pakaged icecream, cookies and chocolate. The last one also included locally made which tasted good, better than american.

The daily market is very handy as it houses a lot of different stalls selling all one's need for the daily chinese meal. Seafood and fresh meat, all kinds of vegetables, eggs, a complete assortment of tofu, fruit and spices. Once we bought fresh shrimps and were confronted with the fact that we were hypocrites. We liked to eat fresh shrimps but what about jumping shrimps in your chicken? They're supposed to be boiled living. They became still eventually and still tasted very fresh indeed without us feeling too bad about it. Grace noticed the prices and couldn't help to make a calculated guess that if we would buy most of our (chinese) cooking needs from that market, around 100 euro's would be enough for a whole month (2 persons). Buying from the supermarkets would cost more of course.
Of course we were still suffering from jet lag. When I awoke at 4 in the morning I saw the super which closed down at around 11 pm being supplied. Do they ever sleep? Everywhere around me I saw only towers and more towers and high cranes to build even more towers. Luckily we lived on the eight floor but when we opened the windows the din of building those towers were a constant noise which actually never stopped during the three weeks we stayed there, day and night, seven days a week.

We passed by several shops in the neigbourhood around seven in the evening and after an hour we saw many shopkeepers having their dinner while watching the news. Remarkably most business stayed open until 10 pm. After observing this situation for a few weeks you couldn't avoid the impression that these people had only one philosophy, working. They were either working or sleeping. Nobody seemed to suffer from it. People would still be smiling getting business at 9.45 pm. Most were small stores selling garments, dresses, shoes, barbers, hair salons and convenience stores, restaurants, noodle shops, laundry's. In Holland there was some talk about getting people to live and stay in the city again to make it more safe. Well this was a textbook sample. Because of the heat wave whole families lived on the street, reading, watching their business, shops and talking to neighbours. This was an example of a safe city, nothing could happen here without being seen (and reprimanded) by somebody.

The massage center was an experience. You were ushered into a room with many massage beds where you lay down fully clothed. A blind man or woman depending on your sex then massaged you. He or she draped a towel over your body part while doing that. It only costs some 50 yuans for an hour of massage. You felt reborn after the massage.

Conclusions
Driving through Shanghai with more than 18 million inhabitants one gets the idea that it is more compact, more filled than Beijing. There are also more treelined streets and the main shopping streets are definitely more interesting. One can't help comparing it with Singapore. Of course Shanghai isn't China anymore, maybe what China would be in a decade or two.

In the days that followed we discovered that Shanghai was a real shopping Mecca. Two important shopping streets near the Bund, the venerable Nanjing Lu and the newer Huaihai Lu were highways with huge department stores, from very simple to exotic and trendy. Cheap chinese ware up to world class fashions in the most exotic, fashionable and expensive surroundings. The Porsche dealership prominent near the modern metro stations in case you decide to drive in style.

Then there were the newer centra's like Xujiahue which is a collection of fast towers connected underground by a large metro station or trendy Xintiandi which is only aboveground. That of course besides the other numerous shopping centres elsewhere like in Pudong. Most people divide Shanghai in two sections, this side of the river and the other side. A practical experience is that it's often difficult to get a taxi to cross the river when it's raining hard. So people tend to stay on their side of the river. When the new metro line is finished there might be some influence on this situation.
The Yuyuan garden complex is also very interesting. There is a wholesaler market nearby selling trinkets etc. A large diamond superstore and the place the tourists usually go, a shopping complex in traditional chinese buildings selling chinese products and a large wellkept chinese garden. For tourists this combination may be more interesting than the centres reminding of Singapore or New York .

We haven't been everywhere yet, but we could spent several hours during repeated visits to the places we mentioned. On feet on your own time your'e apt to discover more things than with a tour.

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