For breakfast we had
some tea and jam and crackers. The other family in our 'compartment'
thoughtfully made room for us so that we could sit on both of the two
bottom bunks. We arrived in Shanghai at around 9am – slightly
earlier than we expected and we were slightly unprepared again. It
was quite a long way from the train station to our hotel, so we
sought out a taxi – eventually ending up in a subterranean taxi
stand where there were two enormous queues. Without any indication as
to the difference between the two queues, I chose the slightly
shorter one. Progress was glacially slow as very few taxis seemed to
be coming through, so I left the others to go and look into the
options for getting to the hotel using public transport, but when I
got to the top of the stairs, I was met by a wall of water falling
from the sky, so I went back and rejoined the queue.
After a bit longer,
I took our hotels details to one of the volunteers who was helping
out in some unclear way at the other queue. He was baffled by the
strange runes on my piece of paper but he eventually found a woman in
the queue who spoke English. She looked at the hotel details and told
me that we were in the wrong queue (of course) but that we could
still get there from our queue. We were disinclined to swap queues as
we were about halfway along ours but as it turned out, the other
queue moved so much more quickly than ours that we would still have
made it to the front sooner if we had switched. After about an hour
or so in the queue, we finally got to the front and into a taxi. Our
driver also appeared to be a bit unsure about my hotel details, but
happily drove off with us inside regardless. As we drove, he
consulted the piece of paper several times and finally, looked at me,
smiled and gave me the thumbs up – hooray, he knows where he's
going! I hope.
Sure enough, we got
there in the end. I had splurged a bit on this one – for the next
two nights we would be staying in the Astor House Hotel, the first
Western-style hotel to be built in Shanghai. First built in 1846 and
moved to its present location in 1858, it was where the first
electric lamp in China was turned on and where the first telephone
call from Shanghai was made. Over the years it hosted Charlie
Chaplin, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Guglielmo Marchese
Marconi and former US president Ulysses S Grant. As we checked in,
the guy at the front desk asked if we wanted another bed as our room
we only had two single beds. I replied that I thought that we had
booked a room with two doubles and he just went back to checking us
in.
When we got to the
room, it did indeed have two doubles. It also had an incredibly high
ceiling, lots of dark wood everywhere, and oodles of old-school
charm. After dumping our bags, we went out to see what we could find
for lunch. It was raining just heavily enough require umbrellas and
after checking out the slightly cloud-obscured but still rather
surreal Shanghai skyline from a small bridge near the hotel, we
walked around for while without finding anything we liked the look
of. Eventually, however, we found a really sweet little place that as
far as we could tell only did variations on noodles and rice. When we
went up to the counter to try to order, the guy behind it pulled out
a battered old exercise book and opened it up to a handwritten
English menu. We got a plate of fried rice and a plate of fried
noodles, sat down at the end of one of the long communal tables and
got stuck in (delicious!). It was still raining when we came out, so
when we found a nice little cafe that had reasonably cheap coffee we
went straight inside. While we drank our coffees and chatted to the
owner, and the girls played with her little caged kitten, the drizzle
outside turned to a proper downpour, so we chatted to her or quite a
bit longer.
Eventually, the rain
eased off enough for us to make our way back to the hotel. Kate then
went out on her own to have a look around and see if she could find a
better area for restaurants for dinner. She identified an area not
far from the hotel, but when we went there, we couldn't really see
anything that took our fancy, and as it was raining again, we went
back to a too brightly lit place we had seen earlier. There we
ordered some beef, pork, veges and rice from the helpful
picture-based menu. Our waiter was a big, hulking, unsmiling guy with
no hair and an impressive collection of gold chains around his neck –
like some sort of drug kingpin from an action film. Afterwards, on
the way back to the hotel, we went back to the little bridge nearby
and took in the even more surreal glory of the Shanghai skyline at
night.
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