China Trip Part Five: Arrival to Shanghai

Display in the reception hall

This year the main highlight of my vacation was embarking on a travel tour to Jiangsu and Zhejiang province. During the entries regarding these parts, I will omit names before I incur the wrath of companies suing me for blasphemy. Whether you choose to believe me is entirely up to you, the reader. Even though there were some un-enjoyable moments, it was still a good thing to experience them because we learned so much from it. I want to share it with readers so that they can take it as a precaution when they choose to join tour groups.
Before we actually took the plane to China, we decided that this year we would join a tour group because everyone around us kept telling us you get cheaper plane tickets this way and you get double the fun. Do I need to mention that they also guarantee us 5 star hotels as part of a promotional package? After all these years, we were the stupid ones buying pricy airline tickets so the first time in many years we bought cheaper ones. We went onto the website of N Company who works with travel agencies in China. They basically help you connect flights from all around the world. So N Company helped us organize a flight to Guangzhou first so that we can fix our jetlag and then connect a flight to Shanghai to begin our 5 day tour. We got some discounts and this is due to the fact we joined a special promotional tour. The requirements were that you must be an overseas Chinese with full blooded Chinese ancestry and you must be able to converse in Mandarin Chinese. The reason being that this event is government funded as part of a project to welcome overseas Chinese to see the well being of their ancestral homeland. To a lot of us in the tour group it was a big deal because we came from families that haven't returned home in over a decade. The ancestral home is foreign to some of us because of all the changes, but it is still nostalgic for many of us.

We were originally going to pick a tour group going to Yunnan, but picked the multi-destination trip instead. Travel is such a great way to open up the mind. I can talk on and on about it, but you will never get the same feeling just from reading about it. You have to go to the damn place. So in the early afternoon, my mom and I took the flight to Shanghai. It was only an hour and forty minutes, but there was a shit load of turbulence and I had a severe case of motion sickness. However, they had really good food. We had rice with preserved meats. I didn't even need to watch a movie, because I could watch it from the neighbor sitting in front me through a crack. They had Penguins of Madagascar on. There were subtitles and I can imagine the voices talking. When we got off the plane and got our luggage, we looked for our tour group sign which was no where in sight. Where the hell was our guide? We called him on our phone and he directed us with directions. It turns out he was just around the corner. They guy didn't even have a flag. It was just a small piece of paper that can be easily missed. Our guide will be called Mr. X for the rest of the entries. Mr. X will be in charge of picking us all up and splitting us into groups. There were over 100 people. Many of us were Cantonese speaking Chinese of Toisonese descent. We started talking to each other. Some of us came from New York, but many of us came from Vancouver. We were all strangers afraid to reveal too much about our identities, but wanted to connect a bit with each other because of our race.

It was already stated on our itinerary that the first meal, our dinner that night, would not be covered by the trip. They dropped us off at the Howard Johnson hotel and we made our way outside. It was quite a shock. We may be in Shanghai, but these felt like the outskirts to nowhere. What you see on TV is highly misleading. The glittering city with a colorful nightlife is nowhere to be seen. If you want to see that kind of Shanghai, you have to venture towards the inner city. Otherwise it looks like a second rate city occupied mostly by the lower middle class and outsiders. However it does have its little charms. Like our dinner that night. We went to a restaurant nearby to have our dinner. The goal was to find one that had the least amount of smokers as smoking is not banned in restaurants in all of China. How unfortunate as soon as we sat down, the neighboring tables lit their cigarettes. We had to endure the smoke that made our eyes and noses water. I wanted to leave, but there is no where else to eat and it was already very late in the evening. We have to wake up at 6am everyday for the trip. Quickly, we ordered and ate.

Our meal that night consisted of a Tsingtao beer (10 RMB),  an eel dish (35 RMB), Shanghainese braised pork (35 RMB) and a stir fried nagaimo (15 RMB). Our eel dish had very little eel and a hell lot of thick sauce. It was also very spice heavy so I chowed down a whole bowl of rice. It was an ok meal, but the smoking really killed it. The braised pork was one of the best braised pork we had. They didn't skimp on the meat and it had really good flavor. We brought it with us for the next night and it didn't go bad. Our nagaimo dish was stir fried with bell peppers and wood ear. It was a very interesting combo and I replicate it at home. This meal also proved to us that small establishments in Shanghai could serve up good food whereas in Guangzhou, small establishments serve questionable things at unreasonable prices.