Old and New

Our hotel, the Oriental Riverside, is adjacent to the Shanghai International Convention Centre which is hosting ICSE, Skene's conference. Appropriately, the Convention Centre is located in Pudong - the richest and most advanced area of the city, separated from the centre by the Huangpu River. It has a Bladerunner feel to it with huge numbers of skyscrapers and post-modern architecture.

The Pearl TV Tower dominates the skyline with its two spheres linked by a swathe of concrete, both brightly lit by a multitude of multi-coloured lights. Nearby, the Jin Mao Tower is a more subdued and elegant presence, despite being the fourth highest building in the world. Its design is inspired by Buddhism: the thirteen segments are derived from traditional imagery and are representative of bamboo. The eighty eight floors are lucky, eight being a special number for the Chinese. On the eighty-seventh floor, the Cloud 9 Bar, the highest in the world, offers a Lost in Translation experience. Dark wood booths lurk in the shadows and the only decor is provided by ornate stones, quarried from the floor of Lake Tai and more usually found in old-style gardens. On our visit we sipped cocktails made with cachaca and olive juice martinis whilst listening to the Avalanches.

The whole city has an optimistic atmosphere, far from the social deprivation which we know to exist off the main thoroughfares. The pollution is patent but there are large areas of parkland and bedding plants line the quiet highways. In fact, the aim is for 40% of the city to be taken up by vegetation. The technology is impressive - a silent flush in our hotel bathroom, a green man at pedestrian crossings with a countdown to the red light and a state of the art metro system. But contrasts remain: future tower blocks are being constructed with bamboo ladders and scaffolding and locals ride electric pedal bikes wearing builders' hard hats.

Old China is hard to find in Shanghai with skyscrapers dominant for 50 km. In fact, it will retreat even further over the next decade or so if the Urban Planning Exhibition is to be believed. Some old buildings have been torn down and replaced by replicas but many were not rebuilt. The Bund, on the western bank of the Huangpu, contains some of the city's most authentic buildings - colonial structures which housed foreign embassies in the early twentieth century.

Our best experience of traditional architecture came from a trip into the countryside to the west of Shanghai, with one of James' colleagues, Ben. We visited his father at their ancestral home - a smaller version of the original which had fallen into disrepair after five hundred years. Ben's father, a property developer, had gone to great lengths to recreate his childhood home, ensuring that hand-crafted roof tiles were used and the necessary blessings inscribed on the beams in the ceiling. The result was stunning. The house featured a reception room with imposing chairs, a huge Ming-style vase, which may well have been authentic, and an ornate panel of calligraphy by one of the best script writers of recent times. A refreshing breeze blew in off the stone courtyard and the lanterns swayed gently. I felt as though I was on a film set.

The old way of life, however, can still be found for the timebeing in the Old Town of Shanghai, not too far from Nanjing Lu, China's neon-lit equivalent of Oxford Street. First we found a theme-park version of China in the bazaar which surrounds the exquisite Yuyuan Gardens. Having explored the gardens at length and admired the various halls that they contain, we ventured into the backstreets.

It was nearing the end of the afternoon and schoolchildren wearing their neckerchiefs were heading home. We saw the women cooking dinner in tiny kitchens or on the street whilst the men sat around gossiping or repairing bikes. Family groups played mah-jong or cards and the odd veteran of the Cultural Revolution wandered around, bent nearly double over his cane. Kittens dozed beneath fast food stalls and we found a pet shop featuring rabbits, mice, goldfish and terrapins. Homemade fly traps hung near rubbish tips and at one point we witnessed slopping out from an enamel bucket taken from a ramshackle privy. No-one seemed to mind us peering past the laundry to see into their tiny homes. All a far cry from Pudong.

A Lack of Sweet and Sour

(Warning: A reader in Penang has observed that much of this blog has been devoted thus far to food and cooking but I'm afraid that that accurately reflects our leisure time. However, if anyone is feeling hungry or queasy, they are advised to avoid the following entry.)

We had been warned that Chinese cuisine would be a far cry from Chinatown and we were both looking forward to culinary adventures. However, at our first meal I played safe choosing tofu and crab meat, feeling a little peculiar from the flight, but Skene dived straight in with beef tendons in a clay pot. He was unnerved slightly by their jellied appearance but refused to be cowed and declared the dish delicious.

The next day, I joined Skene and our travelling companions in an exclusive feast aboard a boat in the middle of a lake. We had been driven by Ben's chauffeur to the edge of a lake where a row of pontoons advertised unintelligible services. Directed by Ben's father, we stepped onto a speed boat moored to one of the pontoons, on which we cruised past numerous crab farms and various dilapidated but inhabited junks until we reached our destination. We were welcomed aboard by the family who occupied the boat and who were responsible for looking after one of the nearby crab farms. We were invited to look around their compact home (no larger than a wide-beam canal boat) and soon located the galley where our lunch was laid out ready for the stove. Outside, the chef and captain sat in a dinghy, fishing. As members of our group watched, he netted a large terrapin which he proceeded to butcher on the deck, to my horror and fascination.

When lunch was served, it involved a whole range of seafood, all of it taken from the lake. There was glazed prawns, eel in a rich sauce, queen scallop soup, a white fish in a vinegary sauce and salted and fried fish the size of tinned sardines which could be seen swimming around outside. And, of course, the terrapin. I pulled a morsel from a section of smashed shell and found it fatty but tasty whilst Skene devoured one of its feet to the amazement of his supervisor. The vegetable dishes were just as tempting - including radishes with the centres scooped out, crushed and replaced in the skins.

Back in town we have enjoyed dim sum - shrimp dumplings, vegetable "ravioli" and yam cakes; a Japanese barbecue cooked on a hot plate in the centre of our table (squid and shrimps for me, ox tongue and sirloin for him), and perch with the ubiquitous fungi and sword beans (green beans to the rest of us). Skene has even been rather taken by the desserts, particularly one involving shaved ice, slivers of jelly and black "pearls" of some artificial and sugary origin which are not unlike fish roe in appearance. And we've both enjoyed dried kiwi fruit from the No 1 Provisions Store on Nanjing Lu.

Nearly all meals have cost less than £10 for two and not a bottle of soy sauce in sight. Ordering has been a bit hit and miss though from time to time - not all establishments have English menus and when they do, our choices are often met with a firm "no" without any explanation. After half the menu was ruled out in one place last night, we decided to leave. And unfortunately, it looks like some of our appetites will remain unsatisfied - shark's fin and bird's nest have been seen in shops and on menus but the prices quoted outstripped our entire bill at Nobu and so, unsurprisingly, we have avoided them.


Tonight, the conference banquet promises to be interesting. It will be held in the Grand Ballroom in our hotel - the largest unpillared ballroom in the whole of China, it will seat 3000 diners at one time. Acrobats, Chinese opera singers and martial artists have been promised. It remains to be seen though whether or not the menu will meet our ultimate challenge by offering us snake.

At Least The Trains Run On Time...

China might have some of the worst pollution in the world, it might execute more than 8000 people per year and religious choice might be banned but at least its communist leaders have managed to make sure that the trains run on time.

Our first experience of Shanghai's public transport system came with the Maglev - a magnetic levitating train which runs silently from Pudong airport towards the city at a top speed of 430 kph. And we know that because the train information boards in each carriage feature a speedometer which rises dramatically as the train gains speed. The carriages are spotlessly clean and have more legroom and larger seats than the new Virgin tilting trains. And the tickets are a quarter of the price of those for the Heathrow Express. The only downside is that the train stops as soon as it meets up with the Metro system - it should have reached the heart of Pudong but the project ran out of steam.

We transferred to taxis for the last stretch and our various sub-groups had very different experiences. Our lady driver found our hotel first time and charged us just 30 RMB - less than £3. Another group paid 180 RMB for a shorter journey which involved them having to direct their driver to their hotel.

After that, it was widely thought that taxis should be avoided. And so we selected the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel as our preferred river-crossing for our first trip to the Bund. Although it is described as a pedestrian tunnel, tourists are transported in gondola style single carriages which are pulled along on rails by a floor-level cable. The crossing is slow but boredom is held at bay by the sound and light show which accompanies travellers - visual displays and soundtracks supposedly evoke meteor showers and "paradise and hell" with a Tubular Bells style commentary giving us a clue as to what we are supposed to see.

For a tenth of the price, the Metro offers a speedier and less fussy journey. All signs and tickets machines are in Chinese and English and Ken could learn a lot from such features as air-conditioned trains without doors between the carriages; energy saving escalators which speed up as a passenger approaches; flat screen televisions on the platforms and the trains, and a train time indicator measured in seconds rather than minutes. And despite the fact that the city has a population of more than 13 million, there's never a crush onboard. It's just a shame that there's only three lines in the centre to date.