When I first saw Lost In Translation I didn’t really get it. I mean the whole underlying theme of feeling alienated and disjointed in country like Japan (and weirdly enough since I have got to China I have mainly been eating Japanese food because it is one of the nearest local restaurants to my place) and seeking people that are similar to you and I thought pace of the storyline moved really slowly. Now I feel I understand that movie more than ever!!!!
 |
| metro at rush hour |
It is a very strange feeling arriving in Shanghai for the first time. I asked for directions at the airport and it quickly became really apparent that I was not going to be understood. You very soon realise that communication is very difficult and that people don’t really even speak their own form of english you have to adapt to speaking in very short syllable words and involve lots of pointing and miming. So the storytelling techniques I learnt at RADA have come in very good use! Either you do that or you have to remember to bring out pictures, english words accompanied by the chinese characters or the actual object like phone cards and drink bottles with you when you go out to buy things if you have to ask for the items. Or you end up with you just talking English and the other person in Chinese and then in the end you both staring at each other blankly. This is a common occurrence when trying to ask for directions. I end up saying xiexie (thank you in mandarin, my only other known phrase is Ni Hao=Hello) over and over even though I do not even know what I am thanking them for as neither one of us has understood! Time seems to move extremely slowly and not in a pleasant way. It is very unsettling, there’s so much that is new, I have only been here for a week and it feels like an age. But I am starting to get into a groove now, I think. I am more familiar with my neighbourhood and surrounding areas and a lot more comfortable with crossing the road. The fact is even if there is the little green man showing at the pedestrian crossing it is irrelevant. It only makes it slightly safer to cross! I try to play it cool and walk and weave like the locals but more often that not I end up sprinting cross the road like a jackrabbit and have people laughing at me!
 |
| No peanut butter cup perfection to be found in China :( |
It really does feel very foreign and at first I was thinking what the hell have I let myself get in for, I’m not going to like this but I think now after a week I am slowly adapting. Normally I really like to get stuck into the culture and way of life wherever I go. You know ‘When in Rome,’ and all that. I would look down with distain on my fellow tourists who wanted their western food, sterilized environments and home comforts. I am personally a firm believer that when you travel to a country that has a very different culture you should embrace it, but I can honestly say for the first time in my life I have really experienced true culture shock and found myself seeking out familiar things. Especially brands and food and shopping chains. Like Carrefour for shopping and US chains such as Starbucks, Subway, McDonalds, Cold Stone Creamery, Dairy Queen and my fave bakery Breadtalk which also has stores in Singapore. For this reason I am inexplicably excited about the fact they are opening a new 7-11 store a block away from my apartment which I hope opens soon. Good old 7-11 seems universal to every destination I have been so far so it is possibly the most familiar and normal site I will see anywhere in the world. That and I bought some cookies form the local chain equivalent and ate one which tasted funny then I realised they were very out of date, the green tea drink I had just finished drinking was also out of date but it was too late to do anything about that.
I am still to yet have real local Chinese food. There is a home takeaway delivery service called Sherpa’s which has every kind of food you can think of under the sun and it is just way too tempting and easy to order. It is actually more expensive than eating at local places, like the Japanese place I mentioned earlier but while I am settling in it’s all good for me. I want to get into eating more local places and trying some local dishes but all in good time. Actually it is not that difficult with the language barrier when eating out. Eating out is cheap (think £4 or less for a full meal plus drink). At most restaurants you go to you just have to point at the menu (luckily most establishments have picture menus) and do the hand counting signals they use here for the number of dishes you want. When the restaurants don’t have pictures, it is very difficult to be understood which is why I was so happy when the lady at the dumpling/bun little shop nearby spoke to me in a few words of English while I was frantically pointing at pork dumplings. She was sold out of those (they are a popular and common breakfast snack) but did have some little sticky rice and pork type of things wrapped in dumpling sheets. She told me next time she will tell me to try something else that she will recommend including a drink that I have seen many people drinking so it must been good. At the time I just picked up some soybean milk which really wasn’t a good choice, I had expected it to be sweet but it most definitely was not.
The one familiar thing here is the subway system which is very easy to navigate and for single use tickets has a similar system to Singapore. Taxis are convenient and cheap but if you want a taxi driver to take you anywhere you need to have the actual Chinese characters written down so you have to be prepared (or have a Lonely Planet book!)
 |
| random stall |
Have not had a chance to do many tourists things yet. There is so much I want to do and Shanghai is such a big city not just in terms of land size but also the number of people (to compare and this is just an off the top of my head rough guess - there are about 9million people in London during peak hours for the tube. In Shanghai there are about 20million - I will probably discuss the rush hour subway journeys in another post!). I thought about braving it on my own and proper getting stuck into going round the city but instead went along to the Shanghai Museum which is like the British Museum near People’s Park with a few other people. Also near there is Raffles City Mall (just like Singapore!) where I won a prize! I have no clue what it was there for but there was a queue of people to go into something at a stand for the I T festival and we were told to play games to win things so I played this game where you had to try and throw rubber balls into a bucket which was obstructed by moving windmills on the wall. I aimed at the biggest and nearest bucket which seemed the easiest. You got four trys and I got one ball in so won some I T Festival fridge magnets. Very random indeed.
It is the hottest time of the year right now in Shanghai, with temperatures soaring to 37. I will never again complain about heat anywhere else in the world again! It is very hot but really it is the humidity that is the worst part. I will be glad when it cools down but I know it actually does not get much cooler so I will have to put up with it!
xoxo
