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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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Shanghai
surprise I went to China in 1994, thinking I would be a temporary vegetarian. My diet had a bit more variety than planned, due to a phrase-book misprint. I met up with a brother and sister called Douglas and Alison. In every restaurant we went to in Hangzhou and Suzhou, we pointed at the vegetable page. The waiter or waitress would always point at ‘aubergines’. What, no beansprouts, bamboo shoots or pak choi? No, you must have aubergines, they insisted. Ok, we shrugged. Out would come a variety of dishes, none of them containing so much as a single smidgeon of aubergine. Maybe the translation said ‘chef’s special’ or ‘whatever you haven’t got rid of yet’ or ‘surprise me’. When we got to Shanghai, I made the mistake of eating the lemon chicken surprise – the surprise being that it contained food poisoning rather than the advertised aubergines. We walked down the Bund the following day, when I started feeling ill. Attracted by the familiar menu, Douglas and Alison decided to pop into Kentucky Fried Chicken. Opening the door, the first whiff of chicken hit me and I dashed back outside. I was vomiting into the bin on the doorstep, while the manager watched me and clucked. He was saying what I presumed meant ‘the gweimoy hasn’t eaten here yet, she just came in, it’s not our fault, go away vomiting foreigner’. After an outstandingly painful 24 hours, luckily involving no further expulsion of fluids under pressure, I recovered. Shanghai was very different in those days. They were only halfway through building the Oriental Pearl Tower and Pudong was just a glint in the town-planner’s eye. After a bit of garden gazing, pagoda peering and sitting in various traffic jams, it was time to move on. I went to the docks and booked passage on a ship to Hong Kong. It was the size of a cruise liner, but with none of the luxury. I think they’d loaded it wrong, as it was listing to port by a noticeable 5º. Luckily, we made the 3-day journey in fine weather. I had a bunk in 4th class, along with about 40 Chinese people and their vast quantities of luggage. I met Lindsay, the only other foreigner onboard, who had a 1st class cabin. Having seen both, I was glad I’d saved a bundle going 4th class. The only difference between 1st and 4th was privacy, as her cabin was equally spartan and the water coming out of her taps smelled equally stale. Minor issues when you’re having such a great adventure. We sailed through the Taiwan Strait and arrived in Hong Kong harbour at dawn on the 8th August. Lucky double 8 was an omen – I took one look at the mist-shrouded fragrant harbour and its forest of skyscrapers and fell in love. I’m not usually an ‘up at dawn’ kind of person, but I had no need of an alarm clock. One of my fellow passengers had a pet cricket in an intricately woven rattan cage. The cricket was excited by entering Hong Kong waters and chirruped non-stop. We went up on deck and saw a very different bunch of passengers to the ones who had embarked at Shanghai. The rather dowdy people who had got on, now wore their best finery to get off. Free from the worry of making the mainlanders jealous, everyone was dripping in bling and Gucci. We docked and disembarked to the sound of the still-excited cricket and made our way into Kowloon. Lindsay and I booked into a relatively swanky 3-star hotel in downtown Tsim Sha Tsui. We dashed into the bathroom and delighted at the odourless, water-coloured water flooding from the taps. After a night of bath-time delight, we relocated to the famous Chung-King Mansions. The lobby downstairs was jammed with a cornucopia of things to buy in a bewildering array. Every two paces, we were offered curries, flights, suits and copy-watches. Upstairs were 101 guesthouses, occupied by folk from every nation under the sun. We stepped
outside into Nathan Road, which bisects Kowloon from the Tsim Sha Tsui
waterfront in the south up to Mong Kok in the north. Every inch of building
was festooned with neon signs and every inch of pavement was jammed with
people. It was a marvellous melange of purposeful activity and endless
variety that delighted me. So much, in fact, that I came for a month and
stayed for five years. But that’s another lucky double 8 story… First published in VISA 97 (June 2011) |