Shanghai revisited

"Shanghai revisited." That's what we call a "metaphor". We haven't literally revisited Shanghai but we are looking back at time spent there as though we were visiting it for a second time.

Yes, children, here we go again...

Shanghai was a tale of two cities: one I liked and one I didn't care for too much. We had arrived at Pudong airport surprisingly fresh after about thirteen hours on the plane. According to our body clocks we'd just been through a normal night and, personally, I'd had a good night's sleep. Thank god I don't smoke anymore though: thirteen hours would have killed me!

So we went to the carousels to wait for the baggage; mine came straightaway but others weren't so lucky. Quite a few of the British Council teaching assistants arrived to discover their bags hadn't followed them. It would be nearly two weeks before they were reunited with their stuff. That's really not what you need when you arrive, tired, in a strange country where the temperature is over 35 degrees and the humidity is palpable.

Met by people from the British Council, we were bussed swiftly to our accommodation - a compound about 40 minutes' drive on the bus from the centre of Shanghai. We're getting used to this: cities in China are just so huge that the forty minute drive is quite normal.

It cost 2 RMB to get to the centre, about 13p by my reckoning, and by 'centre' I mean right in the shadow of the Jinmao and Pearl Towers. Naturally they were our first ports of call and a trip up the once tallest building in the world was de rigeur. We blagged our way into one of the fancy restaurant bars near the top to sip green tea and sit back to reflect on finally arriving.

The schedule arranged by the British Council was pretty intense. Having arrived on the Sunday we were down at the Bell International Language School bright and early on Monday morning for the opening presentations, orientations, lectures, seminars, workshops and discussions. Not always one hundred percent useful or interesting I think the timetabling could have been better and I don't think it would have been unreasonable to have given us a bit more time over the two weeks to explore Shanghai a bit more. But hey, it's all water under the bridge now. And I did come away from Shanghai knowing a lot more and having a lot more confidence in my ability to teach so they must have done something right.

The Shanghai I liked was the neighbourhood around our compound. Even after a couple of days it felt like 'home' to be walking down the highstreet or taking the short cut back from the school. We spoke virtually no Chinese but could get by at the roadside food stalls by pointing and miming and smiling. We'd also been warned that we'd get stared at and, sure enough, people just stop in their tracks as though this white face was the strangest thing they'd ever seen. There's not a hint of animosity but just curiosity; and if you said "Ni hao" the wrinkled brow would turn to a beaming smile.

On the other hand, a lot of people will shout "Hello!" which, again, is meant for the most part in a friendly way. But sometimes, to be frank, they're just taking the piss out of these "old foreigners". Gradually your ear tunes in to the different tone and you learn to either reciprocate or just keep walking.

I liked most of central Shanghai too. Taking the obligatory boat trip, I saw the happy mix of old and new along the grey green river as huge freighters barged past on their way to the sea. Construction cranes are everywhere as Shanghai builds towards the sky but the 'heritage' buildings are still there, especially along The Bund, their colonial grandeur now topped with proud red flags.

And then there's the old city where the narrow streets and original buildings have been retained and, so far at least, have defied the developers. Here's where you get your tourist souvenirs, your expensively packaged tea and your name written in Chinese hanging on a fake gold chain. But the further you go in the more interesting it gets with the sights and sounds and smells of the food stalls and, it has to be said, the drains!

All this was the good Shanghai: the hustle and bustle, the easy going pace, the homeliness of it and above all the friendliness of the place. But walk town the bustling shopping street of Nanjing Road and the 'hustle' turns to 'hussle'. Beyond the Chinese script, this could be any city in any country in the world with all the brand names you could just as easily see in Sheffield as Shanghai. Worst for me though, was that the friendliness I'd felt before had been hijacked by pimps and hawkers targeting the westerner and nag nag nagging him (hallo!) to come see beautiful girl (hallo!) come buy Rolex (hallo!) come buy this come buy that. I got taken in by a group of so called students who purportedly wanted to speak English with me and then said that they were down from Beijing to exhibit their paintings in a special show. Come, come and see because we have to go back to Beijing tomorrow. So along Nanjing Road we go, me naively thinking "well, I'm meant to be a teacher, after all", chat, chat, chat, up five storeys of an unprepossessing building and down a long corridor to an anonymous room decked with a hundred paintings, mostly with traditional chocolate box scenes. They seemed to have a remarkable grasp of English as they described in detail the symbology of each (and, it's just occurred to me, how one of the paintings was the last one painted by their late professor... oh dear, how dumb can I have been?). Now I knew I was being hussled to buy but still didn't grasp the totality of the set-up. Asked which was my favourite, the next question (or maybe imperitive) was "You must buy it. Our school is very poor..." I just wanted to get out of this little room full of impeccably polite strangers. Picking one that I really did like (which, in retrospect, I'm glad about) I handed over the money and fled, hot and flustered and full of anger - anger that grew the more I thought about every detail of the scam and the way that it tainted my entire experience of Shanghai.