Day 70 (23rd July) Shanghai
On this kind of trip there are brilliant days, good days, average days, bad days and crap days. This was the latter. The idea was to get a taxi to the railway station, then take the metro to “downtown” Shanghai (its a sign of Chinese inferiority that they have to ape the Americans in everything). The taxi driver was a monstrously ugly brute of a man who pretended he didn’t understand what a railway station was and drove round and round speaking to a friend who claimed to speak English but could only say that there are many railway stations in Shanghai. Jennifer remembered that we still had yesterday’s tickets and we finally got him to understand where we wanted to go. When we stopped I opened my wallet to pay him and he grabbed 220 RMB (about £25) out of it. When I argued he paid 100 back and drove off. A journey which should have cost us £5 at the most was £13. He cheated us.
Going into the station, we decided to have breakfast at the KFC we went to yesterday and had a surprisingly good meal at very little cost. I said to Jennifer “you sit here in the Concourse and I’ll look for the KFC”. I couldn’t find it and, returning to the Concourse, I couldn’t find Jennifer among the tens of thousands of people milling about. The Concourse has two identical ends and before long I was completely disoriented about where she should be, I walked up and down from midday to 4.30 pm. There were two identical information areas and I approached both of them without luck as nobody spoke English and I couldn’t get them to understand my predicament. Eventually I decided to walk horizontally across the Concourse down every row until I finally came to the second of the two information areas and the young man I had spoken to earlier came running across and took me by the arm to a police station. There, sitting next to the station (although not in handcuffs) was Jennifer. She had been sitting for three hours where I left her and neither of us could understand why I didn’t see her. Eventually she went to the police station where two charming police women were about the only two people among the tens of thousands in the station who could speak some English and they asked the man in the information area to look out for. me.
Then the day started to improve. We got some more metformin tablets with no problem and then tried to get the metro. We got turned back at a barrier because we hadn’t discovered where to buy tickets from a machine with only Chinese instructions and this lovely young girl approached us and got the tickets for us. We decided to travel on Line 2 to the centre of the metro system which we reckoned was downtown and got out at the Jin Tang Temple stop. Quite by chance we discovered the excellent (and cheap) Yunfeng hotel and got a suite of three huge rooms including a bathroom with a jacuzzi.
The man who helped us find each other
The crowd in which we lost each other
Jin Tang temple
