Well, we made it here somehow. Had to sit on the runway for about an hour in Tokyo until they decided that yes, the elevator was broken. Then they figured they had to be able to feed us something, so they sent out for some sandwiches for everyone. We got into Shanghai about 2 hours late.
Stepping outside the airport was a jolt. The air was thick, hopefully mostly with humidity. Or so I keep telling myself -- it looks dirty enough that I would not want to live in air like this. It was a bit of a drive to the hotel, so we got to see Shanghai at night. It's... dark. It's only 10pm or so but the city is very dark. Streetlights seem dimmer and further apart and many of the buildings are totally unlit. Even passing some of the big highrises on the way to the hotel, they're almost completely dark as well. 14 million people in this town -- guess there's not enough electricity to go around.
We woke up early and headed down to the Bund at 6am, one of the old foreign-owned sections of Shanghai. It's this strip of wide area down by the harboir where supposedly people go in the early morning to practice Tai Chi and such. Well, we went but there was very little Tai Chi happening. There were aerobics, ballroom dancing, misc. stretching, some sword forms and a very little Tai Chi. We attracted a pretty sizable crowd ourselves when my instructor and one of the other students started practicing (sans weapons) the broadsword-versus-spear form they're going to be performing at one of the demonstrations coming up, but that was the extent of the excitement for the morning.
Should I know this guy?
Tai Chi & Ballroom Dancing Practice.
We wandered around for a while then boarded our tour busses and went sightseeing. Boy, did we stand out. First off, the Chinese apparently don't consider it to be particularly rude to stare, or even point and stare. And we're all wearing these bright purple shirts. And of course all the shirts have the characters for ``Shaolin'' across the front, which they don't associate with whiteman faces here. So we got a lot of stares. Apparently about half the poplulation here has seen the Shaolin Temple films with Jet Li, and a significant portion of them are willing to sing the first few bars of the opening song at you, just to see if they can provoke a reaction. After five or six times, it gets a little old, especially since nobody seems to know the rest of the words to the song.
We visited some temples this morning with jade buddha statues and such and I took a few pictures and then I realized, ``Hey, I saw enough buddhas in Japan...'' After some number x of temples, be they chinese, japanese, or whatever, they just don't impress you anymore. Maybe if I went back to India to the roots of Buddhism, I might find some buddha that really impressed me, but I doubt it.
In fact, I'm getting a bit tired of the tourist thing already. The entire country is under construction, the people stare, it's too humid and there's no toilet paper. Let's get to the Shaolin Temple already!
Actually, there's some good stuff for sale. Jade stuff is pretty cheap. Found some swords in the Friendship Store for the bargain price of $25. Then again, would you trust them? We're going to sword-making villages later so I'll just wait and see what prices are like there. I'd love to get a spring-steel sword, some hook swords, maybe some butterfly knives, etc.
It's kind of odd being able to make out a fair amount of the writing but be totally lost with the spoken chinese. I bought a chinese phrase book two days before I left. I looked at it the morning of the flight. Well, it didn't exactly immediately come to me... I spent some time on the plane and skimmed through the book. I still can't speak or understand any of it, but I was able to reverse-engineer some of the grammar and such, and I can make guesses when there's kanji. If I had started a couple months ago, I might have had a chance.
So now we're on the train out of Shanghai to Suzhou. Several of the black belts are reviewing their Hsing-I form in the aisle. Only our group... it's causing no end of annoyance to the train attendants who walk up and down the aisles about once a minute to try to sell crap like scarves and doilies to everyone. You'd think they'd learn...