As such, I’m going to attempt to provide you with some highlights to get you up to speed. Since you heard from me last, I finished up my time in Beijing, went to Shanghai for the first time, had even more transit fiascos, and made it back to Turkey with my sanity and newly acquired Starbucks mugs in tact.
While in Beijing, I had one of the major highlights of my entire China trip – the massive bookstore that had an entire shelf on branding and brand management. I’m sure I must have seemed extremely strange as the little foreign boy skimming through books on the “power of the brand” in Chinese (and stranger still as I made my way over to women’s fashion magazines – they have excellent advertisements in them). Chinese magazines are, by the way, insanely cheap, so I bought a small army of them for around 2 or 3 US dollars. I’m not sure if they are all going to be relevant or provide much of any value; however, while skimming through one, I did discover a hilarious “visit Turkey” advertisement that took up the entire back page of a magazine – I literally snorted when I saw it in the Beijing airport (classy points for me).
That brings me to transportation woe number one – the flight to Shanghai. Long story short, it was about time to land when the pilot comes over the speaker and informs all the passengers that, due to weather, the plane could not land at Shanghai’s airport. Instead, we sat on the runway in a town called Hefei for around 5 or 6 hours until we could safely continue onwards to Shanghai – putting me there after midnight (thus after public transit runs). Thankfully, I spoke Chinese (unlike the Russian family on the flight) and was able to get on the shuttle bus to where I needed to go. It was quite a feeling of accomplishment to be the only foreigner who was able to take this option.
That brings us to Shanghai, the Paris of the East. Shanghai is, in a word, incredible. I was like a small child in a candy shop almost the entire time. The architecture is amazing, a mix of modern high-rises that look as if they’d been imported from Hong Kong or Tokyo and older traditional and colonial buildings. It’s easily the greatest city in Mainland China, far surpassing the People’s Republic’s grungy capital, Beijing. The people of Shanghai are the most prominent feature of this city. They carry themselves as if they were Japanese or Korean, beacons of fashion and refinement. Speaking constantly in Shanghainese (Wu Chinese), they assert their unique identity within the massive expanse of the Middle Kingdom. With a transit system that seems highly influenced by hyper-modern Hong Kong, Shanghai was easy to get around with only one small thing causing me grief – the weather. Pretty much the only rainstorm I have encountered the entire summer was in Shanghai, and it was not just one. Each day I was there featured a torrential downpour of at least several hours in the middle of the day, significantly inhibiting my ability to bounce around the city at will.
Finally leaving Shanghai, I spent the entire ride to the airport in complete terror that I wouldn’t manage to make the flight since public transit took much longer than I expected and my flight left a few hours earlier than I had remembered (good thing I checked when I got up in the morning). I finally managed to get to the airport and check in, only to discover that my flight was delayed, subsequently causing me to worry about catching my flight in Hong Kong to Turkey. At the end of the day, I managed to make my flights with no problems, and I have now reached my final day in Turkey, which I will spend, packing and being artsy, visiting the Istanbul Modern museum.
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