Shanghai — a place you love and hate at the same time.
It’s difficult to name the good of this bustling city without having the bad escape from your mouth in the same breath. Or vice versa.
So, having survived 5 days of awesome food, outrageous driving, cigarette smoke and loud characters, here’s my top 10 Yays and Yucks (in no order of importance).
Yays
1. Awesome, though somewhat not as spicy as should be, Hunan cuisine at 滴水洞 (Dishuidong) — especially loved the spiced ribs!
2. Being able to get quality DVDs (a 正版 DVD costs 15RMB, ie. S$3).
3. Strolling through a crowd-free (which is nearly impossible) 豫園 (Yu Garden) and wolfing down 小龍包(steamed dumplings) at 南翔饅頭店 Nanxiang Steamed Bun Restaurant.
4. Rejuvenating massages (about 65RMB for an hour of body massage)
5. Pudong Shangri-la Hotel — enough said.
6. 周庄 (Zhou Zhuang), the oldest water village in China, even though it’s super touristy
7. Tea, especially 阿婆茶
8. Neon lights at night — even apartment-looking buildings are neon-designed.
9. Wannenmei as host!
10. Temperature at this time of the year (low 20s)
Yucks
1. Spitting — it’s not that frequent, but it still is common enough.
2. Smoke inhalation — we realize a lot of people just light up and hardly puff!
3. Incessant in-your-face hawking of almost every product or service
4. Metro is unbelievably crowded during peak hours… you literally can stand there and be pushed along by the crowd. And you thought SG was bad.
5. The Bund Sightseeing Tunnel — you have to see it to know how bad it is.
6. The Dragonfly experience — being stuck in mid-air with a fly on Dragon Air (hence the name!)… it’s not Shanghai i know, but it was bound for there.
7. Several attractions or sites i wanted to visit were closed, eg. 和平飯店 (Peace Hotel) and the Hengshan-Moller Villa.
8. Problems accessing Wikipedia and sometimes Google pages
9. Crazy drivers who flick the high beam at will
10. Haze — only had a day of blue skies while there… guess we were considered lucky already!
All in all, it was a pretty bundtastic time. Not really a bad idea to work there for a couple years =P
