Category Archives: Travel

In May, 2012 I did the “Three-Countries-Three-Weeks-Three-Kids” tour. It was unbelievable! The first stop on my once-in-a-lifetime trip was to Shanghai, to visit my daughter. I toured the grounds of the school where my daughter teaches, we went off sightseeing, and I wandered through the Botanical Gardens and made friends.

After I toured the Botanical Gardens, I met up with my daughter after she got off work. We got on the subway and headed downtown, to the Shanghai landmarks you see in all of the American Express and General Electric ads on television.

The subways in Shanghai were wonderful. Fast, cheap, clean, no problems at all. Of course, I had a “native guide” with me, but even so, I wouldn’t feel shy about trying to navigate them on my own. As you can see from this picture, it wasn’t rush hour. At rush hour they may not be quite as bad as Tokyo’s subways, but they’re close.

This golden temple in the middle of all the skyscrapers is stunning, especially from a distance. Close up it loses a bit of that glamour, with street level being crowded, noisy, and a mish-mash of power and communications lines running above the street every which way. Note that the large blue traffic signs are in both Chinese and English.

The Pearl Tower. With everything being so flat, one of its primary purposes is to be a communications tower, but it’s also a great place to see the city from above. Built for some expo or world’s fair – you can google it. Any way you cut it, it’s a signature landmark and a spectacular one at that.

We were at the Pearl Tower on a day where we had about a two minute wait to buy tickets. This is the room for ticket purchases, with serpentine line management hardware as far as the eye can see. I would prefer not to be there on a day when they need to have all of this in use.

The elevators in the Pearl Tower look like something out of Star Trek or Logan’s Run. I doubt that this is an accident. They’re still pretty cool looking, and fast as all get out.

From the top of the Pearl Tower, you can see how hazy the city is. Some of it’s clouds and haze, since Shanghai is on the coast in a subtropical area. Some of it, unfortunately, is smog. I was told that this was considered a “clear” day.

Across the Zhongshan River is The Bund. It’s made up of many different architectural styles and the area goes back to the days of French colonization. Lots of restaurants, very high end shopping, and so on.

The view to the south (I think) from the Pearl Tower.

The view to the north (I think) from the Pearl Tower. The tallest building on the right (with the odd “bottle opener” top) is the Shanghai World Financial Center, the sixth tallest building in the world. (Unless something new has been built in Dubai this week…) Just to the right of it is the Jin Mao Tower, the sixteenth tallest building in the world. (The Shanghai Tower is nearing completion and will be the second tallest building in the world when it’s completed.) They like tall in Shanghai.

Yes, on the top observation deck of the Pearl Tower they have one of those glass floor sections that you think won’t bother you at all and then it truly scares the crap out of you when your primitive brain stem decides to ignore your higher cognitive functions. It’s still fun.

In May, 2012 I did the “Three-Countries-Three-Weeks-Three-Kids” tour. It was unbelievable! The first stop on my once-in-a-lifetime trip was to Shanghai, to visit my daughter. My first full day there I toured the grounds of the school where my daughter teaches, and then we went off sightseeing.

On my second full day there, my daughter again had to teach until mid-afternoon (after all, it is her job there) and I was starting to feel bolder. While I didn’t speak a word of Mandarin, many of the directional signs on the streets were in English as well, I had a map, I had an iPhone with a ton of map and GPS apps. It was time to do a bit of walking around on my own. What could go wrong?

My first real “beyond-DUH!” moment occurred in the streets between my hotel and the school where my daughter teaches. We all know that China’s got a huge population and the cities are really crowded, right? But you don’t really know it until you see block after block after block after block of this kind of scene. By the way, I loved this street, it was really vibrant and alive to me. The street level of all of these buildings are shops, from phone booth sized to slightly-bigger-than-tiny. But I was fascinated by the jungle of poles and racks cantilevered out of every window. Clothes, towels, sheets, drying food, you could find just about anything up there.

Along with all of the tiny shops, you could also find vendors on bicycles, so overloaded that it seemed impossible that they could move, let alone move safely. This guy at least had balloons instead of dozens and dozens of boxes of food & merchandise.

On my map I had spotted the Shanghai Botanical Garden nearby. I thought it might be an interesting place to visit for an hour or two. Boy, was it!

One of the best things I found about Shanghai was how wonderful the people were. Even when I was being a geeky American tourist with a camera (I was dressed a little more sanely than I had been the previous day) who didn’t speak a word, they were invariably patient and friendly. In the Botanical Gardens, it wasn’t the plants that were the stars for me, but the people doing little things to enjoy their lives. For example, this group that was practicing tai chi.

This was one of several couples that I saw posing for wedding photos in the gardens.

There were beautiful lakes and waterways throughout the gardens, with lily pads, rushes, trees, and plants everywhere. (Well, it is a botanical garden…)

I followed the sound of music to find this large group doing country line dancing. Yep, that’s “country line dancing” as in Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson boot-scootin’-boogy two-step line dancing. It was so tempting to join them, but that was probably pushing just a bit too far out of my comfort zone. (I should have done it anyway — opportunity lost!)

The gardens did have groves of interesting plants and trees that are most certainly not from North America or Europe.

It was near here that I decided to get ice cream, which became an adventure. There were two ladies at the ice cream stand and they spoke zero English and I spoke zero Mandarin. They were laughing at my pantomimes, but eventually with pointing and gesturing they got what I wanted. Now it was time to pay. The lady held up two fingers. I gave her two yuan. She shook here head, gave it back, and again held up two fingers, her index finger and thumb, like she was pointing a gun at the sky. Now thoroughly confused I gave her five yuan.

Again she started laughing, shook her head, and handed it back, making the “gun” sign with two fingers. (The other lady was trying to hide how hard she was laughing at me, with limited success.) I wasn’t sure how much ice cream should cost, but at about six yuan to the dollar, I figured I was in the ballpark at least. So with the two nice women laughing at me, I gave them a twenty-yuan note and gave them the “universal” raised-eyebrows look for, “Is this okay?” She took the twenty-yuan note and gave me back thirteen-yuan in change. Who knew that the “gun” hand gesture means seven? I thanked them in English, they thanked me (I assume) in Mandarin, and we each had a story to tell.

Of course there is bamboo there. Many stands of different kinds of bamboo.

After I had my ice cream I had to hustle off to meet my daughter and her friends for lunch, which was in a true “hole-in-the-wall” place on a street just like the one seen at the top. Boy, talk about “authentic local” cuisine!

One of my standing rules when traveling, especially internationally, is to eat anything and everything. It’s so easy to cop out and look for a McDonalds or to shy away from the local food because it’s unfamiliar and might smell different or look odd. I reserve the right to not try something a second time if I try it once and it really doesn’t taste good at all, but I will try just about anything. So when in a tiny upstairs room in a tiny local restaurant, with native speakers ordering for the table and saying, “Try this,” don’t ask what it is or how it was cooked — try it! It was wonderful.

Along those lines, if you get to Shanghai (and I’m sure other cities and regions of the Far East), there is a thing I saw (on that street up above) which, by Western standards, was “iffy”, but which tasted amazing. You’ll see people on the sidewalk in front of their 50-square-foot shops, cooking on the top of a 50-gallon drum. Not using the top of the drum to put a pan on — using the surface of an old 50-gallon drum as their cooking surface. (Yeah, let’s see you do that in LA!)

They pour a kind of egg batter on it and make something that’s like a cross between a really thin omelette and a crepe. You can add in meats or cheese or vegetables if you want. As everything gels into a sheet about the size of a manhole cover but almost paper thin, they start folding it over and over until it’s the right size to fit into your hand. You eat it kind of like a burrito. About two bucks US, maybe ten yuan, and worth every penny.

Disgusting? No, way! Try DELICIOUS!

You’re on a freakin’ adventure. BE ADVENTUROUS! There will be plenty of time to be boring, dull, routine, and safe when you get back home.

To recap, in May, 2012 I did the “Three-Kids-Three-Weeks-Three-Countries” tour. It was spectacular! 

I first visited my daughter in Shanghai. My first full day there I toured the grounds of the school where she teaches, and then we went off sightseeing.

I don’t really try to be a stereotypical, middle-aged, American tourist. Really, I don’t! But I also figured that I wasn’t going to blend in no matter what I looked like, so I went for practical and comfortable. It was warm, so shorts – cargo shorts are a bonus with lots of pockets. We were doing a lot of walking, so sneakers. I always have at least a couple of cameras plus accessories plus water, snacks, and junk (it’s a Boy Scout thing, “Be Prepared!” and all of that), so I usually carry a backpack. If I’m wearing a baseball cap (and I usually am while being touristy) it’s probably my Angels hat. Okay, so the shirt is a bit on the garish side.

On the other hand, the look on the gentleman’s face behind me is priceless. You just know he went home and said to his family, “You are not going to believe what I saw today waiting for the bus!”

Day One of tourism took us to “Oldtown”, which is supposed to be historical, but on closer inspection appears to be more tourist trap than history. But it’s very nice looking and you obviously aren’t in Kansas anymore.

Lots of buildings there that look like this. I’m told that they’re more or less original-ish, but with everything made of wood and the buildings being hundreds of years old, everything’s been replaced piece by piece as it wore out, rotted away, or was damaged or destroyed in one war or the other. The locations and styles may be original, but there’s little if anything left of the original structures.

I did really like the sweeping points on the tile roofs everywhere, as well as the wonderful wood lattice shutters. Incredible detail work.

Off of the main streets it’s a warren of shops, mainly filled with knick-knacks and souvenirs for tourists. There were things like jewelry, glass, and art shops, but given the other stores in the neighborhood, I wasn’t expecting to see anything similar to something you might find on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

Just when you thought that it might not be all that much of a tourist trap… We also saw Starbucks Coffee and McDonalds. I’m willing to bet that if we had gone looking, we could have found a Carls Jr, a Pizza Hut, a Dunkin Doughnuts, and a Taco Bell.

I’m pretty sure that I did not eat at a single western fast-food place the entire three weeks. I can (and do) eat that crap at home. If I’m halfway around the world, I’ll eat something I can only get “for real” halfway around the world, even if it’s just their version of fast food. (But not their version of our version of fast food.)

Lots of shops and restaurants and stores. There is a bit of a Disneyland-esque feel to it after a bit.

There’s a huge monument and display left over from the most recent New Year celebration. Every place that wanted to be festive had dragon flags, toys, kites, and costumes.

More amazing detailed artwork, along with stone dragons. And a honkin’ big security camera ball hanging down from the awning. Very much an “I was in China!” photo-op place.

The perfect section of town to be a gawking American tourist with a backpack full of cameras. Fortunately, I had dressed for the part!