101 Nifty Details About Shanghai

Layers

After nearly a year in Shanghai, much of it spent trying not to punch taxi drivers turning right on my light or picking bones out of my sticky rice or dodging phlegmy spit puddles on the sidewalk, I have decided to start my Sunshine and Lollipops list of all that rocks in this city.  It will develop as quickly as it develops.

1.  Lanzhou Hand-Pulled Noodles

Noodles!

I suppose that Lanzhou Noodles would be a more appropriate addition to a list of 101 Nifty Details About Gansu Province but I don’t care. There are Lanzhou noodle joints everywhere in Shanghai and I am pulled to the Arabic script of their cookie-cutter identical signage and the Technicolor wall menus and identikit posters of mosques and rolling green fields.

The Xuhui Lanzhou Noodle Meister

I love the fact that they are always crowded and bustling with noodle-eaters, that the noodle pullers are always busy stretching huge lumps of floury dough, that the big pot of broth is simmering away all day and becoming richer and wilder in flavor, that they have huge bowls dedicated to chopped cilantro, green onions and fried eggs.  I could happily live on a diet of dao xiao mian (the ribbons of sliced dough) or la mian (the long, pulled threads of noodle) or jiaozi (the dumplings). I could eat them with slivers of beef or with bok choy or with eggs. I load my bowl with chili paste and aromatic vinegar and after the noodles are gone, I drink all the broth. It clears out the sinuses better than any decongestant.

Favorite noodle joints are:

The one on Shanxi Nan Lu at the corner of Jianguo Lu in the former French Concession, on the right as you head south

The one opposite Tongji University’s North Campus, just around the corner from the Zhongshan Bei Lu line 1 metro stop, exit 1 (turn right after the escalator, then right again for half a block).

2. Taxis

Taxis in Shanghai aren’t actually particularly nifty but they are remarkably cheap and easy to get around in. A half hour trip from deepest, darkest Pudong to Puxi, with bags and bags of illicit espresso in tow and no desire to take the Metro? 30 yuan max!  A half hour trip out to the Other University (about an hour by the fastest Metro)? About 25-29 yuan! Too lazy to carry your bags home from the grocery store? 12 yuan! In Vancouver, the starting fare for anything is about 36 yuan. Think about it.

And half the time you even get that absurd touch screen television in the back of the front seat head rest to watch while you’re whiling away your time in traffic (or trying not to think about your imminent death on the elevated ring roads). I love the Expo 2010 screen, with the Featured Countries and their Special Foods and Special Music.  Did you know that fiddle music was Canada’s main source of dance music in rural areas until very recently? Yes! I first heard about John Legend in the back of a taxi (and promptly never heard of him again but, hey, I hear he’s famous somewhere). I learned that Krispy Kreme Donuts opened in Shanghai recently thanks to the taxi television.

And you know the niftiest thing about Shanghai taxis? They’re generally NOT assholes. Unlike Beijing, where we were constantly being taken on wrong, roundabout scammy trips where the drivers kept trying to squeeze more money out of the meter, or Nanjing where we’ve had to wait 30 minutes in a queue for a taxi or an hour on the street for a taxi that would actually stop for us (we ended up having to hijack one), or Jakarta where they still wanted to change 100 times the going rate in spite of the presence of a meter, or Cairo where the taxis were barely held together with sticky tape and rust.

3. Mops in unexpected places

In the Former French Concession (AKA bits of Luwan and Xuhui), there is a parallel universe operating, much like the ones full of street cats and their armies doing their own thing with their own agendas. This parallel universe is made up entirely of mops. They live rich and varied lives in this area, propped up against walls, dangling from trees, jammed into cracks and crevices, hooked on clusters of dangling wires.  I’ve never ever seen such a subculture of mops in my life. I’m thinking of shifting my old habit of taking pictures of doorways to a habit of documenting the habitats of mops in our neighborhood.

Chairman Mop

ETA March 1st: Just got back from Canada and was immediately inundated with mops in ex French Concession, en route to top up mobile phone credits and get groceries. Here are a few from yesterday, all within one block.

This mop is for mopping windowsills

This mop is factory direct!

This mop is just resting

4. Sugarcane in winter

Not intended for scaffolding

Apparently the dead of winter is sugar cane season. It’s propped up in random fruit shops, taller than me, clumped together in bundles. It makes me feel almost warm seeing it. That and the pineapple add to the illusion.

5.  Brutally honest meat departments in supermarkets

I love Chinese supermarkets. A lot of foreigners I know simply refuse to shop in Chinese supermarkets because some sections can be viscerally overwhelming. Like the meat and fish section.  Our local supermarket reeks of fish and flesh, most of which is not neatly packaged in little styrofoam containers.  There are tubs of live frogs under netting, tanks full of live, swimming fish of all sorts, trellises covered with butterflied dead pigs, chickens, ducks. Everything is either very much alive or very much (and very obviously) dead.  At the moment, there are temporary clothes racks filled with dry-cleaning-styled long drying fish alongside the usual wall of flat, dry posterboard fish. The whole place smells wet, muscly, bloody, fishy. The stinky tofu section is in there too, right next to the fresh sea weed section, so adding in a certain bacterial, oceany tang.

Butterfly Piggie

Dry Cleaner Fishies

Very Fresh Fish

6. Pudong International Airport

This one has no photos because Airport security doesn’t like me taking pictures in sensitive places. But you know what? Shanghai Pudong Airport is my favoritest airport ever, for both coming and going. By this, I mean, I’ve never been grilled or scowled at or pulled aside or had my luggage or myself swabbed for explosive residue. Security, immigration, passport control and customs are all super low-key and gently handled.  I have yet to emerge roaring with indignant rage at my treatment by security staff.  Passport control in Vancouver (my own homeland!) sees nothing amiss about grilling me and glaring at me and questioning my very existence.  Here?  Sanity. Calm. In and out in minutes. No trauma. Yay Pudong International!

7. Blind massage parlours

I’ve got a fucked up clicky neck, leftover from a fun and debilitating 5-car pile-up I was in back in Istanbul in 2007 with an insane company driver. Even though I couldn’t walk without crying/screaming for a month, the Istanbul medical community declared me unhurt and I was released from hospital the same day. No physio, no chiro, nowt. Now, three years later, I’m finally getting some very affordable care for my thoroughly messed up skull/neck connection.

Meet my lovely helpers:

The Double Rainbow Massage House on Shanxi Nan Lu

For 40rmb for 45 minutes (and up to 80rmb for 90 minutes), you get a thorough acupressure-heavy massage from one of the dozen or so blind massage men. This isn’t oily, naked soft massage. This stuff is brutal and quite intense, done fully clothed under a thin sheet. When you first lie down and stuff your face through the hole in the padded table, they lay the sheet over you and run their hands up and down your body from skull to toes before they zero in on your problem areas. One guy spent 45 minutes working solely on the area at the base of my skull, where it connects with the spinal column.

You can also get a one hour reflexology foot massage, after a 15 minute foot soak in an herbal bath in a wooden bucket, for about 55rmb.  The fellow who worked on me yesterday knew exactly what was messed up as soon as he set to work on my left foot– somewhere on the outside of my arch was apparently linked to my neck area as it hurt like hell when rubbed and he chided me for not having dealt with my neck issues sooner.

He knows something I don't