🇨🇳 Mini-Sabbatical Part 1: Shanghai to Beijing

This is part of the mini-sabbatical series. Read more here.

Landing in Shanghai #

My flight is at 8:05 AM from Changi.

A week ago I had bought a backpack just for this trip, 2 days ago I started packing, yesterday I dropped off the rest of my stuff with a coworker to pick up on the way back.

I’m ready. Despite the comforts offered to me in Singapore, I feel well prepared for the next 6 weeks living out of this bag. I have sampled the food, hung out with the locals, I feel like I know what to expect from China, and yet it still occasionally feels mysterious.

My girlfriend, Feiyang (王飞扬), has been travelling from London since the day before, due to arrive in Shanghai Pudong International Airport just after I leave from Singapore, so we’ve planned to meet up at the hotel while she spends the morning with an old school friend.

I board, so eager to land I forget whatever I was reading on the flight.

On arrival, I’m immediately reminded that China is not-quite-Singapore, not-quite-Thailand.

Scammed by a taxi #

Stepping out of the international arrivals section, a guy comes up to me in a suit, claiming he works for the airport (with an official looking pin on his blazer to qualify himself).

“Do you need a taxi?”

I still believe taxi’s are “basically free”, from my experience so far around South East Asia and, besides, none of my translation/navigation apps work and I can’t read Mandarin well enough to communicate with anyone. So I say yes.

We proceed to walk towards, and then straight past, the Taxi pickup zone, and towards the car park. “Uh, taxi’s are here?” I point to the queue of at least 15 official taxis, with a matching orderly queue of prospective passengers.

Never mind that, we continue into the car park, where a very fancy looking xpeng electric car is awaiting me.

“How much?” I ask, expecting roughly £15 worth for the 40 minute drive.

“550”. This is in Yuan, so my basic maths of converting to GBP already tells me I’m getting ripped off.

Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea how much things cost in this part of the world, my first impressions are that this place costs roughly the same as New York.

“I only have 300” I reply, opening my wallet to prove what little Thai Baht or Indonesian Rupiah I had exchanged on departure had afforded me about half a taxi’s worth of currency.

No worries though, the man happily shoves his hand into my wallet, takes the cash (all of the cash I had) and waves me into the Taxi.

Welcome to China!

In the taxi, I test out my esim + Wechat account, thankfully it works. Feiyang helpfully informs me I’ve been ripped off, and that I should have got one of the official taxis, obviously.

The Bund, choking on intestines #

We meet at the hotel, but head straight for the Bund to see the sights, and have dinner with her friend.

The place is so crowded! Every restaurant appears to require a booking (not sure why I’m surprised, London is the same), and the sea of people in and around the Bund is only broken by the occasional Chinese military sentry guard, standing like a statue on a plinth.

At the hotpot, amongst many kinds of meat and veg, we ate some duck intestine. Normally this would be fine, but my recent decision to get braces meant that I could no longer chew very well.

So I swallowed it whole, or at least most of it. The end bit got caught on a piece of my braces, leading me to perform the final act of a sword swallower and pull out the entire 30cm strand of intestine from my throat, with the accompanying gagging.

Great first impression with China, and Feiyang’s friend. We went back to the hotel shortly afterwards, tired from the days events!

China or Europe? #

Day 2 we started with a coffee and croissant from the very European feeling old streets.

Shanghai in general felt very westernised. It was clear that it was somehow different to the rest of China, but we couldn’t quite put our finger on it. The Bund was famously owned by various European trading companies, and it’s banks are lined with European inspired architecture, but aside from this there was also a slightly different feeling to the people there. It might have something to do with the fact that Feiyang was asked twice if she was a model, so that made us feel quite cool.

Checking out the Chenghuang temple area, we stopped for some lunch.

This was a peculiar mix of very ancient religious temple, with a disney-esque commercial building, with tourist shops, buddhist temples and gold jewellery shops side by side.

Continuing with the European strangeness, I had my first experience with the Chinese nouveau riche as we had dinner in Xintiandi. For those who don’t know, it’s basically like the Covent Garden / Mayfair of London, complete with Lululemon, On Running and DJI shops (to summarise our personalities).

Not something I expected in such a recently wealthy country, but then again totally understandable. This would continue to be a theme with all big cities we visited throughout China. Luxury is IN.

Oriental Pearl #

Of course, no trip to Shanghai would be complete without the obligatory trip to the Oriental Pearl TV Tower.

Built in 1995, the city has extended skywards around it. Whilst it used to be a TV broadcast tower (back when TV was delivered by these large broadcasting antennae), it is now purely a tourist attraction, with a rotating restaurant, and weirdly misplaced arcade inside the red balls.

I didn’t realise this, but it is also designed to look very similar to a sort of sugary caramel street snack (balls on a stick). I think I prefer the look of the building to the taste of this snack though.

You can get some great views though! Both looking out, and looking down…

Day 4, have you settled in yet? Good. Let’s go to the Capital.

Beijing #

Meeting the GF’s Family #

“Isn’t he cold?”

I had packed for a 6 week long beach trip, without first checking the weather in Beijing.

It’s 14 degrees and I look like a complete mug in my shorts and birkenstocks.

The language barrier is quite the challenge, but we seem to get along just fine as they drive us from the train station and around the city (past Tiananmen square and the Mao photo). We stopped for a hearty meal then back to the parent’s district where Feiyang and I checked into a hotel opposite their flat. Still easing in gently.

In the morning, we are accompanied to views of the sprawling suburbs of Beijing. The expansiveness of Beijing drew parallels with Los Angeles in my mind. The benefit to Beijing is that even though the easiest way to travel is by car, it at least has a functioning metro system.

We are roughly 9 miles from central Beijing. A mere 20 years ago this would have been right in the boonies, as evident by the remnants of farms and military training grounds nearby (we actually awoke to the sounds of horns and distant marching beats!)

Nowadays however, this is prime commuter belt territory, and we took advantage of the tube system every day to get around. Weirdly, I had to scan my passport to enter the tube! Why?

Belt and Road Summit #

Well, turns out the week we decided to come to Beijing was the week of the annual Belt and Road Summit, with Putin in attendance.

We would later find out that this high profile summit substantially changes Beijing for it’s duration. For one, there was almost no pollution whatsoever (to later change). For another, the security was tight.

This was our current issue - if you wanted to get anywhere near Tiananmen square, you needed to scan your identification, and even then you are not actually allowed in the square, designed to hold 1 million people. Since 2021 you have needed to book entrance to the square, to avoid the spread of contrarian ideas COVID.

Given the fact that all museums and typical attractions were closed, we decided to spend the rest of the day visiting some of Feiyang’s favourite districts, and going shopping to get me some slightly warmer clothing.

Getting a few rental bikes was very easy via WeChat, and I must say that Beijing offer some of the most comfortable cycling paths I’ve ever experienced from a major city!

Not much else to note from our shopping trip, but it seems that Beijing may have accidentally hired too many reserve police for the week of the B+R Summit, we kept tripping over police cars and off duty officers.

Qianhai #

Beijing was all a bit of a blur, but I do remember Qianhai as one of my favourite spots.

A short cycle away from Tiananmen Square, it is a little region surrounding Jingshan park and Qianhai lake, where you can get lost amongst old traditional houses-turned-shops, before eventually winding up around the lake for unbeatable sunset views.

We met up with another of Feiyang’s old friends here for hotpot, this time I didn’t make a fool of myself, but some fascinated locals seemed to want to try out their broken English with me - they say they hadn’t met a white person before. I called bull, even as I realised I also hadn’t seen another westerner since leaving Singapore.

By this point in the trip, we’ve finally hit the weekend and Feiyang’s parents have promised they would take us on a trip out of town! So we hop in the car for a few hours drive. I’m starting to worry about Feiyang’s Dad’s driving. She gets her good eyesight from him, and he was making full use of the hard shoulder in each traffic jam. We eventually made it though.

I’m completely clueless about what to do around here so I didn’t even know the name of the place, but later found out we would be spending some evenings in Gubei Water Town!

Gubei Water Town #

Gubei Water Town was probably one of my favourite places I visited in China.

I know, that’s a bit of an uninspiring statement, since it’s all quite artificial, but there was something about it I really enjoyed. As far as I know, the town is not actually a historical water town, but a replica of the Wuzhen Water Town from the south of China, and only around 500 years old.

But it’s not just some quaint old village. The whole place has been converted to house discreet museums, tea houses, restaurants, activities and hot springs in amongst the ancient streets. Maybe it was more surprising for me since I couldn’t read any of the maps.

Not least, I loved it because it was just so beautiful! We were visiting in Autumn, and the red leaves and crisp air yielded some great sights.

Cultural Site #

Once we peeled our eyes away from the colourful trees, we ended up stumbling into a few of the town’s cultural heritage sites.

A bit ashamed to admit I took almost no photos of the ancient textiles factory, alcohol distillery, replica villagers house or the public traditional chinese theatre. You just have to trust me that they existed, and were really interesting, I promise.

I do however have this one sick photo of me surprising everyone at archery.

Whilst I’m not actually much good at it, I at least wasn’t useless, which can only be a welcome surprise for the people who have watched me choke on hotpot and fail to converse in basic sentences with them for the last week.

Great Wall #

It’s been looming over us since we arrived in Gubei.

長城, Changcheng, Great Wall.

You hear about it so much, “it can be seen from space”, “500,000 people died building it”, “the locals dismantled it to build houses”. It feels like it should be a pilgrimage, an arduous trek up a mountain to touch this world wonder.

Nah, turns out you can just take a cable car right to the top!

The views were incredible, but this stretch of the Great Wall (Simatai) is not particularly long. You find yourself cut short, unable to go beyond a few of the towers, beyond which the wall returns back to a ruinous state.

Hot Springs #

In the evening, we returned back to Gubei and decided to visit one of the Hot Spring baths. By this time the temperature had plunged to ~3 degrees.

I had been to a few of these places before, I remember the Széchenyi baths in Budapest, a vast hot pool to fit hundreds of people. When I last visited, the air was -15C, with the steam from the baths causing my towel to freeze solid.

These baths were much smaller and, calmer. There were maybe 10 small pools indoors and one outdoors, all at varying temperatures between 33 and 46 degrees, with varying mineral content.

I’m less used to this, so whilst Feiyang and her family jumped straight into the hottest one, I took my time to work my way up. I don’t want to feel like the boiling frog!

The view from the outside pool was mesmerising. I don’t know how, but these city planners had managed to cram an LED into every single nook and crevice of each stone wall of Gubei. The results were astonishing, with the already-too-good-to-be-true town transforming into a movie set overnight!

I wish I took photos, but my phone was dead by this point, so you’ll have to do with what everyone else has already taken.

It might seem a bit touristy (and it is), but I’d recommend giving Gubei a visit if you have a bit too much time in Beijing. It’s a remarkably calming place.