I wake stretching, straining and drag my rapidly aging carcass, replete with aches and pains, out of bed and over to the station in good time to make the train.
Unlike at the ticket counter yesterday, where we were greeted with abject disdain and our tickets were slung down in the manner of a petulant school boy handing in his half-completed home work, before we were waved away with the grace of riot policeman, the guards proved eager to help and adept at doing so. Basically, they could point. The combination of this and my ability to read Chinese numbers, up to four, mean we arrived on platform four with ease.
With a higher grade of tickets in our possession, the discomfort of yesterday rapidly becomes a distant memory, as we take up the padded seats opposite to our beds, found on the top layer of a triple bunk, and proceed to take in the scenery. It’s green, green and green again. We may be in the most populous country in the word, but five minutes out of the city and we’re in its seriously rural backwaters, taking in enough chlorophyll to keep a rain forest nourished.
With six beds in our rather dense section of the train, we are up, close and personal with several locals, none of whom seem particularly intrigued or perturbed by our presence, aside from when I tried to work my way into my top bunk. With only about a foot between the bedding and the ceiling, at the top of a slender ladder, this was like trying to thread a sumo into a compact sleeping bag. It took some maneuvering and was enough to distract our compatriots from the TV and provide considerably more entertainment to boot. In passing round their foodstuffs as they ate them, these chaps put us at ease and made us feel welcome as we cruised through the ten hour journey up to Shanghai.
Given the magnitude of Shanghai, our arrival in it proved rather innocuous. Indeed, there was nothing to be seen from the train to warn us of the sprawling, stunning urban metropolis we had entered. The only give away was the view of the Shanghai Hotel from a window and the fact we were promptly ushered from the train as we scrambled to get our packs, having realized we were the last ones left aboard.
Exciting the station, we were immediately hit up by a taxi hawker, with whom we haggled, finally settling on a price, it would later transpire, that was about three times above the ordinary. That said, given you could barely touch a London cab for this cash, we weren’t remotely dissatisfied. Moreover, the smoothness with which the journey passed and the simplicity with which we were able to acquire access to my absent friend’s apartment, proved, appreciably, the easiest part of our journey to date. Our first key destination had been reached. We were in. We took a moment, to drink it in from the balcony, relieved, delighted, excited.
With the night drawing in, we took to the streets for our first step into the unknown. And this it really was, with neither of us having done any research on Shanghai, with all our time consumed with how to get there in the first place. In the space of thirty minutes, we moved between narrow streets of well-maintained, but clearly aging buildings, awash with scooters, people in their stride with things to do and the wafting smell of street food, into the glitz and glamour of a shopping district that could have been plucked from any city in the developed world, replete with effulgent stores lit up like overly elaborate Christmas trees, branded by the likes of Cartier and Tiffanys. It didn’t look like Communism and it didn’t reel us in either... We strolled, we ate, we sneered, we went to bed and snoozed.
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