First Day in Shanghai - In Search of Enchanting Experiences

      We were very tired and headed to bed shortly after returning to our room, but with the twelve-hour time difference between home and China, I found myself wide awake at midnight. I managed to get a bit more sleep, but not much. Adjusting would take some time. Breakfast was included, so we made our way to the dining room for our first of many breakfast buffets. This one was among the better options, and fortunately, we weren't sharing it with a large tour group. The buffet featured a variety of Chinese dishes such as noodles and cooked vegetables, along with plain rice porridge, eggs, and a small selection of cereals, which is what I usually have for breakfast. The most important feature was the espresso machine, although it didn’t make lattes. I was always curious about the other guests. Their composition changed as we traveled across the country. In this hotel, the other visitors seemed to be overseas Chinese or other Asians. We met our guide Simon in the lobby and headed to our awaiting car, as part of the tour. Simon made a strong first impression; he was professional and spoke English perfectly. It was a short drive to our first destination. The Bund is located on the west side of the Huangpu River, which flows north through Shanghai, dividing the city into Puxi (west of the Huangpu) and Pudong (east of the Huangpu). Throughout most of the tour, we learned about events from several centuries ago, but Shanghai’s history is more contemporary. We stood where there was merely a muddy lane in 1842 until the British demanded a settlement and trading area following the first Opium War. We gazed across the river at Pudong and the North Bund. The skyline was striking even on this overcast day. These buildings, including some of the world's tallest skyscrapers, have all been constructed since the 1990s when Pudong was designated a special economic zone. We could truly appreciate these changes, as this wasn't our first time in Shanghai. We had stood in the same spot in January 1985 during a long train journey through China that Po and I took with our mothers while living in Botswana. One day, Po expressed her desire to take her mother to China, since they both grew up in Hong Kong and had never been to mainland China. I interjected, "What about my mother?" We flew from Gaborone in December 1984, picked up my mother in Pennsylvania, and Po's mom in Calgary, before flying to Hong Kong in early January. At that time, independent travel to China was still in its infancy. All our arrangements had to go through the China International Travel Service (CITS), which only booked one city at a time. So, we secured a hotel in Guangzhou and a train to get there. Once in Guangzhou, we visited the local CITS office to book our flight to Beijing. Thankfully, this was our only internal flight. It was quite an experience, especially the chaos when the check-in counter opened, with our CITS representative emerging through the disorder with our passes. We flew on a Tupolev, an older Russian aircraft. The seats were thin, and I could feel the back of the passenger in front of me every time he tried to recline his seat, which was blocked by my knees as I desperately tried to maintain my limited space in front of me. This occurred repeatedly during the three-hour flight. He never understood why his seat wouldn't recline. Po's cousin in Beijing had arranged for us to stay in an apartment, but it was cold and dark in early January. My mother insisted we needed to find a hotel, and I didn’t argue. The next morning we went to China Travel, and they found us a hotel in Beijing while also booking our sleeper train tickets to our next destination, Xi'an. We repeated this process in every city, arranging onward travel and our next hotels. We all paid higher prices for our train tickets compared to local rates. Po and her mother received the overseas Chinese pricing, while my mother and I paid an even steeper premium. I didn’t mind this, as local salaries at the time were a fraction of Western ones, and train fares were quite cheap. I have some old photographs taken as slides by my mother, my wife, and myself. Back in January 1985, Shanghai was a dreary place. Pudong was filled with shipyards and farmland. These photos were taken looking across Suzhou Creek, with the ornate building being the Russian Consulate, which still exists. In April 2026, I didn’t see this sign. The banks and trading businesses on the Bund were abandoned in 1949 after the Communists seized power, and the buildings were repurposed. That dreary day in January 1985 was what we witnessed. Everything has transformed since the 1990s, with the buildings on the Bund once again serving as businesses and upscale hotels.

Other articles