A pretty cool article on Shanghai from the NYT.
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Alleys of Shanghai
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Published: March 15, 2013
Street signs in English, not-so-spicy cuisine, locals who don’t stare,
contemporary art galleries, modern youth hostels and even interpreter
hot lines for cabdrivers who don’t speak English. For independent
travelers about to start an expedition into the huge, mysterious nation
of China, I have some advice: stop in Shanghai and take a deep breath.
Seth Kugel for The New York Times
Vibrant street life and vignettes are abundant in
Shanghai, especially along the alleyways. Above, a scene outside a house
in the alleys of an old Shanghai neighborhood.
Not literally, at least without checking the air quality index;
the smog can be brutal. But do stick around for a few days — as I did
before I set off up the Yangtze (article at left) — to ease into Chinese
ways in the city where expatriates have flocked since the First Opium
War ended in 1842. Here, strangers are less strange.
Even on $50 a day, Shanghai is perfectly feasible — once you accept you
will not be taking a sightseeing boat along the Bund, eat in fancy
restaurants or stay in luxury (or even midrange) hotels. That’s because
much of the city is yours free or, in the case of public transportation,
hostels and noodle shops, close to it.
That includes the Shanghai Museum (shanghaimuseum.net/en),
which is free. It also provided a lesson in the sort of friendliness
I’d encounter on the rest of my trip. Just as I’d placed my passport,
wallet and camera through the museum’s X-ray machine, two guards pointed
me to the coat check, signaling they would watch my valuables.
Returning two minutes later, I was outraged to find them intently
leafing through my passport.
“We like your passport!” one exclaimed, beaming. My cultural-disconnect
alert sounded, just in time. “Thanks,” I said. “Lots of countries, but
my first day in China.” I feebly joked that I would be fatter when I
left. “You like Chinese food!” the other exclaimed. Smiles all around.
It was as if China were tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “Psst, we do things differently here.”
I found a more historical lesson inside the halls of the museum, a
powerful reminder of just how old and complex Chinese civilization is. I
gazed at an almost-4,000-year-old battle ax and ancient instruments in
the bronze gallery, gawked at stone heads of Lokapala from the Tang
dynasty in the sculpture section and tried to come to grips with the
gorgeousness of the porcelain collection. Finally, I headed to the top
floor to see the traditional costumes and art from China’s minority
ethnic groups: the Kirgiz, the Uighur, the Bai.
But Shanghai is also into newer creations; luckily, just as budget-friendly. M50 (www.m50.com.cn),
an enclave of galleries in former industrial buildings in north
Shanghai, is as funkily contemporary as the museum is dazzlingly
ancient. I especially liked the ShanghART H-Space (shanghartgallery.com), a cavernous space showing large-scale installations by Chinese artists. At the Pacific Perspectives gallery (ppl.bz/en/),
I became intrigued with landscapes by the Chinese-American artist
Thomas Leung, pierced with fiery, near-neon lighting, and I said as much
to a man working in the gallery. “I’m Thomas Leung,” he responded.
Frugal shopping options are limited, but you can try Tianzifang,
a web of back alleys in the French Concession that now house
restaurants (too expensive) and artsy boutique gift shops (not always).
Check out La Woo’s reasonably priced felt animal figures, handmade on
site, more Velveteen Rabbit than Hello Kitty adorable.
For any great city to be budget-friendly, it needs intriguing street
life to stroll through — and Shanghai doesn’t disappoint there. I spent a
good hour wandering behind the Peach Garden Mosque near the Old City
section, in one of the city’s dwindling traditional neighborhoods of
residential alleyways, and found life lived in the open: a man and woman
washing a fish at an outdoor sink, a pair of red and purple rubber
gloves hanging near just-scrubbed sweet potatoes, a cart full of
fluorescent light bulbs lining a side alley.
Bustling (but fully Chinese) commercial streets on the outer edges of
the French Concession also drew me in, eliciting more questions than
answers. Why were fish hanging out of that second-story window, each
with a playing card attached? What services were rendered in that small
store with nothing more than a person behind a desk and signs I did not
understand? Did people really have no qualms about stopping for
conversations and completely blocking the narrow sidewalk to all coming
pedestrians? Could that temptingly wrapped gelatinous candy taste as
good as it looked? (I do have an answer for the last: it was
disgusting.)
The Chinese apparently look down on the city’s native dishes. Shanghai’s
cuisine “is the redheaded stepchild of Chinese food,” said Jamie Barys,
an American who, with Kyle Long, runs UnTour Shanghai (untourshanghai.com),
a food company. Yet Shanghai food is a good baby step toward eating in
the nearby provinces. Take the most famous Shanghai export, soup
dumplings called xiao long bao, comfort food even for nonlovers of
Chinese cuisine.
UnTour Shanghai charges $60 for a three-hour tour (too much for my
budget), but you can cheat using articles by Ms. Barys and Mr. Long in
the Shanghai pages of CulinaryBackstreets.com.
Or (less likely) you can be connected to them through a Chinese
neighbor back home and have them invite you to dinner, as I was. We had
sesame paste noodles (8 renminbi, or $1.30 at 6.1 renminbi to the
dollar) at Wei Xiang Zhai; soup dumplings at their favorite place, Nanjing Tang Bao (which has Nanjing-style dumplings similar to xiao long bao; eight for 7 renminbi); and Macao-style Portuguese egg tarts (4 renminbi) from Lillian Bakery. (At those prices, I took the rare opportunity to treat.)
Even on my own, my initial language-based trepidations about eating out
in China dissolved. English speakers would materialize out of nowhere to
help me order a bun filled with shepherd’s purse, a green related to
mustard; I fumbled through China’s hand-counting system (1 through 10 on
one hand) to pay street vendors for roasted sweet potatoes, misshapen
beauties with crispy skin and soft yellow flesh.
My biggest expense was lodging, but even there Shanghai came through.
Unlike most other cities I visited, it has good hostels, and good
hostels often have private rooms mostly indistinguishable from (though
often smaller than) those you’d find in decent hotels. That was true of
the Shanghai Soho International Youth Hostel, (yhachina.com),
where I booked a private room for 180 renminbi a night. Though the
mattress was hard as a rock — par for the course during my trip — the
place had amenities that most Chinese business hotels in a similar price
range do not: English-speaking staff members, and no-smoking policies
that are not entirely ignored.
It also had a great location, on a pleasant pedestrian path along the
downtown bank of the Wusong River, a five-minute walk from the Xinzha
Road subway stop. Actually, plan on six minutes: if you can resist a
60-second stop at Xiaocheng Shengjian to grab four
scallion-and-sesame-seed-sprinkled pot stickers for 4.5 renminbi (at 392
Xinzha Road), you probably shouldn’t be budget-traveling in Shanghai at
all.
