7 May 2018
The main drag
Nanjing road and finding cold medicine in Shanghai
It is raining again, not hard, but enough to prevent any kind of epic walk this evening. I also have decided that my cough is annoying enough that I need cough medicine. I was starting to develop an abdominal six-pack from excessive coughing. It is mostly a problem as soon as I sit down or go to bed, it is not really an issue when walking around. Last night I was up half the night coughing, no doubt annoying the whole hotel.
In my quest for the cough medicine I decided the best course of action was to head to the main shopping street, Nanjing Road.
This road while still interesting, is a good example of how Shanghai is dated compared to the 'newer' mega cities of China. Some of the shops are closed for redevelopment, but many are now quite old looking, and are huge uninviting concrete cubes with one door and 200 small allocated cube spaces on each floor for individual shops selling jade and ginseng.
Shanghai does of course have hundreds of modern style airy malls filled with modern stores, but the old guard has a long lease on almost everything on Nanjing road.
The best part about Nanjing road now is the numerous people trying to scam tourists. The have not changed much, they still want to sell watch / bag / girl massage, they used to add dvd onto the end of that, but the dvd market has dried up. What they should be selling is xiao mi battery / DJI Drone / ZTE mobile banned by trump?
The good news though, the constant flow of scammers targeting a solo middle aged man gives me a great opportunity to practice speaking Chinese. This was great fun, and I ended up making most of them laugh. Generally my tactic was to tell them I am poor, cant afford to eat, I need a job, please hire me to work with you etc. But I then also enjoyed telling them that I am a government official, or in one amusing case, that I am a confused nun on a religious tour.
Here is the start of Nanjing road, this huge place on the corner is being completely redeveloped to become more modern.
This was not here last time I was here, there was a watsons chemist inside, but I found out watsons is not really a chemist, it is a make up and vitamins shop.
A bit more of Nanjing road, I was on the hunt for a chemist.
I found Shanghai #1 pharmacy. That was its official name, I suspect they are all numbered. Anyway, there were 3 levels and you had to go to the top level past the ginseng and other crap to get to the actual medicine. They found the young girl but her English was worse than my Chinese. Eventually I was able to tell her in Chinese I wanted western cough medicine, not Chinese traditional medicine. This meant we could stop looking at the broken spore powder and ground turtle shell.
I have no idea what I have bought, but it was $5, its tablets, and I think we agreed I take 2 tablets twice a day.
She then takes it back off you, you get a piece of paper, go and pay, and they want ID. I didnt have my passport on me, but they actually accepted a photo of my passport. Time will tell if I got placebo, poison, or something that will cause me to develop breast soreness.
It started to rain more, time to find dinner.
Pasta night! It did not look like the photo on the menu. The menu said vegetable and chilli wholegrain pasta with olives. I guess I kind of got that but also mystery meat. It was actually quite nice, once again a small serve which is good.
I found myself at the end of Nanjing road soon after, which meant I was back at the bund, in the rain and fog, time for a mysterious photo of the buildings in Pudong disappearing into the night.
The number of dark barges that go past very quickly is amazing, you really could stand here all night.
The bund is actually the old buildings on this side of the river, not the shiny new buildings on the other side. I guess I will go to the other side tomorrow and fire off some photos of the old buildings, until then, heres a preview.
And here is my cough defence pack, paper aeroplane pills and an ice cream. I also bought an apple (a day to keep the doctor away). I dont feel weird from the pills yet. They were bright blue.