7 November 2011
Zhongshan
I felt very lethargic this evening, and it looked like it might rain at any moment, despite not having rained all day.
So I studied google maps for a while and decided to go to Zhongshan, most famous for having a giant park but also seemed to have lots of other things around it including many food icons on the map.
This turned out to be a great plan, it was a really nice area. The Cloud 9 mall on top of the subway station has a giant Carrefour but also (I counted) 62 restaurants.
These were proper sit down table service restaurants, not hole in the wall or fast food places, spread out over 9 levels. The place seemed to be a bit older and catering for regular Chinese folks, it was still nice, but there was no Gucci or Cartier to be seen.
I wandered around like a zombie here for a while, but once I had my dinner I felt like a million dollars and walked all the way home, at least 10km, and the weather was superb.
Tonights funny story, many of the restaurants in the cloud 9 mall had long waiting lines of people out the front (see pics below). Generally they give you chairs but not always. Depending on the availibility of a correct size table, a girl calls you by name to enter the restaurant.
Universally, this involves the worlds cheapest, loudest and most distorted battery powered personal microphone and speaker set of best ever Chinese quality, complete with feedback. So if you look at the photos below you can see how cavernous the place is, now imagine 60 odd of these loudspeaker systems feeding back at once as a Chinese girl screams your name.
Looking up in the cloud 9 mall, it was a triangle so there were 3 such 'wells' like this on the points of the triangle, connected by walkways of about 50 metres. The Carrefour is over 3 basement levels with the subway under it.
I tried to do a long exposure where I appeared 3 times in diiferent stupid poses. It didnt work out, instead I am a ghostly shadow of my current self.
Now I am at the top of the mall looking down. I was taking redundant photos cause I thought I might go straight home again due to rain and tired. Neither turned out to be true.
One of the above mentioned restaurant lines.
I couldnt eat in any of the big restaurants (and some had seating for at least 100 people). But I found this place that was part cafe, part dessert bar, part snack food but also had a big sign 'EXTRA spicy beef noddle soup'. I was sold instantly and it was indeed excellent.
Afterwards I felt like superman, and started taking much longer strides and running up escelators 3 steps at a time!
I thought I better head outside into the darkness before I transform into something.
The walk home was through some of the nicest parts of Shanghai I have seen. All the streets are treelined, and they all have lights hanging in them (you cant really see it in the photo but theres multi colored LED lighting all over the place).
This seemed to be an English language school using disney movies as a teaching method.
Oh Hi!
The walk home took me past the unline Jin'an temple. The massive advertising neon wall behind me made it impossible to get a photo even with a long exposure.
Tonights amazing hotel photo is the Shanghai JC Mandarin.
Back on Nanjing Road west and it is very nice this evening. Not so busy. There really is a lot to see along here, at first glance it seems to just be high end fashion boutiques but look down side streets and below and above street level and theres lots to see.
Theres also street vendors set up on rugs with boomboxes trying to sell pirate cd's. To demonstrate the quality of the cd, they use the same distorted speaker setup as the restaurants, as best I can tell they play the theme from Titanic or Whitney Houston doing the theme from bodyguard endlessly.
Slightly more interesting, in road underpasses theres dodgy looking guys with a little rug with an assortment of mobile phones on them, they are generally fiddling with them with jewellers screwdrivers, a cable and a netbook. I am guessing these were not acquired through legitimate means.