Musings from the Far Easy: Shanghai'd in Shanghai

Shanghai Nights

Alright... So I haven't posted in a while because I have been putting off writing about my worst experience so far in China. Michael and I decided to go to Shanghai for a couple of days, which sounded like a great idea. I have heard of Shanghai my entire life, now I was going to actually be there!! So cool...

Boarding the Plane

I know its a regular occurrence worldwide, but my first time boarding from a runway

We get a couple of flights, show up to the airport BARELY on time and make our flight. I promptly fall asleep until its time to debark. We take a taxi to our hostel which was far more expensive than the taxi's in Beijing. This was a sign of things to come...

Our hostel was pretty cool, it had a maritime theme. Michael and I redecorated the table a little bit, putting our initials in stone.

We set out to explore the city. It was a rainy day unfortunately. There were signs everywhere saying Shanghai would be affected by two seperate typhoons during our stay..... Michael is the one who planned this trip, so I congratulated him on his thorough job of checking the weather. It turned out fine though, it only rained intermittently and no typhoons appeared while we were there.

The first day we just walked along a river that seperated where we were staying from the magnificent skyline of Shanghai. We went into a restaurant that had a large tower on top. I would not be surprised if it were some kind of lighthouse a long time ago. The tower was closed to visitors, but (as it was raining) there was no one outside where it's entrance was to stop us from entering sooo... of course we climbed to the top...

It was old and very dirty... no one had climbed here in a long time

Picture from the very top

This is what we climbed to the very top of

Unfortunately, like idiots, we didn't take a picture of the building itself... so here is a picture of it that I found on the internet. We climbed down and the restaurant staff could tell what we had done because of how dirty we were, but whatevs...

So, after waking up from a nap we decided we'd have a beer at the rooftop bar of our hostel... The view there is spectacular.

After this we decided to head out and explore the nightlife that Shanghai had to offer. We don't really know where to go so we ask a guy on the street where the bars are. He says he will take us... This should have been our first clue something was wrong. A guy doesn't just decide to turn around and walk the other direction with two foreigners unless hes up to something. Being naive, we follow. We ask him REPEATEDLY if this is a real bar, or a "lady bar" (a hooker bar) because Shanghai is full of people trying to sell you hookers. It's like Vegas in this respect. Beijing doesn't have a lot of this, but Shanghai is obnoxious. He assures us that it is a real bar, but when we arrive its obvious that it is a lady bar...

We try to leave, and out of no where 5 more guys appear and we are forced into a tiny room and kept there. I don't remember fighting them (it all happened so fast) but somehow I got a cut on my forehead. Michael says he punched one guy and choked another, which I believe because they were very aggravated towards him the entire time we were kept in that room. We emptied our wallets, and they kept yelling at us to give them more money... Eventually they realized we didn't have anymore and we were escorted to a taxi and driven back to the hostel. I imagine this was so we wouldn't be able to find out way back with the police. The walk there had taken 20 minutes involving many turns and twists and I honestly had no idea where we were.

In the end, we lost about 120 dollars US, so it could have been much worse. I learned a valuable lesson about trusting people, which will hopefully keep me out of worse situations in the future.

I realize this isn't my best post, but its not something I enjoyed writing about, plus I have been sick the past few days and... I don't know, I apologize for it not being up to my usual standards. Anyways, here are a few more pictures that don't really need explaining...