Day 25: Million of... (Shanghai, China)

Shanghai has a population of 23 million people. Every single one of them decided to show up in downtown Shanghai today.

I didn't sleep well, due to a bit too much alcohol than Mylanta can offset. I woke up on time, but tired, to find we'd been delayed. Grrrr.

The ship was held up due to other ships picking up the pilot the previous day, and not giving him back to the Shanghai harbourmaster. We didn't dock until after 10am, over three and a half hours late.

At least the disembarkation process flowed efficiently. Princess have improved their procedures significantly since our first cruise, and we were off the ship, through immigration, and on our shuttle within 20 minutes or so.

Chinese customs officers were far more relaxed than I'd expected. The only strange bit was having to walk through two scanners that detect nuclear substances. As Hutch, the shore excursion lecturer had pointed out the day before, "sorry, folks, but today you'll have to leave your nuclear weapons on the ship".

We were concerned the air pollution might be as bad as during our first visit, but it wasn't. It was worse. The fog/smog reduced visibility to a few hundred meters. And people breath this stuff?

So we rode the shuttle into town, squinting, trying to guess what all the mysterious grey shapes along the roadside were.

We were dropped at the north end of the Bund, the old business district in the pre-communist days, which we missed last time. We walked the length, along with thousands of other tourists and large numbers of locals. It would have been much nicer at night, all lit up, but that will have to wait for a future visit.

Then we cut in to find the Yu Gardens, which were built (mumble, mumble) centuries ago. This was a wonderful opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with Shanghai drivers, who make Vladivostok drivers look like skittish little girls.

Traffic lights are basically a badly-expressed suggestion of a possible intention that you  might want to consider following, providing you have little to no consideration for your own safety. 

Our rule for crossing the street, "stick with the locals", sort of works. We didn't get hit, but it did bring us perilously close to scooters and taxis pushing through the cloud of pedestrians. And it did nothing to help us deal with scooter riders on the footpaths. 

Squillions of scooters, not a helmet in sight. Protection on a scooter consists of leaning on the horn, which is Shanghai-scooter-speak for "approaching intersection, not stopping".

I'm amazed the police don't have trucks roaming through Shanghai, gathering the dead and broken.

Somehow we made it to the Old City, which has retained the traditional Chinese architecture, converted into shops and restaurants. The last time I saw this many  people in one place was the Helm's Deep battle scene in "The Lord of the Rings", and the only way they packed them in that densely was with computer graphics. This crowd was real, larger than normal due to being the last Saturday of a week-long holiday.

Which made it kind of cool. 

The Yu Gardens are classic Chinese rock gardens, with a series of small pavilions, water features, and garden alcoves juxtaposed in a way to virtually guarantee you'll get lost.

We had the good luck to catch a performance of traditional Chinese music played on instruments made wholly or partly of porcelain. Mainly percussion (various bells and tiles), a drum (covered with a skin), a flute, and the Chinese violin-like instrument I can't recall the name of.

Lunch was at the brilliantly-named "Million of Gourmet". Up an escalator into a restaurant that was part-buffet, part yum-cha, with dozens of different kinds of dumplings, noodles, vegetables, shellfish, rice, and tiny little birds that looked like deep-fried baby ducks. We skipped those.

There were about 200 Chinese and us, so we figured it was going to be authentic enough. Quite a good meal, more than we could finish, for the astronomical prices of 147 Yuan - about $20. And we think were overcharged 19 Yuan (about $2.50 - shocking.)

After lunch we wandered the back streets, dodging scooters, taxi drivers and overkeen spruikers for fake handbags and watches. 

By the time we'd returned to the shuttle the day had cleared up considerably. Visibility was at least several kilometers. I thanked one of the local tour organisers for organising the nice weather. He told me they'd arranged it with the Buddha. 

Nice answer.

Back on the ship was a show by the (Zhoukou Acrobatic Troupe), five girls and two boys between the ages of 11 and 20, doing a series of stunts involving hoops, unicycles, burning candelabras, spinning plates, all balanced/spun/juggles in various improbable ways by  people contorting themselves into physically impossible positions. Phenomenal.

Before dinner we caught a comedian, Scott Young, who did an entertaining routine that included a rather good impression of our captain, Dino Santini.

Speaking of the captain, he made an announcement that was a pleasant surprise. We'd thought the following day was in Dalian, but it's actually another sea day. Something we would have known if we'd read our itinerary properly.

By 8pm I was trashed, and babbling incoherently in languages I don't even speak. Dinner consisted of vindaloo, boiled vegetables, and strange hallucinations.

The last time I was this exhausted - zzzzzzzzzzzz.