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Welcome to Shanghai... Cough, cough !

I had my first line for this installment even before I left the aircraft. It was supposed to be: "When I walked off the airplane, I thought I would be walking into the future. Later I discovered I was leaving the past." The idea was that we are all living in the 21st century China Era already, but we do not realise it. It is as if you wake up from a dream when you visit the place and see it with our own eyes. Then you are forever changed, andthe world (like the past the past you cannot go back to) will never be the same again. In short, visiting here was meant to be a transformational experience. And probably it will be, but perhaps not quite in the way I had expected.

We all know the basic story, even if we have not seen the dtailed statistics. As the Independent put it on Sunday, "The emergence of China is an epoch-defining change in the global economy. This country of 1.3 billion peoplehas in the past 10 years built enough roads to encircle the equator 16 times. It already makes 90 per cent of the World's toys, 40 per cent of the world's socks and 80 per cent of the World's DVD players. Its economy has grown by around nine per cent every year for the past 25 years and is now worth more than US$2 trillion." Interesting statistics, and here's another that I picked up somewhere else that seems scarcely believable: Shanghai is the home to 16.74 million people, and contributies 25% of China's national taxation. Can that be so? 1.3% of China's population, and they pay 25% of its tax? If so, they must be phenomenonally productive and highly-taxed people. Or, there are so many companies based here, that the headquartered here have an amazing overeach and power in the Chinese economy. What do the figures look like for Beijing? I doubt they match that.

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To get to the future you must first get past the dragon.
China is a country in a hurry, but it has not quite yet given up on its historical bureaucratic procedures. On the plane I was handed various forms to fill in, and on departing I queued up (happy with that spelling?) with my forms in hand, and watched as people were literally waved though what I thought was the passports window. At the desk was a woman barking orders in Chinese, and she was madly waving people by her station. Some were almost running past her, and I imagined, that she was shouting, "hurry, hurry, welcome to China". She barked at me too, and waved me past as I flashed my completed forms. But suddenly her face morphed into a chinese opera mask, that of the evil mother-in-law. It seemed that I had only completed one side of the form. To save her wrath, I quickly backed away towards the counter she ordered me to. By the time I had pulled out my pen and completed the form, I was left standing almost alone, and the dragon lady had disappeared. There was a single station left open, and I was soon rushed past that too. They tore off my newly completed form, and I moved to another set of queues. Now why the forms could not be collected from a single window is beyond me. I suspect that this has something to do with some job-creating procedures of the past, and now in modern China this has been left as a useless residual procedure, which is more like a starting block than a barrier. The second window was less intimidating and I soon found myself lost in Shanghai's modern new Pudong airport.

The spaciousness of this new airport was nothing like the old memory of the dingy Shanghai airport I saw on my last visit about 15 years ago. This one seems to go on forever, and it took me a while to find the signs for the Maglev, Shanghai's ultra modern, ultra fast train service. Yh had instructed me to take the train and meet her at he terminal inside Shanghai. Once the correct signs have been located, and the maze up and down escalators have been followed you find yourself stepping onto one of the quickest and most efficient forms of land transport on the planet. In motion, the Maglev zooms past the automobile traffic. A journey that used to take an hour or more, is cut to less than 20 minutes (or so it seemed.)

With all these speedy measures, I arrived 30 minutes early for our rendezvous. And YH was 30 minutes late, so I had an unexpected hour to kill at the terminal which connects the Maglev with the Shanghai metro. The first thing that I noticed was that people were noticing me, singling me out as a person to approach if the had something to sell. I was offered two laptop computers, and the same one twice, so call it three. Fairly redundant when you are already carrying your second - and lightest - laptop in your knapsack. And it seems to work well enough, as this installment demonstrates. At one point, i bought an iced tea to quench my thirst and finished about half of it before the excess sugar got to be too much for me. I walked over to a bin to discard it, and a small man dress almost in rags appeared from nowhere and stuck his hand out, indicating I should give it to him rather than throw it away. I did, rolled up inside the Culture section of the Sunday Times. I suspect he was hungry and thirsty, although he never asked for money, and it was the remaining half of the iced teathat he wanted, not the cover showing Una Thurmans' long legs. He seemed so grateful that I was embarrassed and moved away. The only other thing that struckme was the number of cleaners. In the one hour I spent there, I saw three different people pushing brooms. Yh told me later that the Maglev was a showcase, and they keep it very clean to impress visiting businessmen and diplomats. If it is good for business, it is good for China.

YH finally appeared. Sunday had been a late night (working on business reports until 2am!) and she had overslept a liitle. She told me how tired I looked after my eleven hour flight, and complained about the weight she had lost since she arrived in Shanghai one month earlier. As we rode the crowded subway into the heart of Shanghai, she pulled out a map, and explained how in China maps are often printed upside down. Chinese characters being more greek than Greek to me, I am not sure that I would notice. But for some reason, on certain maps North is down and South is up. It made me realise that I was bound to have many of my expectations upended on this trip.

At the end of the Metro journey, we hailed a cab to save what YH said would be a 7 minute walk. But she did not take into account the full entrepreneurial powers of a Shanghai taxi driverwhen presented with a still naive foreign traveller, and his Chinese girlfriend with a Cantonese accent. He pretended to be unable to read the Chinese character on the business card YH handed him, and then he sped off in the wrong direction. Eventually YH wised up and they had an argument about the correct pronounciation in Mandarin of "Zheignsnan Lu", the road that our serviced apartment was located on. Almost 20 minutes later, we turned up at the right location. The a taxi driver was shamed into accepting 10 RMB (about 1.00 pound) rather than the 18 RMB that it showed on the meter. Had her brief shouts and negotiations failed, we might have been cheated out of an extra 80 pence. Hardly worth the effort in England, but a matter of some speculative effort in Shanghai, apparently.

We celebrated my safe arrival by going to lunch. A very nice Cantonese meal, with steamed fish, garlic chicken some nice veggies and rice in an upscale modern restaurant cost us about 130 RMB. I was surprised at how crowded it was, and that there were so many young women eating in the restaurant, often in all female groups. Yh told me that many of the young Shanghaiese women do not cook. Until my arrival, she had been sharing a flat with Nancy, one of the top employees at the company for which she is freelancing. Nancy doesn't cook, but merely heats up food she buys from shops. Yh finds that incredible. And also surprising to her was how quickly Nancy through out her husband. Apparently, he followed her to Shanghai from Beijing, and then found it very difficult to find a job in the area of his degree, some type of astro-engineering, where most of the jobs are based in Beijing. After she threatened to throw him out, she had an affair, and he got so upset that he walked out and moved back to Beijing. I think this story was one of many that I am likely to hear about the craftiness of women from Shanghai.

One thing that concerned me as we had our lunch together was YH's persistent cough. It started soon after she arrived in Shanghai, and has already been through a period of bronchitis. She blames the air pollution in Shanghai, and had warned me when I was still in London. I brought with me: effervescent vitamin C, zinc tablets, and selenium to boost the immune system; plus some decongestent, in case the sympoms arrive. I am already coughing as I write this.