However for me it was just another Asian travel nightmare: the aircon blew directly onto my forehead, which kept me awake, but also gave me an ice-cream headache; even though it was a non-smoking bus, people seemed to think they could get away with smoking in the toilet – and then they did, the reason only becoming clear when I saw the driver smoking at the wheel; the provided blanket was too short for it to cover my arms and feet at the same time; the bed was too narrow for my small bag to fit comfortably with me and there was nowhere secure to put it instead; when the driver wasn't smoking he was talking on his mobile, in fact usually it was both at once; and possibly worst of all, the passengers were constantly farting so that the bus was filled with noxious gas. It was a long journey though and, since we were lying down the whole way, I did probably get a reasonable amount of sleep once I thought of wrapping my krama around my head to protect it from the cold. The krama was a birthday present to me from Joanne in Cambodia. The Cambodians mostly use them to keep dust out of their faces when on the back of mopeds, but they use them for plenty of other things, and I had found several more uses since leaving Cambodia, but this was another one.

To compound the discomfort of the journey they played that other common Asian trick on us and did not drop us at the bus station, but at the side of the street, in some unknown part of the city. At first sight Shanghai was nowhere near as modern and pretty as Beijing, with lots of rubbly building sites and crumbly tower blocks which looked like they must be social housing, which I assume almost all housing in China is. It turned out we were near a metro stop, and we found our way to the hostel with no trouble at all.

At the hostel we returned to trying to organise the next stage of our trip. After the trouble we had escaping Beijing, we wanted to get the next journey booked as soon as we arrived. We were told that we couldn't book trains from Shanghai to Suzhou or Hangzhou because the train were so frequent there was no point in booking. After some debate they told us it might be possible to book a train ticket from Suzhou to Xi'an, which was great as it was the journey we were most worried about not being able to get. But we would have to wait until the next day to find out.

Taking advice from the hostel, we went to a fairly cheap nearby restaurant. The food was really good. Joanne especially had been finding Chinese food a bit difficult to take: the meat is awful. And offal, usually. I don't know why we were bothering ordering meat, actually, we really should have been ordering vegetarian food, because vegetables don't have bone, sinew, or fatty skin, which is all the meat in China seems to consist of usually. Anyway, this wasn't like that: it was proper bits of animal muscle and it was very very spicy. After the shock and disappointment of Thai and Indian food not really being hot at all, China provided us with by far the fiercest food so far. A bit of a surprise and it seems to be only certain regions that do spicy food: the restaurant we were in was a Yunnan restaurant and previously we had eaten very hot Sichuan food.

Yummy spicy Yunnan food

We had a bit of difficulty ordering in that restaurant as it wasn't a tourist restaurant, and it seemed that English was not as widespread in Shanghai as it had been in Beijing. I was really struggling with the language, and the phrase book I had bought wasn't up to the standard of the Lonely Planet ones we had usually bought, and I had thought those were useless. It's just the tones that make the language so hard. Even with the phrase book's system of Romanisation and accents I find it very hard to work out what the word is supposed to sound like. The result of that was that nobody ever seemed to understand even single words that I said, so managing a whole sentence was out of the question. In retrospect, we really should have bought or downloaded audio guides for countries with tonal languages; the few times that Chinese people said words for me to copy it was much easier rendering them comprehensible next time I used them, but words hardly ever sounded like I had expected from reading them. In common with most Asian languages, the grammar, as far as I could tell from the phrase book, seemed to be very easy. It had all the same components, unusual from a European language perspective, that every other language we had encountered had: quantifiers for counting objects and a far more complicated system of pronouns and conferring respect when addressing or referring to people.

I think Chinese would be great to learn, because learning it would teach the ability to grasp a tonal system as well as the grammatical structures that seem to be common to at least most Asian languages, but also it would teach at least a rudimentary collection of the Chinese characters used in several other languages, for example Japanese. These characters are another major obstacle to learning the language. I had always believed that they were purely pictograms, meaning that they each represent a concept and you just have to know the character to have any idea what it means or how it's pronounced. Several people had confirmed this to me, and it would mean the writing system was incredibly difficulty to learn, each character needing to be learned separately. However after arriving in China I looked at an online introduction to writing Chinese, which claimed that most characters contain elements which carry information about the meaning and the pronunciation of that character; they quoted a study which came up with a figure of 90% of characters not being pure pictograms. Thinking about it, the people I asked were probably all Japanese, so maybe there are no pronunciation clues for them since, although the meaning of a character is usually the same across languages, the pronunciation is usually very different. Nonetheless, we were having far less difficulty in China than we had in Japan, because they seem to be far more geared to tourism and their Romanisation system, pinyin is far more widespread than Japan's romanji.

written by  The Happy Couple on July 25, 2009 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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As for"it seemed that English was not as widespread in Shanghai as it had been in Beijing. " actually people in Shanghai know a little on how to greet others in English because of the coming Expo,but it's really a tough job to translate all the Chinese dishes into English~~
Moreover not all the restaurants, both in Shanghai and Beijing, have waiters who have a good command of English as you think.

written by  Susan Lee on August 18, 2009

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