Despite taking it easy the night before, I didn’t wake up till 2pm. So having wasted most of the day already I figured I’d spend what was left of the day just walking around absorbing Shanghai. I was hungry enough to eat a whole maternity ward of babies, so I headed to a little place called NYC deli, on Fuzhou Lu, which wasn’t far from my hotel. I had heard from rumblings on the net that the place had good burritos. I hadn’t had a good burrito in months; hell I hadn’t eaten any form of texmex food in months. So it I knew it had to be mine. It cost 45rmb, which I thought to be a little steep, until they handed it to me using a forklift. Seriously I could have fed a small African country with this thing. I went to a nearby park and had a picnic with my giant ration of a burrito. And damn was it delicious. I’ll admit that there was no way I could finish this thing it was just that big. It was easily twice the size of a large burrito from Burrito Boyz back home. And although it was good, I have to say once I got to the end of it, it wasn’t as good as the narcotic-like burritos from Toronto. Despite that, I’ll definitely be grabbing another one the next time I’m back in Shanghai.

After my gluttony, I went to check out Nanjing Xi Lu, which if anything is Shanghai’s answer to Fifth Avenue. Unlike its American counterpart, Nanjing West is more about giant malls than flagship stores. This definitely makes a huge difference. I’m not into the whole luxury brand thing. I’d rather see nice and clever design than wrapping something up in a label. But on this street you could find every big label. The problem was, despite there being 3 or 4 big malls, they were all pretty much identical. I counted 5 Cerutti 1898 stores and they were all empty, on a Sunday afternoon. This was typical of China’s obsession with overbuilding things of excess. A city will have 2 supermarkets that are overflowing with people till close, but it will have 3 luxury boutique malls that are always empty. There was nothing special about any of the stores; they all carried the same expensive crap, which I assume was selected from the brands’ catalogues to fit the Chinese market’s conservative style. No exclusives, and no niche designers, and there were no high-end Shanghai designers to be found.

After my stroll, I met up with a friend at my hotel and we went to Southern Barbarian for Yunan food. This is a type of cuisine from the southwest, and it’s BBQ. The food was awesome; we had fried goat cheese (cheese in china, at a Chinese restaurant can only be a sign of the apocalypse), BBQ chicken, pork, fish and potato pancake. They also had my new favorite beer, Erdinger. Awesome meal and it only came to about 220rmb with 4 damn fine beers making up half of that.

After dinner we went around town for a walk drinking much warmer, ass-tastic beer. We managed to wobble our way to the Shanghai railway station, and then proceeded to navigate our way through the raw humanity to the subway station. The subway car’s AC didn’t seem to be able to handle the 40 thousand sweaty bodies crammed into it. I was secretly hoping someone might spontaneously explode and in doing so clear some breathing space. We made our way back down to Nanjing Dong Lu and tried to terrorize the touts that offered us watches, bags and girl “massajies”. Most of the time, as soon as they knew we could speak mandarin they left us alone. The guys who offered “massajies” were the best, because I would tell them in Chinese that I was gay*, and that I’d only accept a personal massage from them. Now I understand how China will have Olympics sprinters.

Eventually, we wound up at a bar/club called Windows, which is the typical cheap expat scene, but manages to stay busy late into the morning. We stayed till the sun rose. As we were leaving, we met a small consortium of beggars and their kids at the steps of the club. The girl my friend met foolishly gave 25rmb to one of the beggars (which I imagine is a small fortune to them), which was a stupid mistake, and made me question whether she was really from Shanghai. After this unholy act was committed, a dark portal opened up somewhere and literally brigades of hobos started appearing, and then chased us down the street as we tried frantically to hail a cab. The kids would latch themselves onto us and scream the only things they knew in English: “hello hello” and “money money”, which funny enough are the same things that come out of most Chinese girls mouth’s when they talk to foreigners. Luckily I had a spare holy hand grenade on me, which I used to properly disintegrate the unruly masses that had entrenched us, and then two cabs arrived in the nick of time. I passed out at the hotel and the next thing I knew I was back in the redneck village of Qingdao.

*To which I must absolutely ascertain to anyone who doesn’t know me that I am 110% straight, which should go without saying, but unfortunately from the number of unwanted advances I’ve had from men here, I must now go out of my way to make blatant.

Filed under: tourist shit