Wokay!

The Shanghai skyline has a side benefit. You can look up, look around, and find out if you’re walking in the right direction just by seeing where a skyscraper is in relation to you. The way ancient seamen would navigate by steering towards the pole star, you can reach your destination by walking towards or walking away from the Pearl TV Tower, or the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

Today was a day where cash was wasted. It’s one thing to spend money and get something out of it, but today I just got ripped off, or ended up with cash lost in translation.

I could ascribe it to not being experienced enough a traveler, but that’s no excuse. I’ve done enough travel to know where it is that there’s a high probability of being suckered.

I started out from my hotel in the midmorning. I travelled away from the river instead of to it, hoping that I would find something interesting and some place to eat.

I did find interesting things: gardens at the road intersections, and the fact that my street had it all: luxury hotels, machining workshops, convenience stores, hardware stores and real estate agents. As for places to eat, it had the entire range from mom-and-pop outfits to reasonably classy restaraunts.

A hard-to-break habit acquired in engineering college and uncertainity about how much I could afford to spend in the days to comedrove me into one of the mom-and-pop, or rather, mom-and-daughter-and-niece cafes. After a little back and forth with mom and daughter, English-speaking niece appeared. I settled on a set lunch and a banana shake. Not great, but not bad either, and it fills the stomach, which is a good deal for eighteen yuan.

After lunch, I hit the road again. I walked into what looked like a florist and discovered that it was actually the entrance to a much larger market- one so remarkable that it deserves an entire entry to itself.

I got back to the hotel, and checked my secondary mail account as an afterthought. I found that my dad had paid my credit card bill by check, not knowing that I had already paid it online. My credit limit, therefore, had increased by fifteen thousand rupees. Hooray! I could now spend more freely.

So now that I could spend more freely, what did I do? Walked into the cheapest restaraunt on the Bund for dinner. I said it was a hard habit to break, but it turned out to be an expensive one as well. The place made up for the low price by serving a horribly inedible meal- and charging fifteen yuan for a glass of green tea- a bottle of which costs two and a half in a supermarket.

Oh well. I resolved to stop skimping, and spending as much as I liked if it was worth it. And I started by asking a taxi to take me to Motel 168 near Dalian Road.

Ten minutes and fiteen yuan later, my cab pulled up at Motel 168, not near Dalian Road, but on Dalian Road. I finally understood why the reception hadn’t been able to find my reservation the previous day: they didn’t have it. My taxi driver on that day had taken me to the wrong Motel 168. This taxi driver had dropped me to the right one, but this was hardly any consolation, especially since all my luggage was in the wrong one.

Still, the wrong hotel had its advantages. It was seedy, yes: the primary clientele seemed to be Shanghai university students who had come there for an intimate afternoon; and single misfits like me got telephone calls in our rooms at midnight asking if we wanted massage. Still, it had undeniable advantages: free internet access in the lobby (albeit from a terminal running Windows 98 and IE5), it was on the same road as a market I might not have discovered otherwise, and joy of joys, its very limited selection of TV channels still had the Chinese feed of Star Movies, which comes with English subtitles. Chinese horror movies manage to outdo the Ramsay Brothers ones in sheer cheesiness. The motivation behind the entire plot of one was summed up by the subtitle: ‘Blood Monster raped and killed Mindy!’ In another one, an intrepid Chinese aunty destroys evil demons by photographing them and capturing their spirits on film. I also saw the ending of a Hong Kong ripoff of City of Angels. Mere words cannot describe it.

But coming back to my predicament of being on Dalian Road instead of near Dalian Road. Not wishing to get even more lost by trying to find tyhe direct route, I actually ended up walking the distance twice over: from Dalian Road to the Bund, and then back to my Motel 168 using the route I knew. Adada.

But I did reach it without further disaster, and after I got into bed I turned on Star Movies Chinese to watch Karate Girls, the fascinating story of a Chinese-pop girl group who go to a monastery to learn Karate. What a wonderful way to end the day.

To my slight disappointment, Maajorly Shadymax Arbit Fundaes is not considered important enough or subversive enough for the Chinese government to block.

I write this from a Public Internet Club. Detailed travelog and photos will be posted once I am back in India.