Happy National Day! Today is the start of one of the two Golden Weeks where the entire country closes up shop and gets out of town. There'll be fireworks in all of the big cities tonight. None for me though: I'll be on a train until the 3rd. Hotels and trains book out quickly at this time of year -- I'm leaving Shanghai two days later than planned because everything was gone -- but the hostel in Kunming has beds left, so I probably won't have to sleep in the forest. (It wouldn't be so bad: the bears are off visiting relatives in Chengdu.)
Shanghai's motto is Better City, Better Life. At the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall they set out their goals for making a Better City. It's good stuff: tons of green space, reclaiming polluted land, energy efficiency, public transportation, preserving historical buildings, making the place beautiful. They claim that they've already achieved a room-sized patch of green space per resident, and that they'd like to make it a house-sized amount instead. This seems ambitious to me, but it's true that it's a very green city. There are lovely big parks and public squares everywhere, and very many tiny ones too, squeezed in anywhere there's room. More often than not, the streets are tree-lined. You can usually find somewhere pleasant to sit. Good job, Shanghai Urban Planners.
Some author, Scott Adams maybe, once wrote about telling convincing lies to gullible people and seeing how far the story would travel. His example was "You know, they don't really eat Chinese food in China". In Shanghai, it's true! Sure, you can easily find noodles and dumplings and rice, but if you walk down a random street and eat at the first restaurant you pass, you'll be having Italian or Korean or Thai or hamburgers. It reminds me of my first evening in Kochi when Jonathan said "We're going to have what a Japanese family would traditionally eat on a Sunday evening. Indian food."
So Shanghai is beautiful, and its authorities put effort into making it a good place to live and it has good food and a cosmopolitan attitude and interesting people doing interesting things. The public transport is decent and the public spaces are filled with art. It's a fine city. I could not live here.
This is why: Shanghai is LOUD. It's really really loud. It is so freaking loud. Even the less busy streets are a cacophony of honking horns and screeching brakes and people bellowing over the sound of the traffic. The car's horn doesn't indicate that there's a problem here; it's just letting everyone else know where you are on the road. "HONNNNNNNK. I have a car!" "Parp! Parp! My scooter will overtake your car now!" "BEEEEEP! I'm riding my motorbike on the pavement!" "HONK! Still have a car!"
It's constant and it's piercing. Walking anywhere here gives me a headache and makes me crabby. I get irrationally furious about it all. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? I shout, not helping with the noise pollution (or the residents' opinions of the mental health of foreigners). If I was in charge, etc.
An Australian who had moved here told me that you do get used to it but that it takes a year or more.
So, Better City, Better Life, and it's a very good city indeed. But you'll want to bring earplugs.
