Shanghaied

Shanghai Cityscape

The first thing you need to know in Shanghai is that when you're in the old quarter (which the locals refer to, hilariously, as "Chinatown") and someone sticks the pelt of an (undoubtedly) endangered animal in your face, do not shriek "no" and recoil in horror and sadness. Because what will happen is the peddlers will laugh, and then they will follow you through the narrow alleys making "woof-woof" noises behind you.

Also, sea cucumber is served in a tasty soy sauce, but it still has the consistency of boogers. This dovetailed nicely with my very first vision stepping out of the fabulous Pudong airport, when my eyes landed on a man picking his nose and then carefully examining his find.

This makes Shanghai sound bad, and it's not. Polluted, yes. The air quality is as bad as Houston's. Although our guide assured me that this was only "haze," I know smog when I taste it. But the mist only added to the impression that I was on another planet, an otherworldly capital filled with towering spires and Star Wars-worthy skyscrapers. They take modernism seriously here, and the architects have run amok with turrets and domes and strange, fantastic structures. The Orient Pearl Tower could have been created by giants playing with jeweled Tinker-Toys, and our cantilevered hotel (the Grand Hyatt) is the highest in the world. Old still rubs against new, though, and much of the scaffolding shielding the ongoing construction is made of bamboo.

Speaking of Houston, Shanghai homeboy Yao Ming is in town for an exhibition game between his Rockets and the Sacramento Kings. So the residents are seeing a few foreigners this week, but the black guy (fellow journalist David Jones) and the blonde still got loads of looks from the locals.

I'm here on assignment for Global Traveler as a guest of the PR team from Korean Air, who're promoting their new flights from Seoul to Shanghai. Hurtling over the Pacific, I began to regret my constant reliance on the phrase "shot down like a Korean airliner" and resolve never to use it again. Really.

Press trip aside, the first job of a hack is to give the flacks the slip, so I set out on my own after lunch. In the taxi, I consult my handy Mandarin phrasebook and attempt to say "nice view" to the driver. God only knows what came out of my mouth, but it caused the cabbie to swerve across two lanes of traffic as he looked back at me with an expression of what can only be described as utter horror. From now on, it's English and only English for me, and after an afternoon of shopping I'm happy to return to the bosom of the group. Some things they just don't teach you in Arkansas, and negotiating a city of 15 million Chinese people is one of them. And that was before they started barking at me.