Chunjie (the Chinese new year)is rapidly approaching here, and rather auspiciously the actual Lunar apogee falls on St Valentine’s day this year.
So it's a tender time for the millions of cross-country reunions between families ,friends and lovers.
The scale of these takes many forms but one thing for sure is most Chinese will attempt to return to their ancestral homes for this special holiday.
This causes immense but curiously good natured strain on the country’s transport services.
The state sponsored airlines are relatively easy anytime of year, but prices are dropped on many other services and gargantuan queues start to form.
Canton(Guangzhou)’s main railway station managed to precariously hold over 500,000 stranded passengers in 2007.
Amazingly, considering the scope of temporary migration(mainly from the big eastern cities into rural areas), most journeys run pretty smoothly.
Nanchang has had a bullet train for a few years now, it kind of resembles a laughing white swan from space but it's fast, clean, quiet, spacious and cheap, with a fairly refined service.
I can leave my apartment in the city centre and be in Shanghai in five hours.
It’s so pleasant that I don't even compare to the hideous uncertainty of a British train journey.
Confuscian harmony and peace is often on display here during such frenzied travel periods, road rage could be termed road ‘love’ here, to lose one’s temper and bluster is a loss of face - your face that is.
Accidents are a common occurence on the roads, but many are low speed and minor.
No rules that can be understood by mortal minds seem to prevail on the roads, and most foreigners are actively discouraged from driving by tight bureaucracy and the hurdle of a test paper in Chinese.
Like many things this can be overcome with cash and a good deal of guanxi (business relationship).
Overall, flying seems to be the easiest way to travel here followed by the growing number of bullet trains routes.
Shanghai is a top destination for ex pats during Chunjie. It is central, wealthy and displays openly its western affiliations, styles and tastes.
It's a good pick me up to be in Hongqiao and walking through a neighbourhood that could be Blackwell or Mowden or any affluent post war residence.
Shanghai is full of many strange wonders. A trip to Ikea will reward you with the sight of real Chinese shoppers making themselves at home in the bedroom displays, whole families fast asleep in the middle of the afternoon, snoring and stirring without a care in the world. Test driving the mattresses.
The defunct abode of snobbery that comprised the British Shanghai Club has stood empty for a number of years now, it’s ghostly authentic inside. Pudong is beginning to loom like another Hong Kong Island over the older parts of the city.
The Bund resembles Liverpool’s Albert Dock area for some reason, with similar granite mantels of Victorian grandeur facing a low expanse of silvery water. Even the small lighthouse is similar to the one on Merseyside.
Even some of the gangsters are returning, the odd foreigner trying to get in on the game, making the headlines in Shanghai papers by being easily caught in police entrapments.
Shanghai now has a sedate excitement neither American or European in character, but nothing in comparison to its bad old good days.
As one 19th century missionary quipped ‘Shanghai is an apology by God for Sodom and Gomorrah.'
Another said ’Forty-eight storey buildings built on 24 storeys of hell.'
But the buildings where gangsters once installed bulletproof elevators and the average European was a man like Herman Elbmann ‘monkey expert,narcotics dealer and friend of Errol Flynn’ still stand and speak of a lost age of the twenties and thirties.
When the huge pan-city wide Green gang battled it out with the communists(symbolically corrupt capitalism and worker Bolshevikism), they fought to control the destiny of a torn up city, eventually the Reds prevailed and they more or less reinvented the place after letting it go to seed for almost 30 years.
It's probably the most peaceful giant city you'll ever visit now, and a great destination for homesick westerners. But beware the Guinness is now at £6.50 and rising!
Capitalism is creeping back.
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