Thursday, 3 September 2009

I'm beginning this journal of my time in Shanghai at least one full day later than I anticipated.

That's mostly because our arrival in Shanghai was a day later than it should have been. We flew from Los Angeles to Shanghai via Tokyo, and missed our Tokyo connection. Wind shears from the remains of some typhoon were severe enough to prevent a normal landing in Tokyo. We diverted to nearby Nagoya for much needed refueling, and then made it back to Tokyo for a safe (if unsettling) landing in what were by then still quite strong winds. But we were 2½ hours late and the damage was done – our Shanghai flight had rather rudely left without us. The flight we were rebooked on wouldn't leave until the next day, so we were going to have to spend the night in Tokyo. Since the whole thing was put down to weather, our airline abandoned us pretty utterly. It would be up to us to find a hotel. We wouldn't have the benefit of our checked bags, as these had been checked through to Shanghai, and nothing could change that. We managed Japanese immigration and customs, found a sad little hotel near the airport and spent our stranded night there, frustrated but not defeated. The next day, we arose, donned the same clothes we had already spent nearly a day flying in, flew (uneventfully) to Shanghai – and immediately set about repairing our Chinese visas.

We had applied for multiple entry visas, but the Los Angeles Chinese consulate only saw fit to grant us single entry visas. As Miles needs to go to at least two conferences outside China during our time here (and I'd like to tag along on one – in Korea), we needed to get this fixed. As the first of these trips was, by the time we arrived, just 8 days away, and since it takes 5 working days to obtain replacement visas, there was little time to waste, so we got right onto this task. It all sounds quite straightforward. But nothing to do with Chinese bureaucracy is straightforward.

To begin, one needs letters of invitation. We already had these from Fudan University when we got our visas the first time, but we needed new ones, as the originals had been kept by the Los Angeles consulate. This involved a visit to room 703 in the east tower of the monumental twin-towered skyscraper built to commemorate the founding of Fudan. We had easily been able to see the twin towers from our 17th-floor hotel room when we checked in, so it seemed an easy affair to walk there. (It was actually a bit farther than it seemed – the better part of mile.) However monumental this building might be, and however clearly in use, it was nonetheless quite difficult to work out when we reached it just how one enters the building – since all the obvious entrances were closed, posted, in English: “gate shut”. We did finally find a strange little below-ground-level entrance, and a guard, who did not speak English, managed to make us understand the wisdom of rising to the 7th floor in an out-of-the-way elevator that looked more like it led to a chapter of a novel by Franz Kafka than to anywhere that would help us. Still, rise we did, and eventually we found room 703, and got our letters of invitation, and the various visa application forms we would need for our re-applications – but by this time it was really too late to attempt the visit to the visa office that day. We therefore retired to our cushy hotel for dinner and jet-lagged collapse.

Step two in the visa re-application process involves getting a “Registration of Temporary Residence” from our hotel. This should have been easy. But nothing to do with Chinese bureaucracy is easy. The very friendly and efficient woman we have had helping through the whole visa process attempted to do this for us, but in her haste, did not notice that they only gave her one form (for Miles), when we needed one for each of us, and that, though Miles' form was officially stamped, it was otherwise entirely blank. We noticed that there was no form for me, and remedied that the afternoon of our arrival, and that was when it actually became clear to us that Miles' form really was a forlorn cypher, compared to mine. Not only that, but we also realized that to fill it would apparently involve marking in some Chinese characters – not something we felt prepared to do. We had made a date for 8:00 am with our helper to set out for the visa office, but had to spend quite a time getting a form remade for Miles, since, apparently whoever does these forms only comes on duty at 9:00 am, and he had to be located and coaxed into action. At some point while remaking Miles' form, the hotel staff noticed that my form had not actually been properly filled in, so mine had to be remade as well. By the time we had two properly filled forms, it was nearly 9:00 am, and our hopes of getting to the visa office just as it opened at 9:00 am were fading.

Meanwhile, prompted by something I had wondered aloud about the previous day when I learned that the visa office would keep our passports for 5 working days – “if we have to give our passports to the visa office for an entire week while the visas are reissued, how can we actually rent an apartment, won't the landlord need at least one passport?” – Miles had spent some of his own quota of worrying time that night reasoning that it might also be difficult to change money without our passports, so we had to have our helper help us first change several thousand dollars worth of travelers checks into Chinese currency before we could go to the visa office. You see, we had been alerted that for a rental of only 4 months, a Chinese landlord would probably insist on all of the rent being paid in cash up front.

So instead of an early trip to the visa office, we made our way to the nearest office of the Bank of China. And waited for it to open. (Nothing in China opens before 9:00 am.) And continued to wait for a teller, despite getting a very nice number on entry to the bank – just 5th in line – those customers ahead of us taking endless time with whatever it is they were doing. And then waited while the teller attempted to get approval for such a large exchange as we were making, using a useless cordless telephone that might as well have been been a tin can with string, and then using a more reliable method we might refer to as “sneakernet”. At length we were able to accomplish our exchange and left the bank with a several inches thick wad of Chinese currency. Needless to say, we high-tailed it back to the hotel to put said cash wad into the room safe!

Finally, we were ready to headed off to the visa office. Having meant to arrive there at 9:00 am, it was somewhat frustrating only to arrive there around 11:00 am, but we did arrive there (after a lurching taxi ride – but on the basis of those taxi rides I've had so far, I'm concluding that most of these are of the lurching variety). The number we got at the visa office was translated to us as “at least two hours wait”, so our helper recommended that we try an alternative office about 20 minutes away by another lurching taxi. It was much newer, and should have much shorter lines. It did, indeed, have short lines – there was absolutely no one there but us as we got there. But we got no joy there. The officials there seemed not to know the first thing about the process for doing what we needed to do. Several phone calls by our helper back to her office – and several sometimes heated exchanges between her and the officials present, or her and whoever she was speaking with on the phone eventually established the utter futility of attempting anything further at the new office, so we went back to the old visa office (yet another lurching taxi ride). We were steeled to begin our wait for a teller all over again, but our helper proved to have been cleverer than even she realized. I innocently speculated whether if we showed up with our orginial number chit we could use it if the number hadn't been called yet. Our helper then frantically began digging through her little bag for the chit. After a minute or two of examining various impostors, the real chit was located! It turned out that we only had to wait about 20 minutes before we were served when we got back to the old visa office. Another 20 minutes later, we were bidding a wistful goodbye to our passports in hopes of seeing them a week hence – with the new multiple entry visas we need. The new visas will cost us “only” around $150 each, which is a bargain compared to what the first ones cost (more than $200 each). That is, if we actually do see them when we are supposed to, a bit less than a week from now, at 9:00 am on Wednesday, 9 September – the very day Miles is supposed to fly to Manila for a conference.

But enough about visas!

Having had several lurching taxi rides by now, I've gotten to glimpse at least a portion of Shanghai through the framing of a lurching taxi window. And the most obvious first impression is just how utterly vast this city is, and how filled with contrasts – new against old, rich against poor. Close up, there isn't much of it that is beautiful, in the way that, say, an alpine town in Europe might be. Close up, it is quite clear that whatever Shanghai is going through, it is going through it way too fast to be all that much concerned to create that sort of beauty. Besides, that may be out of character for China (or at least Shanghai). From a certain distance, though, most parts of the city clearly make up in character what they may lack in aesthetic beauty. This is probably clearest in the financial district, which is filled with really jaw droppingly wild post modern skyscrapers that prove that someone somewhere here has a really playful sense of architectural humor.

I'll close this already quite long post with just one other observation: If I had to “locate” what it's like to be out of doors (and, hence, out of the reach of air conditioning) in Shanghai in early September, using the ancient system of elements, there is no doubt in my mind – I would have to choose a combination of fire and water. Call it steam. It's not actually all that hot. It just seems that way because the humidity is so high.

So, there you have it. Yours steamily (with Miles) will now go off and get to work on the next steps required to get our life here going – finding an apartment, getting sim cards from a local (and therefore cheap) cell phone provider for our spare phones, etc.