Results tagged “shanghairailwaystation”

The public toilet outside the Shanghai Railway Station costs RMB1 per visit and is said to earn RMB100 million each year. To see whether there is truth to this rumour, Steward Du stood outside the toilet for a good five minutes to count the number of people entering the toilet and did all the math for us.

One of the main perks of moving to China is the relatively low cost of living. If any expats tell you otherwise, they're lying. The flip side is that it can be incredibly frustrating when you come across certain items that cost the same or more than you would normally pay in other countries. Beer and alcohol, particularly at bars and mid/high-range restaurants, immediately come to mind as do computers, name brand electronics, and cheese. One of the biggest disappointments, though, has been what seems to be the incredibly high cost of prescription glasses. We've seen them range anywhere from 500 to several thousand kuai, which seems a little fishy when every other person wears them in this country.

As Shanghai welcomes Chinese New Year for the first time in decades with a dash of snow, we trawl Flickr for pictures that best capture the essence of this week-long (or to be precise, 15 days' worth of) festive cheer filled with red firecracker sprinklings and endless fireworks.

There has been plenty of criticism leveled at the Shanghai subway system, both on Shanghaiist and elsewhere, for things that could be better about it: it closes too early, the interchanges take too long, it's too crowded and too hot/cold, it doesn't reach XXX place, etc. If you fancy yourself on optimistic person, though, you know that one way to change the negatives into positives is to change your complaints into things you're looking forward to.

Two bits of transportation news from random sources:

We have discussed Shanghai's new bullet trains before, and last week we actually had a chance to ride one. Condensed review: We like.

We were leafing through the latest City Weekend* over breakfast this morning when we realized we forgot to tell you something very important: We love Southern Barbarian (南蛮子). It's a Yunnan restaurant that opened in the fall (we have mentioned it briefly twice before). It is easily one of our favorite restaurants in the city, Chinese or non-Chinese. The food is fantastic — tasty and plentiful — and it is cheap (especially when compared to another Yunnan restaurant that opened recently). An added bonus is that Feng Jianwen, the owner (yes, he's from Yunnan), is a lover of beer — the result is the best selection of bottled beers we have ever seen at a Chinese restaurant. There's Hoegaarden, Chimay, Coopers (Sparkling Ale and Best Extra Stout), Leffe and a bunch of others. They are priced reasonably, too. Hoegaardens are 28 kuai; Coopers are less than that. Or you can always just get a tall bottle of Suntory for 6 kuai — they have that, too.

Browsing the Ditiezu.com (Subway-ers) BBS, we came across some interesting tidbits:

We swear we heard the PA system announce yesterday that we were at Jinjiang Park metro stop, when we knew we were at Huangpi Nan Lu (and so did everyone else — lots of confused faces). We assumed the metro just got its sound files mixed up ... but could it have been someone's mobile phone ringtone?

We've got one in our closet. Should we post it on TaoBao?

Shanghaiist wound the clock back a few years yesterday afternoon at the New Jiangwan City SMP Skate Park (the biggest in the world!) watching a scarily young posse of locals and laowai get around a massive series of concrete bowls and ramps on skateboards, inline skates, BMXs, motorbikes and scooters. There were plenty of t-shirts with statements, lots of spills, some impressive frontside-180-nosegrind-to-fakies, and far too many members of the local constabulary considering the modest size of the crowd.

The two photos above are from Shanghai. The second, we think, is Shanghai Railway Station. Barbieri's work comes to our city as part of the Shanghai Biennale and the Year of Italy in China. More Biennale events are listed here.

If the only railway station waiting room you’re accustomed to in China is the grimy, smoky one with endless waves of humanity sitting on those red, white and blue striped bags of live produce, then you’re going to enjoy the South Shanghai Railway Station for a change. We were fortunate enough to pass through the gleaming, spotless and modern facility last night on our way back from Hangzhou (RMB 44 for soft seat; 1 hour 50 minutes). It’s everything that Pudong Airport is not.

We doubt they mean God. Remember what we said a week ago about female-only cabins on trains that run between Shanghai and Beijing? Well, forget everything we told you. That plan has been derailed:

Shanghaiist feels lucky that we will stay home for Spring Festival after reading this Sohu report (in Chinese) about the annual holiday transportation peak between January 14 and February 22. Ticket prices for trains, buses and boats are up 20-100 percent during this season and everything is going to packed, uncomfortably packed, like can't fight your way to to the toilet packed (and then if you finally make it to the toilet, you'll wish you didn't -- trust us).

The good news is this:

Shanghaiist’s worst travel experience ever was on a 15-hour “sleeper bus” (ha!) from southern Shandong Province back to Shanghai. Packed to the rafters, Arctic January temperatures, layers of ice on broken windows, an ancient, festering interior dotted with rusty metal benches and the occasional sodden blanket (actual interior, pictured), black smoke chundering out of the engine console inside the vehicle, a desperate need to urinate for the second half of the trip and a Soup Nazi of a driver who couldn’t even be bribed to stop. To make matters worse, we joyously spied the night lights of the Oriental Pearl Tower in the disorientating haze of bladder pain and thought the horror was over, only to discover it was a miniature of the Pearl Tower located about 200 kilometres northwest of the city and we still had a four-hour crawl left to go.

Today is International Anti-Drugs Day, and China started the festivities two days early. China celebrated like only China can on Friday -- by executing lots and lots of criminals. (China executed some 5,000 people last year -- more than 91 percent of the world total -- and those are are just the executions we know about.)