My blog

At noon I was scheduled to fly to Shanghai, or as they say about China's largest metropolis with a population of twenty million - the "Pearl of the Orient".
I knew that in China there might be problems with accessing some websites on the Internet, so I quickly installed the necessary software at the Seoul airport to cheat the "great firewall of China" so that I could use Facebook, Google and other useful travel applications there. Just in case, I installed two tools.
When I landed, I started by exchanging money and buying a SIM card. Then I sat down at Starbucks to check how the internet worked. And indeed: facebook.com – didn’t work, google.com – didn’t work, maps.google.com – didn’t work. How to live here? Polish websites generally open. But how to search for anything here, or find your way to the hotel?
However, I was prepared for this situation and with a cunning smile I launched my sabotage software installed in Seoul.
It didn't work, though. So I launched the second tool - it didn't work either. I broke out in a cold sweat and knew I was done for. There's nothing you can do about it here, because all the servers with such software are blocked here - you can't download anything. I won't write any more posts, and what's worse, I'll have trouble finding the hotel...
At the information desk – they spoke English, fortunately – I asked for a subway map and the nearest station to my hotel. It turned out to be only 600 meters away. I asked the guy to give me the address of a Chinese map – the equivalent of maps.google.com. It's called baidu.com. The problem is that it's in Chinese, with no English version – so no big deal.
After an hour and a half I arrived at my destination, I left my metro station and started to wonder how to find a hotel 600 meters away from where I was standing. Attempts to talk to policemen and various people – to no avail. I thought I would take a taxi and maybe I would find a taxi driver who understood European letters. Fortunately I remembered that before leaving I had installed a navigation app on my phone with maps of China and that saved me. I reached the hotel.
The hotel turned out to be located in the heart of the central Huangpu district, glued to the main pedestrian street in the shopping district. The hotel has two entrances. To wait, I entered it through the southern entrance, and when I went out into the city in search of dinner, I went out through the northern entrance and then I got a shock - right outside the hotel door I fell into some incredibly fast-flowing river of people, flowing along a long pedestrian street, intersected every now and then by intersections, where soldiers stood forming lines to help people find their way in this flood.
My first impression of Shanghai: a large, overwhelming city, a bit un-Chinese, modern, well-kept and colorful, but when you go a bit from the center - it gets ugly and starts to smell bad. People on the promenade are not as well-kept and not as dressed as in Seoul. At least half of them look like they came from out of town for a Sunday walk in their best clothes.
I didn't find a suitable place for dinner, so I went back to the hotel restaurant. It was supposed to be elegant, but it reminded me a bit of the Polish People's Republic: I ordered duck, but it turned out that it was already finished, I got a warm beer, and a glass with it only after some time, and the ordered rice never arrived. In the end, I ate fish - they don't specify the type of fish here - fish is simply fish, ribs, which turned out to be bacon, pak choi with soy sauce and cookies for dessert. Quite good, but I didn't give it five stars.

For breakfast, I had a latte and a Caesar salad at the elegant, art deco Peace Hotel, an impressive waterfront row of Victorian buildings built by the British, who settled in Shanghai along with other Europeans after the Chinese lost the Opium War and signed a treaty that allowed foreigners to export tea without restriction from China in exchange for opium imported from India.
In general, I have the impression that the most beautiful things you can see in Asia – apart from nature, of course – were either built, designed, or imported by the British or the French.
After a brief stroll through this British enclave, I took a kitschy train that runs through a viewing tunnel under the Huangpu River to a modern high-rise district. The five-minute ride involves watching S-curves projected onto walls.
Then I climbed up the Orient Pearl TV Tower, Shanghai's trademark, which has eleven pearl balls. It wasn't exactly a good investment of time, though - two hours in line and ten minutes of watching. But at least I ate vanilla ice cream on the sky terrace, which was my lunch today.
After dinner I decided to take a look at the old town and take a taxi there. Unfortunately, my specialist software to bypass the Chinese firewall only works on my laptop, which I left at the hotel, so I couldn't access Google Maps on my phone, which shows the names of places in both Chinese and English, and three taxi drivers to whom I showed a Polish, book-based guide with a map with names in English did not understand where I wanted to go at all. The passers-by whom I asked for help to explain to the taxi driver where to go either did not know English - it is really poor here - or could not decipher the English name.
So I had to go back to my hotel and ask the concierge for help – he had trouble too, but he identified the place somehow. I asked him to write the name of the place down in Chinese on a piece of paper and only then could I tell the taxi driver where I wanted to go. It was also a good thing I had made provisions for dinner and asked the concierge to also write down the name of the restaurant I had chosen for dinner.
The old town turned out to be not that old at all, but it was worth wandering around its streets.
I chose the restaurant for tonight's dinner from TripAdvisor – fortunately, the Chinese don't block this site, but what good is it if it doesn't provide addresses in English.
The restaurant specialized in steamed dumplings. Another attraction was the open kitchen – you could see the technique of rolling and wrapping the dough.
I ordered the dumpling soup with pork and shrimp and the dumplings with crab and pork. I have to admit that it was delicious. A complete rehabilitator for yesterday's not-so-great food.
Next to me sat a lonely German woman, about my age, who watched in horror as plates of food were brought in, which she had ordered herself. She couldn't resist one of the plates and asked me to help her. I couldn't say no to my neighbor and for some time I reached for food from two tables.
As I was leaving the pub, I exchanged a few words with a young Chinese woman who was standing outside the restaurant and happened to know English. It was a warm, pleasant evening and quite early – ideal conditions for a bike ride. When I shared my thoughts on this with the Chinese woman, she offered me a bike – not hers, but a city bike.
As it turns out, they have an amazing bike system here – there are supposedly ten million bikes in Shanghai. However, there are no bases to which you have to return the bike when you’re done riding. When you’re done riding – for one yuan, or less than a złoty per hour – you simply lock the wheels and leave it wherever you want. And when you want to take the bike, you enter its ID online and receive a four-digit code to unlock it (you have to be registered in advance, of course) – you’re charged for the number of hours it takes to lock the bike again.
So, taking advantage of the Chinese woman's kindness, I took a city bike. She warned me that my hotel was quite far away and I might not make it there. I assured her that I had an excellent sense of direction and set off in the direction she had indicated.
When, after two hours of riding, exposing the Chinese woman to a two-yuan charge, I saw the pub from which I had started again, I had no choice - I left my bike and decided to return to the hotel by taxi. Which of course was not easy, because I did not have the name of my hotel written down in Chinese anywhere.

Shanghai Railway Station is huge. There is an X-ray check at every entrance, and you can only enter the platform with a valid ticket fifteen minutes before the train departs.
My train to Beijing traveled three hundred kilometers an hour, stopped every hundred kilometers, and covered the 1,300-kilometer route in less than six hours.
The main landscape features along the way are green hills and concrete cities with soaring residential skyscrapers.
Apart from the speed, slightly larger seats (in first class) and the view from the window – the experience is like in our Pendolino.
Beijing, at first glance, seems like a city with fewer people and more space than Shanghai. There are almost no skyscrapers here, and you rarely see street food. When you walk along these wide avenues, along which monumental, post-socialist buildings have been built, songs of praise to the working people, the party and the leader come to mind. And as soon as you go down the side streets, it immediately becomes a bit of a festival – like a Chinese bazaar near Łódź. And there are plenty of offers to buy a watch or a “massage lady” from men in too-short trousers and non-binding offers to show the city “just the two of you” from young and not particularly attractive women.
I quickly became hungry – I hadn’t had anything in my mouth since the station Whopper for breakfast, so on TripAdvisor I found a restaurant with “Roasted Duck” in its name that had the most good reviews.
On Google Maps, which only works on my hotel laptop, I checked that the restaurant was only twelve hundred meters from my hotel. Still, it wasn't easy to find it. Luckily, a young Chinese woman who knew English helped me. She took me to my dinner, telling me in broken English what I should eat and see in Beijing and warning me that I would have to wait a while for my dinner.
And indeed, there were many people waiting for a table in front of the pub, and waiters were bringing drinks to those waiting. Every now and then, another number was read out over the loudspeaker – I got 82, just as the number 62 came in, which, as it turned out, meant an hour and a half of waiting.
I have to say it was worth it though – there is no better recommendation for a restaurant than a queue. The duck was delicious, and before it a fantastic sample of Beijing cuisine delicacies – I will definitely come back here.
My hotel turned out to be located between Tiananmen Square and a large shopping mall, so after dinner I took a walk: first along the shopping street, where in a side street they were selling the kind of delicacies I wouldn't touch for any money—certainly in this form—and then along the honorary box from which the communists greet the nation in Tiananmen Square.

Right after my breakfast of dumplings, I set out to explore Beijing and immediately started enjoying the most important things they have here.
I walked around the Tiananmen Square – it takes a few kilometers because it's so huge. Unfortunately, the mausoleum of Secretary Mao was closed for some unknown reason, which is easy to tell from the fact that there was no queue.
Instead, I stood in the place where the Great Leader proclaimed the People's Republic of China in 1949 and for years addressed the working people. I even waved my hand to those gathered in the square, but it probably did not meet with a significant response.
Finally, with great emotion, I touched the greatest relic of the socialist state, the round, gilded emblem with five stars – like on the Chinese flag, which had hung in the square for twenty years and encouraged the masses to fight, until the Western, imperialist winds had eroded its gilding.
The Gate of Heavenly Peace, from which Mao watched the parades, is also the entrance to the Forbidden City, where I headed next. Forbidden because for centuries, apart from the empress, the emperor, his concubines, officials and eunuchs, no one had been allowed to enter.
The city is – like everything here – huge. I hired a Polish-speaking guide for the tour, who you put in your ear. It is really nice to listen to all these imperial stories in your native language.
One of the last emperors of the Qing dynasty fathered a child with his concubine who had category number six. Concubines had categories from one to eight, which was primarily related to the distance of the concubine's bed from the emperor's bed. The birth of a child caused the girl to advance to category three, and the emperor designated their common child as his successor, writing this in his secret will. Since he did not live long, his six-year-old offspring became the new emperor, and the empire was de facto run by his mother, called the "empress from behind the curtain."
Then I walked around Coal Hill, Jingahen Park, Beihai Park. Basically, I saw most of what Beijing has to offer tourists today.
After the sightseeing and twenty thousand steps, I had gone a long way from the hotel, so I started to think about how to get a bike here. There are plenty of bikes here and all of them, like in Shanghai, in the system of "take where you want, leave where you can". However, I couldn't install the app to download bikes - because the Google store was blocked (by the way, I wonder how they download apps for Android here). Besides, the app would probably be in Chinese anyway.
I tried to talk to people so they could unlock my bike for a few yuan – but I didn’t come across anyone who understood me. Then suddenly I looked, and among the million bikes standing next to me, one was unlocked and ready to ride. So I had a bike.
After a few kilometers I decided to have a beer. In Beijing it is not easy to find a pub where you can drink beer that is cold, served in a mug and is not Chinese piss (they drink very watered down beers here). And I did not find such a pub.
I stopped at a café, where I got a bottle of cold piss and sat down near the exit to watch through the glass to see if my unlocked bike was safe. During that time, while I was drinking beer – and it was a small bottle – I had to fight off four smart alecks who wanted to steal my bike.
For dinner I decided to go to an elegant place, according to TripAdvisor. And I have to say, considering that everything I write here is probably analyzed by Big Brother, that they are supposedly Chinese, but they know how to make exquisite food. A bit worse with the service - but you can't have everything, right?
I ate foie gras in truffle sauce, a soup of stewed morels, peas and thorny sedge seeds, four fried delicacies (chicken breast, duck breast, bamboo shoots, duck gizzards), triple-stuffed dumplings (pig, shrimp, and something else) and strawberries on ice. A fairy tale.

As the Chinese proverb says, "A man who has not been to the Great Wall of China cannot be a hero." Well, I would like to announce that I am a hero today.
There are six sections of the Great Wall of China near Beijing that are suitable for sightseeing. I chose Badaling. It is the closest to Beijing, fifty miles away, and offers the best views, but it is visited by tens of millions of tourists a year.
It was too late for an organized tour, because you have to book in advance, so I had to take public transport. I read online that the fastest connection would be a bus, which leaves from a bus station two kilometers from my hotel and gets there in less than two hours.
So I set my alarm for seven and was already sitting on the bus at eight-thirty. As soon as it started moving, I realized that I hadn’t bought a bus ticket for the Beijing–Badaling line, as I had thought at the ticket office, but a guided tour of the Great Wall of China.
The tour guide, the entire way there and back, didn't let us doze off for a moment and chattered away through a megaphone to the forty Chinese people with whom I was on this trip, the only foreigner.
The ticket included a stop halfway down the road at a greenstone jewelry factory, where I was cajoled for an hour into buying a brooch, bracelet, pendant, or ring at incredibly bargain prices. Then, also included in the ticket, lunch at a thousand-seater restaurant, where each bus sat at a single table so tightly packed that it looked like everyone was eating from the same plate.
I politely thanked them for the shared meal and bought myself a watermelon and banana before entering this temple of consumption.
If it weren’t for the omnipresent smog and the zillion people, walking along the wall would be a real pleasure. The wall, built over seventeen centuries, is impressive, although the five-kilometer stretch visible in Badaling is actually a replica of a fifteenth-century structure. Despite this, it’s a pleasure to climb China’s greatest attraction.
Every hundred meters or so on the wall there are watchtowers, which in ancient times were observation points and when an enemy appeared, thanks to signals in the form of fire - at night - and smoke - during the day, in a few moments information about it could appear hundreds of kilometers away - despite this, the Great Wall never stopped real invaders from plundering China.
After the trip out of town, there was only enough time for a short walk around Beijing, and for dinner I went to a nice restaurant with very good service, but food that wasn't amazing. I ate: drunken chicken (chicken in wine) - that was actually very good, sturgeon with asparagus - that was quite good and abalone noodle (the English call it abalone, and the Germans call it sea ear) with bean shoots and shrimp roe - and that was so-so: it was hard to see the snail and roe in this dish, and besides, noodles are not food.

I started the last, 30th day of my Asian trip with noodle soup at the hotel restaurant.
Then a visit to the National Museum, after which nothing will be the same – it is hard to imagine anything larger than the building of this museum adjacent to Tiananmen Square.
And then I indulged in what every traveler usually does on the last day of their trip – shopping for gifts. Unfortunately, this is very difficult here, because the choice is limited to goods available in Wólka Kosowska near Warsaw.
First I took the subway to China's largest antique market and browsed the stalls, and when I came back I went into every shop around Tiananmen Square.
For my farewell dinner I had duck at my favourite restaurant – when I was leaving the waiter asked what time he could expect me tomorrow. I think Peking duck is the best legacy that the Chinese leave to the world.
And some less fun things include: smog, X-rays at the entrance to every metro station, spitting in the streets, document checks at the entrance to a major intersection, and cuts instead of diapers in the pants of toddlers of diaper-wearing age to make them less of a hassle.
It's a shame that this journey of mine is ending. But more than regretting, I can't wait to see and hug those who are - I hope - still waiting for me in Poland.
It was a long, albeit very short month alone. Probably unbearable if I didn't like myself. My dilemmas here were whether to order a whole duck or a half and what to include in my daily post. I had plenty of time to get things out of my head and make room for new things. I saw and tasted a lot here. And I warn you: I won't hesitate to tell you all about it in detail when I get back.
See you in Poland.