walks in shanghai

walks in shanghai

Shanghai seems unreal when you fly up to it by plane.

This feeling does not come close when flying to New York, Berlin, Delhi, Paris, London, Warsaw, Havana, Vienna, Rome, Belgrade or Moscow.

Shanghai skyscrapers, standing on the bend of the Huangpu River, even from the height of the flight seem to be buildings of a different civilization.

What is that group of eiffel towers over there? I asked a simple question to the person who met me.

It turned out that these buildings are one and a half to two times taller than the Eiffel Tower.

Moreover, outbuildings. As a rule, not far from any world airport, you can see extensive economic facilities: some kind of hangars, tracks, warehouses. The difference is that the economic facilities that can be observed at the Shanghai airport do not end up to the very horizon. I have no idea what their purpose is and how many people work there, but in terms of spread and scope, it is a natural city.

The conclusion immediately suggested itself: in this country they know how to work on an unusual scale for us, and there is someone to do all this work.

Bottom view

Another surprise: in Shanghai, there are not as many people on the streets as I imagined - especially after visiting India.

I sincerely thought that even in this Chinese city darkness, darkness and darkness were wandering, and their movement was aimless and stormy.

No matter how. While we were driving forty minutes from the airport to the hotel, I saw no more than ten Chinese people on the streets. The lobby of the hotel was also empty, there were no forty porters who did not know what to do with them.

I changed and we immediately went for a walk. In addition to the actual tourist areas, no crowds of people have been found anywhere. I have no idea where all these Chinese live - there are 20 million people living in Shanghai, after all, but they definitely don't walk back and forth on the streets.

Moreover, they were not found even during rush hour. When, in theory, everyone should go home from work! Let not 20 million, but at least 10 million should return home at the end of the working day, huh?

But traffic jams there - at least in our understanding - are not at all. We traveled all over the city by taxi, including during the critical time by Moscow standards from 16.00 to 22.00, and did not stop anywhere. Several times we slowed down a bit. This is what they call "plugs".

Lower

Then I expressed a desire to ride the Shanghai subway, again at rush hour.

The subway was also quite free. There was almost always a place to sit down. The main audience in the subway are young people.

Everything - I emphasize, without exception everything! - Well dressed. All have calm faces. In Russia, this is called: "confident in their future." Exactly.

They sit, stand and look at their iPhones. Someone is reading, someone is watching a movie, someone is texting and smiling. Pitch fatigue from the work done during the day on the faces was not reflected. No, God forbid, rudeness, no tension - everything is sterile and tactful.

I got to China from France - with a two-day stopover home, in Nizhny Novgorod.

So, the French metro, compared to the Chinese one, is a quiet horror. In Paris, it is dirty, gloomy, heavy-smelling, full of destructive personalities, pensive French contemplating something like suicide, terrible beggars collecting alms, and obviously not very well settled in new places migrants - there is generally an overabundance of such good things there.

I told my new Russian Chinese comrades about this.

One of them calmly replied:

Shanghai is a European city.

- What about Paris? I laughed.

“And Paris is no longer a European city,” he replied, still calmly.

And one more important detail. The subway, like everything else in Shanghai, is very clean.

Side view

“You can’t say that they don’t litter here,” my new Russian friend with a Chinese residence permit told me, “they just clean up here.

The city is close to perfect order. It is no less clean here than, for example, in the nicest Austrian or German towns, where, as you know, even if you wander barefoot through the streets, your heels will only become cleaner.

Tellingly, I never saw any cleaners in Shanghai. Apparently, working Chinese know how to be inconspicuous. Moreover, for several days I did not meet a single policeman.

My Russian Chinese acquaintances unanimously stated that this is a very calm city. “To get into someone else's pocket, of course, is not a problem in Shanghai either, but you can move around the city quite calmly here. If a young girl is walking along a dark street and a drunken company is meeting her, the most serious thing she can hear is: “Hi, miss, how are you?” Nobody will ever touch her."

The Shanghai Chinese are generally very nice and smiling - in fact, like Europeans. Or, if you like, the ideal Europeans.

Eyes to eyes

Well, and then - faces.

My childish notion that all Chinese are the same soon began to dissipate. It's not that I started guessing those Chinese that I accidentally saw yesterday from the window of a taxi in another area - it didn't get to that point, but, hell, they are really different. Opening!

Moreover, they are no longer small. They are growing! Of course, in general, we, a group of brave Russian guys, were higher than the bulk of the Chinese. But quite often I came across Chinese guys taller than me, either by half a head, or even by a head.

- Nutrition! my friends told me. - They have been eating normally for twenty years - so they grew up!

Looking at the Chinese girls, I mentally added: "... food and ... cosmetics."

And clothes. Chinese women look great and dress beautifully. Thank God, not in the European-American manner (in all sorts of overalls, burlap, T-shirts and grandmother's jackets - just so as not to become an object of sexual interest), but exactly the opposite - like in our country or somewhere in Ukraine ...

... they dress beautifully and joyfully carry their clothes.

They also grew up. Here and there, Chinese women passed on ideally beautiful, almost already long legs.

There are a lot of beautiful Chinese women. In percentage terms, it is still smaller than Muscovites or Kievans, but judging by the local MTV, they will soon catch up with us both in quality and quantity.

MTV

In every country in the world, I always watch the local MTV.

Firstly, as you already understood, there you can reveal how beautiful people live in this particular country. I recorded Chinese women on the streets, but young singing Chinese, although this is not our part, are also simply beautiful.

Soon the representatives of the Chinese people will win not only in all sports, but also in all beauty contests.

…Secondly, by the level of pop music, one can immediately assess the average aesthetic taste of a particular nationality.

It must be said that Chinese pop music actually has no Chinese specifics. The melody of most of the songs is unified European. There are no memorable melodies at all, apparently, they have not yet learned how to make music “like in the West”. However, everything is played and mixed, as a rule, flawlessly - no, you know, amateur performances.

In short, Chinese MTV is worse than, say, Austrian, but better than Polish.

Funnily enough, if they sing in Chinese, there are often subtitles at the bottom of the screen. As you know, the Chinese language has a system of tones, which, when singing, especially pop songs made in the European style, is almost inevitably lost - as a result, the Chinese themselves cannot understand their own songs. And probably not necessary.

As if we can understand our songs.

About women and men

The white man is no longer a demigod in China.

Back in the early 90s, a person from Russia was presented as a messenger of another race - certainly more successful. Today, my beautiful-looking young Russian comrades living in China told me not without sadness, the situation is no longer the same. And it looks like it will never be the same again.

“You come to a nightclub,” says one of my acquaintances, a charming blond who looks like a young Val Kilmer, “there are stunning Chinese women ... They don’t even look at whites!” Why? Because they know for sure that the Chinese have more money.

That is, the average Chinese is richer than the average white person, and the rich Chinese is richer than the average rich tourist, even a Russian one. Not good to catch here. However, ours have not been caught there for a long time. It is better to come to Shanghai with your own samovar.

Our

As you may have guessed, Russian emigrants live in Shanghai. All are wonderful and lovely people. But it's not just immigrants. These are the most Russian emigrants in the world!

I know many families who have ended up in Europe or America and are trying to forget about their past as quickly as possible: to such an extent that their children no longer speak Russian.

In Shanghai, everyone I met remembers the language, watches (among others) Russian cinema, reads (among others) Russian books, listens (among others) Russian music; and they usually have dual citizenship.

I think there is an explanation for this: in a few years you can become such an American - that you can’t tell, and you can try to become a Frenchman, and a German - but a Russian will never become a Chinese. Therefore, there is no need to try.

The Chinese, like few people in the world, are friendly and curious towards foreigners, in China it’s enough just to work and just live, but you can’t dissolve in “Chineseness” - you will always be a foreign body there.

Our other

China is an absolute empire, representatives of 56 nationalities live there. In fact, there are many more nationalities there, because there are only 235 languages ​​in China, it’s just that the Chinese leadership is in no hurry to recognize all ethnic groups in a row.

For several thousand years, even if it has individual and temporary troubles, China will not fall apart in any way - contrary to the vanity of our wonderful thinkers, who, following the collapse of the USSR, passionately argued that "all empires necessarily fall apart." It seems that with the same confidence they will continue to say the same thing when the Russian Federation, God forbid, goes to burst at the seams.

Either general laws do not apply to China, or, you know, we have been deceived.

The “Russians”, along with, say, the yellow Uyghurs and Vietnamese, are one of the 56 nations that have a real status in the modern Chinese empire and representation in parliament. These “Russians” are not directly related to emigrants of different waves. For the most part, they are descendants of the Old Believers and have lived in China for a very long time, trying to preserve the Russian language and ancient, even forgotten in Russia, customs.

With the latest emigrants, the Chinese "Russians" communicate in so far as. Oddly enough, they have very little in common.

tourist areas

In Shanghai, as in any city in the world, as soon as you get into the tourist zone, you will immediately hear your native speech and see painfully familiar - usually slightly drunk - faces.

I have long noticed: if you say hello to a compatriot abroad, in 9 cases out of 10 he will look at you unfriendly and may not even answer. "What are you doing here?" - read in his eyes.

What he himself is doing there, he, of course, understands.

Russians abroad are generally some kind of special breed of Russians. There are, for example, Russian Russians, there are Chinese Russians, and there are these, “abroad”: eyes are running, hands are fussing, the form of behavior is rude impudence.

I don’t know, maybe they squeezed the slave out of themselves, as they were told, but for me, it would be better if they didn’t squeeze it out.

As for the tourist areas, the old city in Shanghai is amazing. And there are at least forty places worth seeing.

But what am I going to tell you here, I'm not a guide.

military threat

The myth that the Chinese are about to conquer Russia, I myself periodically supported, although over the years I thought less and less about this topic.

It becomes clear to any normal person in Russia that our leadership will destroy the country with much greater success than all the armies of the world at the same time.

The latest data says this: the Chinese are not settling in Russia and, on the whole, do not aspire to go there anymore. Cold, poor - what to do here? The Far Eastern OVIR reports that how many come to us from China, so many leave.

Why? Because even in the 1990s we were still an attractive country for poor China.

Since then, we have been told for twenty years that we must tolerate the new self-proclaimed bourgeoisie, because “the first accumulation of capital in the United States was predatory”, because the “new Russians” give birth to children, “children will finish Oxford and raise Russia from its knees”, because that "socialism must be built, and capitalism only allowed", and so on blah blah blah. While we were reassuring ourselves and tormenting ourselves with anticipation, the Chinese have become the world leader in the production of most types of industrial products, now they have half of the world's foreign exchange reserves. And we, meanwhile, have offshore companies.

Latest Chinese Warning

The Chinese have never fought successfully outside their territory. It seems that they are aware of this, - my Russian Chinese friends finally resolved all my doubts, - they do not even solve the problem of Taiwan! Although with their military resources they could solve this problem in an hour! All the more so, they can’t get to Russia.

Well, do you know about Taiwan? Historically, it is a Chinese island that separated from communist China in 1949 and has not been rejoined since.

You know, there is an expression: "the last Chinese warning"? It just comes from this many years of Taiwanese history.

The Chinese leadership has already promised a hundred and forty times that it "will not leave the problem of Taiwan unresolved," but things are still there. Any of our Kremlin "son of heaven" would long ago, regardless of the sea, have brought tanks there - and the Chinese are only threatening.

Apparently, Taiwan will remain a separate state.

In the meantime, we are told that the Chinese supposedly draw on their maps of China so large that it reaches exactly to the Urals. Well, so they paint over Mongolia as their possessions, and several other neighboring countries strive to repaint in parts or in whole. And now what?

The Chinese just love to draw, and they have a lot of paint. They have a whole lot of everything. But most of all, common sense.

Moreover, I never found maps with China to the Urals in Shanghai. If anyone has seen it please show me.

political correctness

In general, the Chinese treat Russians well. All these topics about the "bloody regime", Chechnya, Abkhazia and our "imperial manners" are of little concern to them, unlike Europe.

As a result, they have no particular reason to treat us badly.

The Chinese intelligentsia still remembers the great Russian culture, the older generation still watched Soviet films on all-Chinese television, and their main party, whatever one may say, is communist, and they have not yet forgotten where this, as we believe, infection came from .

Yes, in the not so distant past, we had several military clashes with China, but they ended quickly enough and in our favor, which only added weight to us in the eyes of the Chinese.

What they definitely don't like is the Japanese. The Japanese, as you know, during World War II occupied part of China and staged a natural genocide there, exterminating a million Chinese.

Then World War II ended, but the Japanese side did not even think to repent for what they had done and did not suit themselves at the Nuremberg Trials.

By the way, this is an important point. It is often said in Russia that until we repent for what we did in the 20th century, as the Germans repented, nothing will work out for us. I keep thinking, maybe send our "repentants" to Japan - let them do their propaganda there. And the Chinese comrades and I will look at the results of this propaganda.

Well, that is, how soon propagandists will be deported from Japan.

Communism and the eternal block

Communism in China is actually nominal, there are no red ties and processions, agitprop and party resolutions. On the other hand, the CCP rules the country not nominally at all, but exactly the opposite. The mayor of Beijing was stealing (this is a man of the level of Luzhkov with us), he was a hop, and they shot him. One of the leaders of the CCP showed himself badly (someone like Gryzlov we have), he was once, and they put him in jail for 18 years. There are even more such cases for Chinese governors.

I asked my Chinese - in the sense of Russian - comrades who have business in China, if there is corruption there.

They answered: in principle, it does, but on a scale incomparable with Russia; As for the grassroots level, it actually doesn't exist there.

Well, once someone had to give a carton of cigarettes. There was a special shop like this in a state institution, where they sell cigarettes in blocks downstairs.

“Apparently,” my interlocutors laughed, “there the same block is first sold, then the officials themselves rent it to a shop and take their money.

Bath

In the evening, my friends and I went to the bathhouse. The bath was Chinese, but the Chinese do not really like to bathe. There were two steam rooms - at 100 degrees and at 35. Our Russian company sat in the first one, and numerous Chinese people basked in different pools and from time to time visited steam room number 2. They ran to us for a minute and then, growling in Chinese , ran away.

At least one reason for pride appeared to me in a few days.

My comrades told me how they once went into the steam room, and there were some unusually heat-resistant Chinese who were not going to leave anywhere.

- Here are the cross-eyed devils, sit down, - in our, primordially Russian, good-natured manner, my comrades discussed the situation.

“Come on, get out of here,” they said as if in jest, confident that the Chinese, blissfully frozen in a couple, did not understand anything.

Then it turned out that these were not Chinese, but a Kazakh circus that had come on tour to Shanghai. Everyone there is not only magicians and athletes, but also individual wrestlers. And they all understand Russian perfectly. What is it?

How do I get to China

“And how did it end?” the reader will ask, seeing that a new chapter has begun. And I did it on purpose to make fun of you.

It ended well: the Kazakhs appreciated the humor of the situation and invited my comrades to a performance in the circus - for free.

In general, my new Russian Chinese comrades have such a tradition - for five years now they have been going to the bathhouse on Thursdays. Actually, I owe my visit to Shanghai to their bath procedures.

They were sitting, it means, they somehow after a bath, consumed frogs with beer and started talking either about politics, or about literature, or about the first and the second at once - lately it is difficult for us to separate these things.

Sake went into action, the degree rose - and a dispute arose about how exactly a Russian writer would summarize their conversation - for example, me.

“Let’s call him, and let him resolve our dispute,” they suggested right there at the table. So they called me.

I flew in with pleasure, also ate frogs (terribly delicious), washed down sake (just lovely), then we aggravated it all with a Chinese duck - and safely settled all the disputes.

Watch

On the last day, out of pure hooliganism, I bought a Chinese Rolex on the market.

Everything was arranged as it should be: the Chinese sellers took me for a long time to some secret room, there, with all the precautions, they almost took a watch out of the safe - choose, white friend, the real ones.

They asked for two and a half thousand yuan for a watch, but my new Russian Chinese comrades bargained for six hundred.

Considering that the taxi ride from the hotel to the airport cost me three hundred yuan, the cost of a Rolex watch was equal to two trips.

Taxis in Shanghai, by the way, are all official: you will not find any Moscow bombers looking at you with rabbit eyes at train stations and airports.

When I bought the watch, I knew exactly what I was doing. Accordingly, the Chinese knew very well what they were doing. So no hard feelings. One thanks.

The clock stopped after a month.

But they are not doing this for themselves, but for us. Purely to amuse former demigods.