Escape to Chongming Island

Restaurants and malls and city life are great, but sometimes you need to get ooooout of the city.

But before we go on a day trip, I should introduce you to Agnes.  Agnes and I met once in Portland when La brought her to a party at Caroline and Michael's place over Christmas.  Some of you blog-readers were there.  Do you remember that party?  The one where we watched a Blazer game and Gardner made the only pecan pie I have ever enjoyed?  Yeah, it was that party.

Agnes happens to be in Shanghai for six months for a Nike project.  It feels so fortuitous that we're both here at the same time.  I feel like I must have built up some really good karma to deserve this.

Sunday was supposed to be nice, so Agnes and I wanted to get out of town.  We were going to go to Hangzhou to pick tea leaves in the fields and hike around.  Hangzhou is 2.5-3 hours away, and it's supposed to be beautiful.  I was going to meet Agnes at her apartment at 11:00, and we were going to head out.

Agnes lives over by People's Square, so I was going to take a cab.  My Mandarin skills are practically nonexistent, and cab drivers definitely don't speak English.  But there is a great way to give directions to a cab driver.  Lots of places provide their address in Mandarin or online.  You show the address card on your phone to a driver, and voila, they take you where you need to go.  Foolproof system, right?

My taxi driver nodded confidently when I showed him the address, and we started driving.  I wasn't really paying attention, since I didn't know where I'm going anyways.  I started feeling like it was taking longer than it should, so I tried to follow our progress on the Apple map on my phone, and it say I was in Pudong (on the wrong side of the river) and continuing to head away.  I tried to get the driver to stop so I could show him the address card again ("Ting" means stop, and is one of the few Mandarin words I do know), but he just talked rapidly in Mandarin and kept driving on the freeway.  I called Agnes and she handed the phone to her driver, Jimmy, and I handed the phone to my cab driver.  Jimmy yelled at him in Mandarin (I could literally hear him yelling), and the guy took a huge U-turn across traffic and started heading west again.  When I got the phone back and Agnes told me that there is another Green Court apartments in deep Pudong, and the cab driver hadn't actually looked at the address and assumed that I wanted the east location.  I was probably 20-30 minutes east of where I needed to be.  

He finally brought me to Agnes' apartment after being in the car for more than an hour.  I had no idea what the cab fare would be, but at that point, I didn't even care.  I would give him all the cash on me just to let me out.  I was more than an hour late.  He told me to give him 20RMB (about $3.30) and get out.  I don't know what Jimmy said to him, but he must have been very persuasive.

Since I was so late, it didn't really make sense to go to Hangzhou anymore.  I felt terrible, but Agnes and Jimmy were so nice about it and insisted that it was the cab driver's fault, not mine.  We decided to go to Chongming Island instead since it's only about an hour and a half away.

Since it wasn't out intended destination, I hadn't done any research and didn't know what to expect.  Chongming Island is like the Sauvie Island of Shanghai.  Big, flat, agricultural, great for biking, close in proximity to the city but remarkably rural by contrast.  I didn't know how starved my eyeballs were for open space, trees and flowers until we got out of the city.

(In real life, the East China Sea is more of a khaki color than in this photo.)

First, you drive over an incredibly beautiful, and incredibly long bridge to get to the island.  Jimmy said that the bridge was only two years old, and that before it was built you had to take a ferry to get to the island.  I guess that explains why it the island can feel so rural even though it's close to the Shanghai sprawl.  Fun fact: Chongming is the world's largest alluvial island at 750 square miles.  Hopefully that knowledge can make you can feel really pretty and smart when it inevitably comes up a dinner party.  You're welcome.

We were driving along and saw field and fields of yellow flowers that were as tall as a petite adult or large child (Aggie my love, you would disappear).

Our first scheduled stop was Chongming Dongtang Birds National Natural Reserve.  The wetlands are a stopover or wintering ground for lots of migrating birds.  Agnes and I have zero bird-watching experience, so we heard lots of bird calls that we couldn't recognize.  Also, most birds are really good at camouflage.  

You know what birds don't care about camouflage?  
Black swans.
You know what black swans don't like?
Well, actually, lots of things.  They're pretty cranky.  But we learned that they don't like wasabi peas.  (I know, we're terrible.  I promise this is our last foray into bird-watching.  Please don't send the audubon society after us with their pitchforks and binoculars.)

Next we went to Dongping National Forest Park.  We got there shortly before they closed, so we persuaded them to let us in without paying, and then we tried to run around as fast as we could.  

There is a lot of natural beauty, but I couldn't get over how was laid out like an amusement park and had ambient music and fake bird calls playing over speakers off the pathways.  I guess it really is telling that when you are this close to the largest city in the world, nature is a little bit of a novelty.  We saw women walking around in dresses and high heels.  Toto, I don't think we're in Oregon anymore.

But OMG!  They have something called grass skiing.  We were so curious to see what grass skiing was, and discovered that it's exactly what it sounds like.  People rent very sturdy ATV-like roller blades and "ski" down one gently-sloping, well-groomed grass hill.   And then they take a rope tow back up again.  I guess the closest good skiing is Japan, so sometimes you need to get creative.  

All in all, it was a great sunny Sunday adventure.  We had big bowls of ramen at Ippudo when we got back to town.  Ippudo is a Japanese chain, and if you're curious, you can check out the site for their NY locations since it's in English.  It was delicious.

And then I happily walked the 1.5 miles home from dinner.  It was a nice night out, and I think I had spent more than enough time in a cab that day.