Shanghai

THE FAMILY AND I WERE BACK HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS, catching our collective breath and catching up with friends and family. Predictable dinner party questions (“What’s Shanghai like?”, “What do you miss about South Africa?”) have given me an opportunity to draw comparisons after several months of living in China.

Most obvious to me now is the priceless and absolute freedom we have come to enjoy in Shanghai. I never see my daughter over weekends, because she simply bicycles off to go play with her friends. She is eight. My 14-year old son catches taxis into town. Back in South Africa, we have to rein both of them in, which is difficult on all of us.

On the other side of the coin, it was bloody marvellous to be back home and have the freedom to drive. In Shanghai, we are utterly reliant on our driver to take us around; to our eyes the traffic is nothing but chaos. You cannot get anywhere in less than an hour. I’ll take Jo’burg rush hour any day.

But the thing we miss most in Shanghai is – and I know this sounds crazy – the humble public toilet. When you gotta go you gotta go, but when you gotta go and you are in, say, Xiengang Market, you have a problem. That’s unless you’re happy to join in a communal squat over a long trough, which is a hard sell for the wife. Here’s a tip: find a hotel, any hotel. They are quite used to foreigners popping in to relieve pressures of nature.

As unpatriotic as it may be, those are my only major gripes with this city. When you finally get where you are going, and locate the nearest real toilet, it is on to the live shows, historic towns and indoor skiing.

And the shopping. Never mind a communist legacy; there has been big money in Shanghai for long enough to ensure you can find any brand imaginable – on top of all the underground markets and weird and wonderful oddities you might never have imagined.

Around the corner from my office downtown there is a beautiful lingerie shop called the Easy Shop. My wife and I were in hysterics the first time we saw it, on the assumption that this was an unfortunate reference to the morals of women who shop there. But it’s no mistake, as I found out from my assistant. The name is actually a typical Chinese double entendre: not only is it easy for a woman to buy the skimpy lingerie and get it on, but it is just as easy for a man to take off again.

Shanghai is exciting and challenging and very different, and I can’t honestly say we feel homesick. Heck, we even have our own Spur.