Ofer and I have been spoiled by Japan and Hong Kong. Clean streets, kind people, good smelling hotel rooms. I was starting to feel confident that this whole traveling thing wasn’t going to be as hard as I had initially anticipated.

Then we stepped out of the airport in China. We got into the line and we were led to our car. With suitcases and backpacks in the trunk and our driver informed of our destination we climbed into the back seat. Once the doors were shut and the cab started on its way Ofer and I looked at each other. Something was wrong. There were no seat belts! As Americans we have been trained not to ride in a car unless there are working seat belts, something Ofer and I both feel very strongly about. We started digging in between the seats, maybe they had been sandwiched there by overweight American tourists who weren’t concerned about seat belt safety. But our hands came back empty.

Hold the phone...something else is wrong. Our cab driver is a suicidal maniac. Once out of the terminal we were being thrown around in the back seat of his car like kernels of pop corn in an old fashioned popcorn popper. He sped and weaved between busses and cars with a grimace on his face, this obviously was not a happy man. “We’re really not in a hurry” I told him coyly when what I really wanted to say “Check your blind spots, you lunatic, do you drive get-away-cars on your days off??!” No response from the front seat. As we swerved and jerked back and forth Ofer and I decided that we would check his blind spots for him, as if this would help at all. Once we tried to so, we noticed something else was wrong. Everything was a blind spot! There was newspaper covering every window in the car but the front window. We were the car version of a horse with blinders on, only the one leading the horse was an angry Chinaman who lacked a fear of death.

My big powerful future husband started getting red. “This is ridiculous he said, where did this guy learn to drive!!” Then the car sped up and we dodged trucks and motorcycles with more speed. “Stop it, he may understand English” I said to Ofer in my bastardized version of Hebrew. Instead I did what any woman in this situation would do; I become my mother. I pulled out a pen and paper and proceeded to write down every name and number I saw posted in his car. The city of Shanghai will benefit from us getting this guy’s license taken away.

As we held hands and watched out the front window we noticed that the streets were becoming less and less busy. In fact we were in an area with what seemed to be houses with no doors and sometimes no roof, people squatting out on the streets relieving themselves, people clearing the phlegm in their throats so loud we could hear it in our moving car and smells that would make you not eat for days. “Holy Crap, he understood what we were saying and he is taking us to an area to kill us”, this is honestly what went through my head and judging by the look on Ofer’s face his thoughts were not too far off. We then took a sharp right turn and saw a large hotel a hundred feet away from the street.

You know movies where they show you some beautiful home with a freshly painted facade, a gentle breeze plays with the flowers that line the perimeter...you can almost smell the fresh baked bread wafting from the open window. Then the light changes and you watch as the years go by, the paint cracks, the porch swing crookedly falls off it’s perch, the flowers become a distant memory and the glow of the home where you could picture a family growing inside is replaced by creaks and bad dreams and the smell of wood and plants rotting. Yep this was what it was like. We had both seen the picture of the hotel online but it must have been taken at least 30 years ago. It looked like a deserted haunted house although it was clearly populated considering how many cars were in the parking lot.

Welcome to China.

That was the first of a string of things to go wrong with the hotel. Once inside we were told to only take cabs out of the hotel because it isn’t safe to walk the streets. The first room they put us in had not been cleaned and still had tissues and bedsheets strewn on the floor. They second room they put us in had no internet, they had to send their IT guy in to run a cable into our room. Then the next day they forgot to send us the wake up call we had ordered. Smelly sheets, a bathroom that smelled like don’t even ask what, dirt and grime on the carpets. Not to mention the fact that they claimed to have a workout room and a olympic size pool of which there were neither...details. We were home.

Ofer and I both know a lot of people who have visited China and loved it. There is so much that colors your experience of a country; who you meet, who you’re with, the places you end up sleeping and eating. Not to mention how comfortable you are in general about traveling to a foreign place. Maybe for us it was the contrast from coming from Hong Kong and Japan. But China was our first real culture shock on this trip.

When we first walked to a busy area looking to grab a bite to eat we waited for the street light to change (Japan had trained us well). Once our ‘walk’ symbol was displayed, hand and hand we began to cross the intersection. Not more than 2 feet ahead of us a motorcycle plowed across our path, then another. I looked to the right and saw that no one even slowed down at the red light. Once we got the hang of the fact that streetlights mean absolutely nothing, we were fine. But the shock of stepping off the sidewalk thinking we had the right of way to cross and nearly getting killed by a motorcycle definitely showed us how incredibly differently cities operate.

There were many more things that we were not accustomed to that at first came as a pretty big shock, especially since we had just come from Japan and Hong Kong. One thing is, there is a lot of spitting that goes on in China. I know you don’t want to hear about it but trust me hearing about it is a lot better than being the indirect recipient of the splash. And it isn’t just, “Oh, ew a bug just flew in my mouth, let me get it out!” nope it is a full-fledged, Leonardo De Caprio in Titanic, from the pit of your stomach spit. And both men and women do it. They don’t hide it. They do it everywhere and at anytime. It’s lovely.

I also need to dedicate at least one paragraph to toilets. It took us less than a day to recognize that we were no longer in the land of heated toilets with flowery sprays and courtesy flush sounds. I remember the first time I saw a real China toilet. We were on our day trip and it was suggested to us to use the bathroom. I waited in a line (I use the word ‘line’ loosely because in China people had no intention of waiting their turn in a line, if they saw an opportunity to get in front of someone else, they took it) behind 10 Chinese woman and children. Once it was my turn I walked toward the open stall. I quickly glanced to my right and saw a stall without a door and a young lady about 18 years old squatting above a hole in the floor. I looked at her and she looked at me, no embarrassment, nothing. Obviously I was the odd-man out.

I reached my stall and walked in. I shut the door behind me. You can imagine the smell, I’m not even going to go into that. All there was, was a porcelain hole in the ground. I stared at the hole...the hole gaped right back at me. Who was going to win, me or the hole. I looked around for toilet paper. Nope. Just as I was convincing myself that this was an ‘experience’ I felt a gush of water splash over my foot from the stall next to me. The hole won...I left. Hole: 1 Shayna: 0.

So apparently how it works, is no toilet paper is used, once you are done you wash anything remaining on yourself or the ground down with a bucket of water you bring in with you. After your delusions of yourself as a ‘lady’ are shattered you then walk out to the sink. There are three things that I now very much appreciate in a bathroom sink: water, soap and paper towel/dryer. If you have one, there is a very good chance that you don’t have another. Paper towel I can do without, I am getting used to that. But no soap? That’s another story. In China Ofer and I learned our lesson, we started bringing tissues and hand sanitizer everywhere we went.

OK, so China is very different from what we have seen before on this trip. That’s fine. Now it is time for us to mold ourselves to be comfortable here. This is how it was going to be for the next few weeks.

We had a one-day tour set up in Shanghai. We saw so much in that one day. There are some positives and negatives about tour guides. The positives: We don’t have to plan where we are going, how to get there, how much to pay the driver, when/ where we are going to eat etc. Everything is laid out for us and we don’t have to think at all, something Ofer and I enjoy and try to do as much as possible. Negatives: They take you mostly to the tourist traps (although some are things we do really want to see), there is a good chance that we won’t understand their English through their accent and more often than not they bus us to places and encourage us to buy (they get a cut of whatever it is that we purchase).

Our guide took us through to the ancient city wall, the Grand Canal, the ancient town of Suzhou, Zhouzhang Water Village and to a silk factory where you can watch the process from silk worms eating mulberry leaves to the finished product of a silk tapestry. A lot of the silk factories are now mostly machine operated but we were lucky to visit a factory where every step was done by hand. It was amazing to watch, really made us appreciate the work that goes into creating even just one silk pillowcase.

Ofer had been talking for MONTHS about going to the World Expo. In fact that might have been his major reason for wanting to visit Shanghai. He was really excited to see the Switzerland Exhibit because they apparently had a roller-coaster. We had been getting reports that it takes hours of standing in line to enter one of the countries expositions but we needed to check it our on our own.

I have to start by saying China is HOT in August. Very very hot. Most people carried umbrellas with them to protect themselves from burning and over heating. And all around the Expo there were areas where you can stand and be sprayed by water in order to try to cut the heat. We asked around and found out that the only Expo that doesn’t have a line is Africa. No line sounded good to us so we headed in that direction. The Africa Exhibit was in a huge space (as was everything, really) and had stands inside from different countries. It was fun to walk around and to visit the stands of the countries that we are planning to visit on this trip.

We decided to be brave and head out in the heat toward the Switzerland Exhibit. Once we got there we were told that the roller-coaster was temporarily closed. Of course. So instead we walked around and found the Spain Exhibit, which looked really cool from the outside. We waited in line for about 2 hours and snaked around the outside of the building. Every ten minutes or so we were lucky to be under a spicket that would spray us with cool water. This trip is starting to make me understand why people in other parts of the world feel the need to shower 2 or 3 times a day. The Exhibit was pretty amazing. It was mostly made up of multimedia displays showing different videos and pictures from Spain. In front of the first screen was a woman dancing to dramatic Spanish music. Next we saw a huge replica of a baby. A huge freaky non-human looking baby. Why this was part of the Exhibit, I can’t tell you. I think people were intrigued by it because, like us, they were pretty disturbed by it. The entire Exhibit lasted about 5 minutes. As admittedly cool as the exhibits were the heat was really brutal. And the more we saw the more we were excited to see most of these places in person.

That’s the thing about China. It is very difficult for people from China to travel outside of their country. In fact whether we were on the street or on the Great Wall people seemed to be in awe of us. Internet (granted restricted internet), TV and people traveling to their country are their only access to the outside world. In fact, many times we were stopped by locals and asked to be in their pictures. So we could see why the Expo was so popular. This was their opportunity to see the world because there was a very good chance that most of the people standing in those lines for hours upon hours and going for multiple days have never and will never leave China.

When living in New York I was introduced to Shanghai Soup Dumplings. If you don’t know what this is I highly suggest googling it and trying them. They are absolutely delicious. My favorite restaurant is Joe’s Shanghai, however since Ofer and I now found ourselves in Shanghai I was determined to try the original. I think I made Ofer try them in at least 6 different restaurants, no joke. We must have eaten at least 50 Shanghai Soup Dumplings in Shanghai along with countless other Dim Sum treats. I don’t know if it is just brand loyalty but I have to admit we liked Joe’s Shanghai the best! Ofer and I kept ourselves busy in Shanghai, we went to the highest observation deck in the world in the Shanghai World Trade Center. We attended an amazing acrobatic show, we ate local cuisine, we got sick from local cuisine and we went to our first night club in Asia.

By the time we loaded into our final cab to head for the airport we laughed at how much had changed. Our first driver in Shanghai wasn’t crazy, he was just doing what everyone else did in China. A driver who stayed within the lines and didn’t sit on his horn was the exception to the Chinese rule not the outlier. By the end of our week in Shanghai we had gotten used to being thrown around in the car, needing to just keep our eyes closed during the journey and not even look for seat belts. It had taken a pretty good initial shake but China had officially broken us in.