from Pillar to Post: a traveller's guide to stuff: Sayonara Nihon, Ni Hao Zhongguo: The Ferry

We boarded, and departed at 12. 12 foreigners, 2 Japanese and 100 Chinese. Our future experiences in China were already starting to present themselves to us as we pulled away from a country we had grown to love and ventured into the unchartered (at least for us) territory of the Sea of Japan. The politeness, the calm, our relative invisibility, all gone. The people were loud, they yelled, they were always in a rush (we never knew why as were stuck on a boat for 48 hours), they stared, they pushed, they were unhelpful, they spat, they took secretive photos of us, they were space invaders (no, not the retro arcade game, but invaders of our personal space). And, perhaps incongruently, they also would get up before sunrise and perform the calming ritual of Tai Chi on the deck.
This is not painting a very nice picture of China, I'm sure. It is a beautiful country, don't get me wrong, but unfortunately you do have to get past all of these unpleasant traits first to really enjoy it - we still haven't quite gotten past the staring and the spitting.
Back to the boat, we made friends with all the foreigners very quickly. Again due to the language barrier, this time a little larger because of the tonal nature of the language, it was difficult making conversation with most of the Chinese. Some could speak a little English and they were quite funny when trying to show off their skills at singing English karaoke songs when there was nothing else to do at nighttimes - for some reason Christmas carols were the genre of choice? All us "outsiders" took over the karaoke bar the first night and then back again on the second night until it closed at a sleepy 10:30pm (yawn) and we were left entertaining ourselves with the cheap cups of sake and large beers dispensed from the onboard vending machines.
The ride itself was pretty calm in my eyes, although Lee has a different viewpoint on the matter. The weather was cloudy on the first day, warm and sunny the next and cloudy again on the day we arrived in Shanghai. I woke up at 5:30am to catch the sunrise on this last day but missed out due to the clouds, however I did manage to have a few more photos taken of me by some curious and rather excited Chinese.
The number of freight ships we encountered throughout the entire trip was quite unexpected, and as we entered the mouth of the Huangpu River and started inland towards the city, that number increased exponentially until it was almost like cars on a busy suburban road. And oddly, they captain their boats as if driving a car - overtaking and cutting others off, pulling out in front of other ships.. No order really.. I saw a lot of near misses.
As we pulled into dock, the sky cleared and Shanghai's iconic area came into full, stunning view. The European-style Bund on the west side of the river and the purply-red hue of the Shanghai Oriental Pearl TV Tower on the other. It was very pretty, and possibly a little deceptive as to the overall cleanliness of most of the city's, most of the country's streets.
We had arrived in China.

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