Greetings from China.
My true love affair with Shanghai began six years ago when my good friend Andrew Steele moved here from managing a hotel in Borneo (that I'd visited three times with my family when they were young) to coincide with the opening of the New Tower of the Shangri-la.
I recall asking him what Shanghai was like and his reply was 'It's great. Particularly if you like Jazz'. I do like jazz music but I guess I didn't associate it with China, a country I'd never visited before.
The first time I went was for a long weekend. An unlikely long way, I know, but from Leeds Bradford via Amsterdam on KLM points, it was a risk worth taking.
Shanghai is mad. Total, insatiable madness. My second visit was to take part in their annual (and my first) marathon and it's mile after mile of monumental skyscrapers on the Bund side of the river (wider than the Thames). On the Pudong side it was beginning to look the same way too but the difference is that twenty years ago, Pudong was a swamp. Literally.
Someone somewhere thought - 'oh, I know, let's build some of the world's tallest buildings on that bit of waste land over there'. It started with the Oriental Pearl. You have to see it at night in the flesh to believe it's real. I've been up it a few times and each time, it doesn't get less mad. Actually, it gets more mad because while you weren't looking, they built another ten skyscrapers. Or twenty. Or more.
There's a building you can visit near People's Square that shows you the Plan for Shanghai. I've never visited it because I daren't. As readers of my blogs will know, I like a good plan. I generally have five year ones in my head which sounds Stalinistic but it's more that 'My name is Sarah and I'm a Workaholic' personality requires a structure and framework to prevent 24/7 amounts of effort going in to every year without stopping to draw breath or enjoy life.
I'd be more Chinese than the Chinese when it comes to working if I lived here. That's pretty difficult to imagine when you are here though. I have to say that I know they say this about New York but my opinion is that it's Shanghai that's 'the city that doesn't sleep'. For starters because there's shopping to be done all night long isn't there?
Over the past six years, I've also seen many other places within China and it's just vast. Life varies tremendously of course but undoubtedly there's still great poverty in large parts. And no social security network either so they take a lot more risks with everything - including life itself. If you get sick in rural China, you need a lot of money saved in your family to get over it. If you have city workers sending money home, you might survive.
If you don't, well, that's life.
I try to get out each November for a long weekend but couldn't last year because of my bike ride and the illness I've suffered after it. On top of that, I needed an operation a couple of weeks ago to sort out my bad back. And on top of that, I started a new job at the end of November, so all things considered, the past three months have been quite tough - notwithstanding I have already luxuriated in a few trips as part of my 'gap year' and it's still only February.
Not sure if I explained earlier in this blog that this year marks shoulder year celebrations for my 40th in August but I can't unfortunately go off on a tour of the world due to family and work obligations (clearly).
Thus each month this year I plan to visit a different country which is my way of checking out the world 20 years on from my last worldwide trip. A sort of worldwide strategic review, for want of a better expression.
Twenty years from now when I'm sixty, I want to look back and have really done something useful with my life. Made a contribution and a commitment to others. For others. We are all different but it's what I do, and will, derive value from.
Here in China where they have dreamed a dream in terms of their vision for Shanghai and then dreamt again, it's easy to build a big dream worth executing because they make it look so easy. Take a dose of hallucinatory drugs and then imagine your absolute ideal dream of dreams then just work really hard towards it, every single day until you're done. All it requires is single minded determined effort to succeed at whatever you want to do. Easy peasy.
A Chinese leader visiting europe recently remarked that the trouble with post-war europe that got us in to this (financial) mess was that we got too lazy and generous with our welfare state(s). The Chinese inner backbone has been forged on poverty. Huge amounts of hunger and misery create a nation that simply does not want to go back there. Generation upon generation, it has gotten a little easier and for some at least in the present day, incredibly wealthily easier. But only with a lot of hard, hard work.
Even now when you look at the grossly conspicuous consumption (which makes the Middle East look like a Hillman Imp) in the new brand shopping centre just behind my hotel, everyone is working. Your brain cannot compute the scale of four floors of every designer brand you can ever imagine in stores four and five times the size of your average Bond Street equivalent but it is there and wealthy Chinese people are spending a lot of their hard earned money while on their I-Phones, I-Pads and assorted other mobiles, laptops (and probably I-chipped bodies). This is the modern world and they are going with or without us.
The challenge for me therefore is to translate this in to something that I understand. Back in the UK, I did that all for nothing over the past ten years. You can either see the swamp I ended up with as 'the end' and give up or you can decide to move on and go forwards with a new spring in your step and a new vim and vigour. Having been so unwell for about a year with various things, I've come to realise that your health is more important than any of us know until we no longer have it. I have been rudely, incredibly healthy all my life but worked myself in to the ground without safeguarding the one thing that enables us to look after our families and loved ones without social security.
So for that reason, I chose Shanghai to convalesce. To linger and consider, to reflect and to indulge in the luxury of time stood still. It does do that here if you let it, particularly if you are hotel bound like me, unable to do a lot of walking or anything much at all except read and write.
'It's a long way to go' people have said or 'that's an unusual place to go for a holiday' or 'it seems mad you would choose there'. Objectively, I agree with all of those statements. If you allow your head to decide rather than process, you wouldn't ever get on the plane, for sure.
But if like me, you are sat looking at the twinkling lights of the Bund from the Horizon Lounge on the 29th floor of the Pudong Shangri-la new tower (the original tower was the first hotel built on the swamp all those years ago) then it's possible to believe and hope in the future while looking at the past, no matter how hard life has been.
Then when your heart decides what that dream life looks like and makes your head do the processing to get you there, you recall that you need to raise £1m to pay off the Yorkshire Haven mortgage and buy our wishlist items.
Only a million small steps till we get there then...
