The Bund 8/27/12

The Bund 8/27/12

The flatmates and I went out to The Bund to A) look for a guitar on “music street” and B) so I could take some pictures of The Bund at night.  Our first task of finding a guitar did not go over so well…we only found one shop that was open at the time and there weren’t really very many music shops at all anyway on the street.  We either had false information about the amount of music shops on the street or we went the wrong direction down it.  We plan to go back out searching for it again some time soon.

Task B however was highly successful.  Pretty much as soon as we got to The Bund and I started setting up my tripod we began drawing a crowd. Chinese people were walking up to us and taking our picture, asking us to be in pictures with them, attempting to talk to us, and just in general crowding around us like we were some kind of celebrities.  One girl about mid-twenties came up to me with her DSLR and began asking me questions (actually more like pointing to different settings on her camera) about why my pictures were sharp.  She showed me her pictures and they were blurry and not very good.  I tried to tell her that she should get a tripod for night pictures and that would help a lot, I think she understood that.  But since she didn’t have one I showed her how to adjust her settings so that she could get better handheld pictures at night and I showed her how to stabilize her camera against objects instead of using a tripod.  She was very nice and very grateful to me.  She thanked me about a hundred times before leaving me to go attempt to take some pictures. 

We also met a lady likely in her 30’s named Luo Guo.  She was very excited to meet us.  She was from some other place in China that I didn’t recognize and had recently moved to Shanghai.  Her English was pretty good so we had a bit of a chat with her.  She was with two guys, I think one was her father maybe, and they mostly just stood and stared at us, took a few pictures, and stared some more.  Like I said Luo Guo was very excited, she could barely contain herself.  She asked us all kinds of questions, gave Christen a Chinese name (Sue Hoe…Su Ho?  I should have asked her to spell it) and she gave me her phone number and QQ information.  QQ is pretty much the Chinese Facebook.  After we said goodbye to her and the crowd that had gathered around us we made our way down The Bund along the Huangpu River through the throngs of people to take a few more pictures.  Anytime we stopped however people just gathered around us so we decided it was time to head back to the hotel. 

It felt like being a celebrity for an hour or two and was definitely a surreal experience.  Shanghai is a popular tourist destination for many people in China and The Bund is a popular tourist spot.  Many of the people down there likely don’t see Westerners that often so seeing a group of 5 (and four of them girls, including a blonde) was apparently pretty exciting.  It would be interesting to know how many Chinese vacation photo albums and slide shows we made our way into on that night alone.