The Sunday Times April 3, 2022 3the majority of passengers to leave the
ship, then jump in a local taxi. It’s a
good, cheap way to go where you want,
with the driver as an excellent guide.
BritWit, via thetimes.co.uk
TRADING PLACES
Sally Howard’s article (“Swapping
tales”, last week) reminded me of our
fabulous holiday in North Carolina with
our young family in the 1990s. We
exchanged our small 17th-century timber-
framed cottage in the Cotswolds with a
large Gone with the Wind-style mansion
with 17 acres of gardens, a swimming pool
and a small motorboat so we could potter
around on the adjoining creek. We even
had a maid, a gardener and a man who
appeared regularly to maintain the pool.
And our lovely American exchangers
thought they had the better deal!
Andy Urban-Smith, Gloucestershire
BEST OF BUDAPEST
I would like to echo the sentiments
of your city guide (“My budget blowout
in Budapest”, last week). Last summer
our family of four had a day at the art
deco Gellert baths for about £50 —
allowing us access to the lovely thermal
pools inside and outside, as well as the
grassy sunbathing areas and beautiful
mosaic tiles and marble architecture.
After chatting in the sauna next to a
couple of locals, they told us about an
open-air restaurant called Pagony that
was just around the corner, on the
former site of the Gellert children’s
pool. You dine in the old pool area
there, surrounded by traditional
lamps, and for a pound you can order
a Meggyes Sor cherry beer to sip at the
end of the day, as you watch the sun set
over the Danube.
Nigel Cox, LeicestershireThe city’s lockdown-free run has ended, and the hassle
is more of a concern than Covid, says Andy Boreham
COVER PHOTOGRAPH: ANDREW MCCAREN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMESEYE35.PIX/ALAMYSHANGHAI
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travellettersE
ven if you’ve never been to
Shanghai, you’ll be able to
conjure up an image in your
mind of the city’s skyline, in
which some of the world’s
tallest buildings loom in a show of
Chinese pride. Those buildings’ roots
are in Pudong, part of the city that was
last week locked down.
Anyone who visited back when China
was still open to tourists will almost
definitely have traversed Pudong
after heading to the city centre
from the international airport. It
is nearly 20 miles from one side
of the district to the other.
The district is home to some
5.6 million people, who have
been confined to their homes
— no work, no school, no public
transport. Even the maglev that
usually speeds passengers from the
airport into the city at a jaw-dropping
268mph ground to a halt.
On Tuesday, Shanghai posted its
highest number of new Covid cases —
nearly 6,000. It might not sound a lot,
considering the city’s total population
of about 25 million, but this is a country
that still has its heart set on zero cases.
You may find it hard to believe that
for the past two years Shanghai’s
residents have lived almost normal lives.
That’s not to say that China has avoided
Covid, of course. Despite stringent
measures that have kept the virus largely
at bay, the world’s most populous nation
has been hit by sporadic outbreaks,
sending entire cities into lockdown,
but Shanghai has been relatively lucky.
Until last Sunday, that is, when the
local government announced — after
days with numbers of new cases in the
thousands — that the city would enter
a phased lockdown. Pudong New Area
— east of the Huangpu River, which cuts
the city in two — was first, locking down
from Monday to Friday; the other half of
Shanghai went into lockdown on Friday
and will remain so until Tuesday.
Even before the half of Shanghai in
which I live — Puxi, west of the Huangpu
— entered official lockdown, the streets
were much quieter than usual,
with the locals doing their best
to avoid catching the virus.
People here aren’t as scared of
Covid as they were two years
ago, but they’re worried aboutIn one of the
quarantine
sites, in the
main venue
of the 2010
World Expo,
the 7,000
beds are fullPudong district
and, above, a
bronze statue of
a bull at the Bundthe associated hassle. With regular
compulsory testing of the city’s
population, new cases are picked up
quickly and taken to hospital or
mandatory quarantine sites, one of
which is in the main venue of the 2010
World Expo; its 7,000 beds are now full.
A few days ago a British colleague
tested positive and became one of those
taken to the expo centre, which she
described as being the size of an airport
hangar — “a massive room where it’s
hard to sleep”. She was told to stay
in central quarantine (with no
shower and rows of Portaloos —
“like a really rubbish festival”)
until she returned two negative
PCR test results. Then she’d need
to spend a week in self-isolation at
home and undergo more testing.
Many of Shanghai’s tourism
spots are within 20 minutes’ walk
of my apartment building, but taking
a stroll is off the cards during lockdown.
People’s Square, a ten-minute walk,
has one of Shanghai’s busiest metro
stations. Here, you can usually feel the
energy and pace of life in a megacity,
but last week it was more like the set
of a zombie-apocalypse film.
Locals usually avoid the eastern part
of Nanjing Road, the city’s main shopping
district, because of the sea of tourists
there — mostly from other parts of China,
as the country’s borders are still closed.
But the latest outbreak means that they
too have stopped coming.
Nanjing Road leads to the Bund, on
the banks of the Huangpu. Here you can
glimpse Shanghai’s colonial past in the
beautifully preserved buildings from that
era, before looking across the river to
see the future: the Pudong skyline and
the heart of the city’s financial district.
From here you couldn’t tell that
Pudong was under lockdown. At
7pm each night all those magnificent
buildings light up in an orchestrated
display of colour and energy. Usually
the vicinity is packed with thousands
of tourists vying for the best spot for
a photo. Last week it was just me and
two or three others.
It should have felt good, but it didn’t.
I’m looking forward to the day when
everyone can come back.Andy Boreham is a columnist for
the Shanghai Daily newspaperC
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