Face recognition, fast trains, crazy mopeds, rooftop lust
Shanghai Nightscape: seven photos stiched together because my wide angle lens is broken
My dad and I were walking into a metro station when we noticed the crowd of police officers. “It’s a pop-up security checkpoint,” my dad explained to me. I had been riding the (excellent) metro system for a couple of days at this point, and while I knew they scanned every backpack before you could go through the turnstile, I hadn’t seen this type of security check yet.
“Sir, can we see some ID?” the officers asked in Chinese.
We started pulling out our California driver’s licenses.
“Sorry, that won’t work.”
“But we left our passports at home!” my dad insisted. (We had, in fact, left our passports at the Airbnb we were staying at.)
“OK, in that case can we take your photo?”
“Uhhh, sure?”
snap The officer had taken a photo of my face with his phone. He showed the screen to me: there was a giant spinner and a bunch of text I couldn’t read, because I’m a banana. We stared at this screen for 15 seconds or so when…
“Whoa, that’s me!” I exclaimed. The phone was now displaying a list of facial recognition matches, and at the very top of the list was my passport photo and a bunch of stats about me. The officer tapped on a couple tabs in the app, nodded, and waved me through.
Absolutely crazy. I mean, this is the stuff they show in spy movies! This is the scene where they’re zooming and enhancing on a suspect’s face, and then they’re like “we ran face rec and bam! here’s the guy.” Could you imagine U.S. authorities with this level of technological competence and coordination? Sure, police officers can look you up if you provide ID, but I highly doubt they can pull up your info in a couple seconds from just a photo. And also, people would freak out if that were happening on a regular basis. And let’s not forget about the technological marvel of processing O(1 billion faces) in 15 seconds!
The trains are great
such precision!
Spooky (and kind of cool) face rec aside, the metro in Shanghai is amazing. Trains are always on time — so on time, in fact, that platforms have countdown timers that list the minutes and seconds until the next train, e.g. “the next train is arriving in 2:39.” And generally I observed these times to contain around 20 seconds of buffer time. I assume this is partly because everything is computer piloted, unlike BART and MUNI which still appear to have people driving them. C’mon, it’s 2019!
Metro rides were also insanely cheap: at about 3 to 4 RMB per ride, that translates to about 50 cents! Now there are some downsides. First, the crowds: because Shanghai is a city of 24 million people, and because the trains are so good, everyone uses them, and it’s standing room only even during non commute hours. Second, the trains stop running at 11:30. If you stay out later than that, you’ll need to take a Didi (Uber for China).
Let’s talk about faster trains. Our family also visited Hangzhou for 2 days, and to get there we took the high speed rail that connects Shanghai and Hangzhou. That train reached peak speeds of around 150 mph, and the journey took just under an hour for ~110 miles (the train has to spend some time below peak speed, obviously).
Then there’s the Maglev train to the airport. This monster of a vehicle reached 268 mph (!) and turned a 40 minute journey by metro into a 8 minute joyride.
Basically, the metro system is miles ahead of San Francisco’s antiquated MUNI/BART system, and the high (and higher) speed rail make Caltrain (and the nonexistent California high speed rail) look like a joke. I’d love to take a 268 mph train to Mountain View or LA…I think we’ll get that approximately never. Sad!
The driving is…reckless
no such thing as “yielding” in shanghai, you just go for it…
The driving behavior is absolutely bonkers. Consider the unprotected left turn maneuver. In the U.S., drivers typically wait for oncoming traffic to clear and leave a large buffer for pedestrians on the crosswalk. Not so in Shanghai. Drivers take the earliest opportunity to “almost complete” their left turns, even if it makes oncoming traffic have to slow down or stop for them, and they’ll aggressively nose their way through the crosswalk with very little buffer for pedestrians. Now as a pedestrian, you need to confidently continue walking even as drivers are executing their left turns, or else they’ll just take your right of way.
Lane lines are more of a suggestion here. People don’t really use their blinkers when changing lanes, and they’ll execute really close cut-in maneuvers. We took several Didis and all the drivers both floated through lanes and had to react to other people cutting in closely.
A lane-splitting moped driving the wrong way
An analysis of the wild driving behavior wouldn’t be complete without mentioning mopeds, which are incredibly popular in Shanghai. They don’t really seem to follow traffic lights nor lanes — they’ll take the bike lane, driving lanes, crosswalks, whatever seems convenient at the moment. They’re like your typical aggressive city cyclist, except they’re booking it at 25 mph.
Rooftopping and droning
Shanghai has a very distinctive skyline (and the second tallest building in the world!) that’s just screaming to be photographed. I remembered that in Sam Kolder’s “My Year 2016” hit travel video, there were some crazy rooftop scenes that looked like they were shot in Shanghai.
wtf!?
So I did some research to see how feasible it would be to get those shots. I landed on this fantastic article by Dominic Ngai who shadowed three famous Shanghai rooftoppers:
Standing 22 stories above ground on the rooftop of a building in the heart of Shanghai, the first thing I notice isn’t the panoramic view of Lujiazui and People’s Square surrounding me — it’s how much my legs are shaking and how slowly I’m moving while trying to balance myself. For experienced rooftop photographers David Yen (@ chilltron4000), Jennifer Bin (@jenniferbin) and Kuan (@3dk129), however, the height doesn’t seem to bother them at all. Rooftopping is part of their lives.
Look at their photos!!
what a good silhouette!
Risking life and limb to get the perfect shot? Sounds like my jam! There was just one small issue: I didn’t know where to go. Since rooftopping is basically trespassing, experienced rooftoppers don’t post where they go all over the internet, as access to that spot would be immediately ruined.
But I did have once ace up my sleeve: my trusty DJI Mavic Pro. I set my alarm for 4:30am one morning (sunrise was at 5:30), hoping to replicate this shot:
probably a drone shot, yeah?
Drone regulations in China require that you stay under an altitude of 120 meters, which I complied with. I suspect our Instagrammer above may have gone higher than that…but my shot still turned out quite nice:
almost fell off a roof taking this shot!!!1
At some point, a police officer walked by and asked me to land my drone. He joked that if I didn’t, they’d shoot down my drone, and I wasn’t gonna mess with that.
Apple Maps is really good in China
As you might be aware, all Google services are blocked in China. Thus, it seems like Google hasn’t invested much effort in making Google Maps work well, both for POI search and transit directions. Meanwhile, I found Apple Maps to be absolutely fantastic.
POI Search
Part of why Apple Maps works so well in China is that just as Apple has partnered with Yelp in the U.S., they’ve partnered with Dianping (literal translation: “rate your order”) in China. So let’s look at this comparison of what you get when you search for a particular bakery in Apple vs Google Maps:
Apple Maps finds all four locations for BAKER & SPICE, while Google Maps finds only one
You also get highly accurate place ratings in Apple Maps versus Google Maps, for an obvious reason: who would be writing the reviews for places in Google Maps? Tourists with VPN access, that’s about it.
Transit directions
Apple Maps was the only English language app that supported transit routing in Shanghai. I was dismayed to find that Google Maps, Transit, and Citymapper all did not support Shanghai. Most citizens would use Baidu Maps, but that UI is all in Chinese, which I can’t read. Note that there’s a funky quirk to Apple Maps and China: you only get transit directions while you’re physically in China—if you’re in the U.S. trying to access transit directions between two locations in China, it won’t give you anything.
Apple Maps provides transit directions, while Google just says “no routes found”
If you’re traveling to China and can’t read Chinese, you’d better be using an iPhone.
Bill fights
This section is less about Shanghai and more about Chinese culture in general. During this family trip there were several meals with my parents’ friends and acquaintances. And a quintessential part of eating out with Asians is the fight over the bill at the end, in which both parties make a big show of rapidly pulling out their wallets (or in this case, their WeChat apps) and engaging in a light physical tussle over who pays. (It’s still unclear to me if there’s a pattern to who relents.) These bill fights are both entertaining and cringey, so I suggested to my dad for one of the meals that we prepay so we could skip the whole bill fight.
I was mistaken. Upon discovering that we had already paid, our host was so appalled that she actually negotiated with restaurant staff to have our payment reversed so she could pay instead! I mean, that’s next level dedication to the bill fight craft— I think she “won” that round. Joke’s on her though, we got a free meal!
On being a banana
My little brother introduced me to the word banana: to be Asian on the outside but white on the inside. And yep, that’s me. I don’t have anything insightful to say here besides a list of mildly amusing anecdotes of what it means to be a banana:
- when the flight attendant asks you what to drink in Chinese and the only word you remember is 水 (“water”)
- when the first thing you ask staff whenever you enter a restaurant or bar is 你拿信用卡吗 (“do you take credit cards”) because you don’t have WeChat to pay
- when you have to stick “do you take credit cards” into google translate
- when the customs agent directs you to the Chinese nationals line, but you’re not
- when a little old lady wanders up to you asking for directions and you have to sheepishly say 我的中文很不好 (“my Chinese is trash”)
- when you ask your parents to order for you at Starbucks because you can’t read the menu
…yikes.
Oh well, I’m stateside now!