I have been asked that 7 times today, since I arrived to Shanghai this morning after 16 hours of train in hardsleep from Xi’an. By the way, I strongly recommend to use always the softsleeper if you actually want to rest in the train. In the hardsleep you share your space with too many people, and you do not control the lights… So, you will not sleep as much as you want. Tonite, someone dropped his coat from his berth in a third level hitting a bottle with water next to me, which fell into the floor, waking me and others up for a while… and of course, at 7.00 am the lights were on and the music, and the people were walking and talking around…

But I was talking about something more interesting. “Where are you from?”. I have been asked this question today by 4 couples of girls, 1 couple (boy and girl), one girl, and one waiter in a door of a restaurant. In the first 6 cases, my suspect is that it was a well-known scam in China. They talk to you, showing interest in speaking English and after a while, they suggest to go to some place to have a tea (typical, as we are in China). The problem is that the Tea House is extremely expensive, so you pay a lot and you cannot really complain… I knew that, so I did not dare to speak to any of them, except the last two groups, as I wanted to see how they did their job, but I quitted just after they offered me to go anywhere.

I wonder how it can work with anybody, as it is a very forced situation: a strange starts walking with you in the street with a lot of interest in you… That’s not normal… But it still works a lot, otherwise there would not be so many people practicing that. Today, apart from my 6 cases, I noticed 4 more facing other people. This is one of the new things I found in Shanghai. Although in Beijing I met a couple who were victims of this, here it seems to be more extreme.

Apart from that, I have found Shanghai quite more international than Beijing or Xi’an. Most labels are also in English, you see many foreign people in the street, and also the aspect of most of the city is western-styled, with skyscrapers and so on… Still, we have the mess in the traffic, the bicycles, and the intense shopping… but it is different.

Deep down, this was a small town until the french and the british arrived here and made what we can see today. In fact, there is a neighbourhood called French Concession (tomorrow I hope to find time for it) and you can hear a lot of French in the streets…

Coming back to the question: “Where are you from?”… The answer they expected me to give when they asked me the question entitling this post was “France”, and they looked disappointed when I said: “No, Spain”… “But you look French…!!”