Why Does the Word Shanghai Mean Kidnap?
Source: Omar A at flickr
This is a new experience for me. I have a couple of weeks vacation from work coming up at the end of July, and somehow I convinced myself I need to visit China. So I booked myself a plane ticket to Shanghai this past Thursday. No hotel, no idea what I’m going to do there. But I’m sure there must be interesting things. This has got to be the most disorganized trip I have ever booked.
It’s a bit scary to be quite honest and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I don’t speak a word of Mandarin Chinese. Usually if I go to a country that doesn’t speak English, I can “get by”. I can talk to people, order food, deal with taxis, read some signs. It doesn’t matter the European language - French, Italian, Spanish… even Greek. I can look at a Greek sign and make out the word Airport or make out the word for Acropolis, and I know I’ll be alright. I can look at a word, and it might sound terrible, but I can pronounce it and teach myself the language in a shorter time.
But Chinese is not a phonetic language in it’s written form. But a friend who once lived in China suggests I get the name of my hotel written in Mandarin before I go, because taxi drivers don’t speak English! That’s tough to comprehend, because in most countries it’s the taxi drivers who DO speak English. I am expecting to get really, really lost at some point. (Not sure if that’s a bad thing or a good thing. Getting lost can be fun!)
The expense of the trip is bothering me as well. Hot on the heals of describing a $5,000 6-month vacation in a recent blog post, I am looking to spend $4,000-$5,000 on a single 2 week trip! That’s precisely NOT what I want to do in the future. But yet, here I sit with only a couple of weeks to go before my trip, and the plane ticket alone is $2,500.
I apologize if my writing isn’t very coherent today, as you can see my mind is a bit of a mess right now. It’s hard to figure out the right thing to do. Do I go on an overpriced trip to a dream destination, or do I save that money for a longer and more fulfilling trip next year? Or do I do both?
I think I need to go. It’s been a year since my last trip, and so I need to go somewhere, anywhere. I literally said to the travel agent, if you can’t get me to Shanghai, anywhere else will do. Beijing, Bangkok, Hong Kong… doesn’t matter. If all they had was a ticket to Buffalo, I might be tempted to take it. Well, maybe not.
The Shanghai World Expo 2010 should be interesting. I’ll definitely spend a couple of days doing that. And I can book myself a couple of side tours to see a place such as Xi’an where the Terracotta Warriors are. The irony of that is that the Royal Ontario Museum
has a display of them going on right now – and it’s within walking distance from here. I could save $4,475 by going there instead.
In the end, I will go. I can’t get myself in too much trouble in Communist China, can I? Just as long as I get back on the plane back to Canada, I should be alright.
But wow, the butterflies are having a field day in my stomach right now.
Oh, and the answer to the question, why does the word Shanghaiing mean kidnapping? It comes from the practice of tricking or forcing sailors to join a crew, and then treating them like slaves once they are aboard. They used to get men drunk, forge their signature on the signup sheet, and then when the man woke up, he was aboard a ship headed out to sea for a few years. It was actually illegal to leave a ship once you signed up (similar to treason in those days I guess), so watch out who you got drunk with! Shanghai was a popular destination for these ships apparently, so when someone was tricked into joining a crew, they were “Shanghaied”. Yikes!
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