SIGHTING OF THE FABLED MAN IN SILK PJs

So there I was standing in line at my favourite dumpling shop minding my own business when my peripheral vision caught sight of what shocked my brain into disbelief:

A bald, burly man swaggering down the street in his gold embroidered silk pajamas and shiny white sneakers, with enough bling blings to put a gangsta rapper to shame.

I did a double take. The man (not the man himself but the like of him) whom I had read about in a travel forum came to life right before my very eyes.

His unconventional style, it seemed, was not too uncommon to stop traffic, but some eyebrows were definitely raised. Apparently, there are talks of issuing a ban on such a sartorial faux pas in Shanghai because it causes, in the words of a government official, “visual pollution”. Talk about a nanny state.

Welcome to Shanghai, where East not only meets West, but the sartorially gifted and challenged also coexist, at least for now.

We reached the final leg of our sojourn through China. Feeling a little travel-weary, we gave Suzhou a miss (which has won more critics than fans these days) and stayed put in Shanghai for the next three days. Being in the most modern and cosmopolitan city in the country, we thought some pampering was in order. We checked into a quaint little boutique hotel and spent many productive hours lazing in bed and watching TV whenever we were not out on the streets working up a double whammy of coronary disease and Type II diabetes with the sweet and oily Shanghainese fare.

When we managed to pry ourselves from the television set, we did our fair share of inane, touristy stuff that would make the good folks of the Shanghai tourism board proud. We marched down the row of colonial edifices at the Bund like our trusty guidebook had instructed us to, clinked glasses on the top of the world (some call it ‘Cloud 9’), gawked at possibly the most recognizable skyline in Asia or the world (the space station was kind of hard to miss), but stopped short at joining the queue in front of the hyped up Nanxiang Mantou Dian. We knew better. The most scrumptious xiao long baos known to mankind are steamed elsewhere.

Shanghai, as you may guess, is not a very interesting city, which explains the copious amount of time spent indoors and the dearth of photos.

Next stop: yet another Chinese city but not in (or of) China. Yes, Taipei.

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