Shanghai Beer Festival in July and August

One of the benefits of being in Shanghai during the rainy, muggy, mosquito-filled months of July and August is the opportunity to visit the Shanghai Beer Festival, located in the historic Bund area along the Huangpu River. First introduced in 1992, the festival, running from the end of July to the beginning of August, attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists to enjoy mostly Asian and Australian brews in front of the monuments to the new Shanghai. From the moment we first landed in Beijing and I cracked open my Lonely Planet guidebook, stumbling across the tip about hitting up this event, I vowed to be there. What can I say, I love beer.

Many a night in Shanghai saw us ambling along the riverwalk of the Bund, passing by the obligatory Mao statue, the Olympic Ring sculptures, the pay-to-pee public restrooms, and the many vendors eager to serve us their freshly made dumplings and spicy Kung Pao. On the Bund side of the river were the European-style buildings of the concessionary colonial era. It was easy to imagine haughty British businessmen entering and exiting these banks, businesses, and stock markets, eagerly discussing when the next opium shipments would arrive up the river with which to ply their Chinese "hosts." Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of these buildings are still occupied by several Western businesses these days. And many of the faces that enter and exit these buildings are still lily-white.

If the Bund represents Shanghai's past, the Pudong area on the other side of the Huangpu epitomizes Shanghai's bright and bustling future. First developed in 1990, Pudong quickly became not only the economic and financial center but also the symbol of the new Shanghai. The futuristic Oriental Pearl TV Tower (with the world's most elevated post office at the top) and the 88-story Jin Mao Tower skyscraper dominate the skyline of the region, which is home to 1.5 million Shanghai residents. Construction on Pudong is constant, and one can feel the heart of the city shifting across the river from the Bund.

However, for our purposes, the Bund was the place to be, since that was where the Beer Festival would take place. On the day we picked to go out to the festival, David, Ricky, and I convinced Professor Yu, who was originally from Shanghai, to join us in celebrating the joys of drinking beer on the river. We hopped a cab to the Bund, and while Professor Yu conversed in Shanghainese with the cab driver, a surprising realization suddenly came to me.

"Professor Yu, were you just telling the driver to take a left up there, take that back road, and then head over the bridge, since that's the fastest way to get to the Bund?"

"Yeah, that is definitely the fastest way, so that's what I was telling him," he replied.

"I think I understood most of what you were just saying to him!"

Shanghainese was the local Chinese dialect and differed quite a bit from Mandarin Chinese for most phrases. Evidently, I had been in Shanghai long enough at this point that some of it had absorbed into my brain. Professor Yu smiled and congratulated me on becoming a Shanghainese, and said that he had found that if you are in an area long enough, you pick up the language without even knowing it. For the rest of the trip to the festival, I picked Professor Yu's brain on Shanghainese phrases - like "How much?", "That's too expensive, could you go a little lower?" and "I am a Shanghainese" - to use on unsuspecting antiques dealers and DVD peddlers in the future. Professor Yu said speaking Shanghainese would definitely increase my odds in a bargaining showdown. Ha! Adam 1, Shanghai 0.

The Huangpu river walk at night is nothing short of spectacular, with the skyscrapers and towers of Pudong all lit up, and the electronic billboard lightshows that are so prevalent in modern Asian cities dancing away. That night, we were also treated to tent after tent of different beer vendors with scantily-clad beer girls handing out the bottles. As with most things in China, the beer is incredibly cheap. For a da bing de ping pijiu (tall, cold bottle of beer - it's always important to specify that you want it cold) the going price at the festival was four yuan, and if you returned the bottle after you finished you got two yuan back. So, assuming we were not getting too drunk to recycle, we were spending about 25 cents for a large (20 ounces or more) bottle of decent to good beer. We found a table with a good view of Pudong, and grabbed a couple Tiger beers from a nearby vendor.
Professor Yu began regaling us with tales from his youth, including swimming across the Huangpu to Pudong, back when that area was little more than undeveloped farmland. He and his brothers used to camp out over on the Pudong side, and, as the youngest of the lot, Professor Yu would be forced by his brothers to drag a raft with supplies behind him as he swam. The Huangpu is a pretty serious river, and as we looked across the river and imagined a little kid swimming across it, even unencumbered with supplies, we were greatly impressed by the good professor.

The Legend of the Yu grew even more impressive as he told us about his time in China during the Cultural Revolution. While we polished off our next da ping pijiu (this time we tried Foster's Asian brand, which tasted different than what we know of as "Australian for beer"), Professor Yu recounted how he had been denounced by a family enemy, and sent to Mongolia to work on a farm as a prison laborer. From sunup to sundown, he toiled away, with no knowledge of his family's welfare or whereabouts. In his "off-time", he was forced to attend criticism sessions and ideological education classes. His greatest anger at this, he recalled somberly, was that it delayed, and to some extent hampered, his college education. Asked if it was hard coming back to China, he said no, that that was a different time and that China is a completely changed place. Every time he comes back to Shanghai, the professor noted, it seems to be a different city because of all the construction and new businesses that pop up.

By this time other classmates of ours had begun to trickle down to the festival. As they joined us at the table and Professor Yu became involved in their various conversations, Dave and I decided to investigate an interesting phenomena we had observed while sitting at the table and people-watching. About three out of every four people we saw were wearing a white t-shirt that said "I (heart) Shanghai" with the "I" represented by a bottle of "Reeb" beer (Reeb is beer spelled backwards). Not wanting to miss out on the opportunity to procure such a great (and possibly free) souvenir of the festival, we set out to find the Reeb beer booth.

It is amazing to behold the variety of beers you encounter that you never knew existed when you visit a new country. Prior to my arrival in China, I knew of one Chinese (or even Asian for that matter) brand of beer - Tsingtao. But passing by each of the beer vendors on our way to the t-shirts revealed a thriving Asian beer culture. Suntory, the local brew which we drank in droves while residing in Shanghai, had a booth that was instantly recognizable from the adjacent giant inflatable beer bottle bearing its name. Tiger Beer, hailing from the tiny city-state of Singapore, was another popular vendor along the Bund. This had as much to do with the flavor of the beer as it did with its scantily-clad and stunningly beautiful beer girls luring potential patrons over to their booth. Of course the ubiquitous Budweiser and Foster's brands had several tents lining the riverwalk, but the best da ping pijiu came from the home-grown light lagers of China, Japan, Singapore, and the other Asian representatives.

We finally arrived at the Reeb booth on the other end of the riverwalk as nighttime had settled on the festival. Employing our best intermediary Chinese language skills, we were able to ascertain that this booth was indeed the place for the "I (heart) Shanghai" t-shirts, but at the moment they were fresh out. After giving the beer girls our best downtrodden and disappointed looks, and bugging them to death in broken Chinese about the matter, they finally called over to a shady-looking guy who was literally lurking in the shadows. He motioned for us to follow him, and, in what would be a pattern I would follow in subsequent travels in China and elsewhere, I tagged along to who knows where in my usual trusting manner. Luckily, David came as well. Being a devoted anime and kung-fu movie devotee, I figured if anything bad went down, ol' Dave could use his ninja skills that he surely absorbed from these shows. Or, at the very least, he could shoot balls of fire out of his hands to scare them away.

The shadowy man led us to a tent about a block away from the rest of the festival. He looked around suspiciously before lifting a corner of the tent and grabbing two t-shirts, quickly lowering the tent corner afterwards.

"Wushi kuai." Fifty yuan, or about $6.50 US. Each. A bit steep for cheap beer t-shirts.

"Ershi kuai," we replied, attempting to lower the price to twenty yuan. Hey guy, you can't fool a fooler - we had developed pretty great bargaining skills by this point.

"Wushi kuai!" He began to shove the t-shirts back under the tent.

"Ok, ok, wushi kuai!" we yelled to him. Damn, we really wanted those t-shirts, and this guy knew it. Not much we could do except suck it up and get ripped off. He gave us the shirts, informed us that these were the last two shirts he had, and quickly darted away with our money. We walked back to the festival, and examined our shirts. Luckily, they were the shirts we wanted, and they were just as awesome as we had hoped. Dave and I nodded to each other approvingly, and we changed into our shiny new t-shirts, blending in with most of the other festival goers. As we ambled back to the beer booths, we came across another American wearing the "Reeb Hearts Shanghai" shirt, and complimented him on his good taste. We then made the mistake of asking him how much he paid for the shirt.

"What do you mean? They were giving them away for free at the Reeb booth."