TravelJournel 23042024-25042024-Shanghai

Journal of Travel in Shanghai

Li Ao travelled to Shanghai in order to submit his visa application and participate in an visa interview. While the detailed information cannot be publicly disclosed, a journal of his travel in Shanghai is presented to provide guidance to people in wishes to travel to this city.

Travel Agenda

Li Ao used 3 days in this travel. The planned purpose of this travel is to finish visa application and obtain services from various banks, especially foreign banks operated in China.

Actual travel agenda is as follows, on the table.

Date	Activities Conducted	Remarks
23/6/2024	Walk across Jing'an District and get familar with routes to the SOHO Donghai Plaza building, where visa application is conducted at a mission abroad office in this building. He was able to arrive at the building, by walking from Shanghai Railway Station after exiting, without the help of geolocation-based positioning devices and maps. He recorded information on the roads surrounding the building alongside with other nearby buildings. After arriving at the road surronding the building, he asked for instructions of the way to enter the premise. He was able to find out the way to enter the building with the instructions given. During the walk before arriving to the building, he visited several banks and requested services at the branches.
24/6/2024	Li Ao arrived at the building and interacted with service staff responsible for his visa application. After consultation, another visit needs to be conducted to submit the visa application. He later transferred to Lu Jia Zui seeking for banking services; because of not remembering the approximate route which allows moving by walk, and in the needs of arriving fast, he onboarded on the Shanghai Metro transportation. He later walked in to a building named DBS Bank Building, and requested for services at a branch located on the 1st floor. He was later issued a bank account and a UnionPay debit card, after hours of negotiation with the bank addressing a problem, with additional minutes of time on the processing of the application.
25/4/2024	Li Ao planned to walk to the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station without the help of any positioning devices and without asking for anybody the route to the destination. Instead, he will rely on very basic road infrastructure, including road maps, as major information source to the destination. During the move before confirming that road infrastructure is damaged which no longer providing directions to the destination, he did not ask for route by any means; however, he walked in to the nearest metro stations asking for the length of metro line to the metro station which closes to Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station, to estimate the length remaining until reaching to the destination. By strictly following the instructions of the roadmap, Li Ao arrived at a T-shaped junction which has no roadmaps providing further instructions. Because of the abnormalities of the road infrasturcture, he acknowledged that further roads remains unknown to him and he asked for instructions to get to the destination. Neither traffic police officers nor people he was asking with, provided the correct route. After confirming the roadmap issue, Li Ao insulted multiple traffic police officers to express his anger to the collapsed Chinese governance. He later took the metro to get to the railway station; walking to the nearest railway station which is no more than 1.5 kilometres from the route that having the roadmap issue, there was only 2 stations away to the destination, while he confirmed 5 stations were needed before, during the trip by walk.

Additional Travel Advice to Travellers Relying On Traditional Basic Infrastructure for Road Navigation

Please note that the dependencies to Chinese smartphone software and cloud services continues to become a serve situation which results in people that rely on traditional road infrastructures unable to get services that satisfies the quality requirements. Under the collapsed governance, public agencies will not take care of people's interest, including local people and foreign nationals. Travellers with a plan of being in Shanghai should be aware that getting help from public entities are very limited and that there may not be a satisfying outcome as a result.

Additional Travel Advice of Shanghai

During his trip, he also acknowledged that Shanghai is facing serve situation of loosing talents and expats because of changed situations of the national government. Similar to Hong Kong, Shanghai is accepting new inhabitants from other regions, including northern Chinese provinces which with more people uneducated and uncivilised. Social development is pausing but pathway to socialist and communism is progressing, and as a result, the city is no longer suitable for substantial development.

A Bank of China branch serving for him was asking repeatedly to set up the limit of daily amount of debit transactions after he was being issued a debit card, to probably 10k or 20k Chinese Yuan. However, it must be remarked alongside that a China Citic Bank and the staff at the DBS Bank branch as outlined on the table, did not ask him to