We started the morning at the Urban Planning Museum. This showed the transition from the Shanghai of the early 1900's when it was a thriving international financial center to the future. Shanghai has three distinct foreign areas: the American concession, French Concession, British Concession. You can still see the beautiful buildings from this era. Apparently it's a trendy restaurant and shopping area. We did so a little shopping in that area. It had very small shops, but some unusual things. Shanghai today is an amazing city 24 million people. The skyline is quite amazing. They have the 3rd tallest building in the world. It looks like the building boom is going to continue with many more high rises going in to house the population.
Shanghai is an amazing city. It is a stark contrast to Beijing. To me Beijing, seems much more like an authentic Chinese city. I think that because Shangahi has had so much western influence over the years, it has a lot more of a western feel. One area that this is apparent is the number of "western" style toilets we found in the city. It just feels a little less crowded, but we weren't in the areas where the lower and middle class people live. I'm sure you can search these areas out and get a feel for the authentic Shanghai.
Model of Shanghai
Plans for a future Shanghai
We then visited the Shanghai Museum. It has an amazing collection of Chinese bronzes, coins, furniture, ceramics, paintings, ethnic outfits, etc. They arranged the displays quite well tracing the evolution of the art form from the earliest examples to the Qing Dynasty. The museum also showed how the art forms were practiced, for example how the bronzes were made.
Example of bronze vessel
Early Chinese coins
Oracle bone from the calligraphy exhibit
Example of Chinese ceramic
After the art museum we were on our own for lunch. We went to a touristy shopping area, the Yu Garden Bazaar, but four of us decided to go with our Chinese expert, Jeff, to a local restaurant. He found us an authentic noodle place. It was delicious, a very rich broth with skinny noddles and beef. I didn't get the spicy variety, but the others did. Of course, we had a big beer with our lunch. The beer here is 2-3% alcohol. Very mild, but delicious on a very hot, muggy day. They actually call it soda.
Anne, Calvin & Thea
The Yu Gardens was our next stop. It is a beautiful garden built during the Ming Dynasty 1368-1644. Lovely place, but the heat and humidity was a bit overwhelming. It was in the 90's and very humid. After the gardens, we did a little more shopping and then headed back to the hotel for an early dinner.
After dinner, we saw a Chinese acrobat show. Wow, some amazing feats they performed. There were 6 girls that rode bikes, stood on bikes, hopped from bike to bike, stood on the handlebars and steered the bikes. It scared me to death. There was also a very large metal hollow sphere that motorcycles rode on the inside of. At one point there were 7 or 8 bikes riding in circles in the sphere. The most beautiful performance was the large ribbons hung from the ceiling and two performers swinging around the arena. The whole performance was amazing, but I was pretty nervous the whole time worrying about the performers falling and getting hurt.
June 22nd, 2016
I woke up early to take a walk on the Bund with Sonya from Kansas and Ginger from Washington DC. The Bund is a walk way that borders the Huangpu River. It is located in the old French Concession. From there you can see the Pudong skyline, the view of the main downtown area of Shanghai. We saw lots of people doing Tai chi with fans, dancing. It was a wonderful walk but a humid day ahead for the city of Shanghai.
We checked out of our hotel and took a high speed train, the Meglev, to the airport. It travels the distance to the airport in 7 minutes at 430 kilometers per hour which is about 275 mph. Arrived at the airport and we are still waiting for our flight to Osaka, Japan. We have already had our gate changed once and our flight was supposed to leave at 2:15pm and it's now 2:40pm with no information about when we'll take off. To quote Calvin "They better have beer on this plane."
Until tomorrow.
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