Jade Temple and garlic food attack with Nanjing Mall

---

This will likely begin and end with food. As I had bought some bananas last night that served as a sort of breakfast but decided that I had better have a relatively early lunch. It was indeed fortunate that barely 100 m from the Hotel is a place called Shanghai Grandmother which supposedly served hearty food. So that seemed as good as any for a top up. I ordered some cold eggplant and garlic dish to keep up my vegetable component - there was virtually crushed garlic on top. However this was nothing compared with the pork and black fungus and garlic. There were only about five very thin slices of fried pork in it, quite a lot of black fungus which was okay, but an unbelievable amount of sliced garlic (to the extent that I include a photograph of the remains to prove it). Has to be hardly seems to come in 700ml bottles here I bravely ordered a bottle of Tsingtao (also they listed NZ Steinlager it was not available) - and this was virtually breakfast!

The mission for the day which comes from Frommer was to find the Jade Temple. This was almost as frustrating as the Yu Yuan Garden in terms of not being exactly sure where it was other than near Changshou Rd metro station. As you will see from the photographs the area around there is full of high-rise apartments, but also a few very low rise almost falling down old buildings which will no doubt soon be erased. Fortunately I was eventually able to find Anyuan Rd and was lucky enough to be going east in the right direction and found the temple. A small entry fee of about three dollars and then another $1.50 to see the actual (white) jade Buddha which is upstairs and was supposedly brought from Burma in 1881. After that wandered around giving the general flavour of this more "suburban" Shanghai.

Then the metro back to People's Square and headed down to where I thought the venue for the Shanghai Acrobats was (in reality quite a bit further on). I found the Shanghai Grand Theatre (thought that was it -- not) and a small art exhibition. Then retreated to the foyer of the five-star Marriott Hotel across the road. Eventually asked the concierge who told me that there were no performances from them until 26 December. There was another acrobatic group (there are several) but this would have involved a 10 minute taxi ride god knows where so decided to give it a miss.

I visited the Radisson Hotel in hopes of perhaps a drink on their 47th floor bar . However I got to their 45th floor revolving restaurant and was told that the bar was closed (must be low season!). Also decided that the prices on the "international " and Chinese food at about three times normal was not really good value so left. Then decided a slow walk down East Nanjing Rd mall which is a mass of neon and one of the greatest strip of shops in China likely. It was unlikely that there would be any real food other than fast food on the strip so when to a street one off. There I took a stab on Ren Ren which I think is a play on shark shark as they seem to specialise in shark fin bits and pieces. As I have never had either started with an alleged shark fin and abalone soup. This was on a somewhat disconcerting pumpkin colour and I assume the shark fin had only been waved over it. There was however also what I assume was a piece of abalone in it and some black fungus. I was half expecting it to be inedible or something but it was okay. Then a three yellow colour Pudong chicken - a cold dish chopped up like what I would call Hainan chicken which was really nice - and with some floral ornamentation (see picture). I wondered why the slightly smaller bottle of Tsingtao Snow beer was more expensive then noted it was 8% alcohol rather than 5%.

The walk back to my hotel did not seem to take long (must have been the beer) but as it is closer to the Bund walked down there for a night view. It really is one of the world's great streets or at least promenades. Night shots from there accompany.

---