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Published: August 4th 2009
Shanghai Acrobats
Cool shot I took in in sepia modeWalked around the city for about 9 hours today and then spent the evening at the famous Shanghai Acrobatic show. The acrobats were great, mostly Cirque de Soleil type stuff but they finished off with some Crusty Demons-esque motorbike stunts .
Kate, me and two friends we've met through Intrepid went and visited the Chinese Communist Museum today and that was fascinating. The museum is built around the site of the first Communist party's congress and Mao's former residence. I wanted to take a lot of photos there 'cause it was pretty amazing but they had some scary security guards through the place making sure we didn't. My co-traveler, Sandy, is a history teacher and we both still took a few photos when the coast was clear. Unfortunately, when we got to the really good stuff like the wax figure replicated scene of Mao and his mates planning the revolution, there was always a serious-faced guard babysitting the exhibit. Lame.
We went to another museum today which paled in comparison to the aforementioned commies although it did have feature a historical exhibit of Chinese pillows and bedding. They were mostly made out of stone or ceramic. This is funny
because for any westerner who visits China, one thing that he or she must get used to is sleeping on a really hard bed. The beds throughout all of China are usually quite hard and our beds here in Shanghai are basically tables with 5cm worth of padding and then a doona on top. I'm told sleeping on hard beds is far better for you. I think I could actually get used to it, maybe not ceramic pillows though.
After the Shanghai Acrobats show, our group were left to find dinner and a way home. One of the highlights of China so far is interacting with the locals. I've come to the realisation that the language barrier can actually be great fun in many situations. For dinner, about 10 of us found a small Cantonese restaurant. We chose it because they had posters of their food across all four of the walls and we figured it would be easy to pick-and-point. They re-arranged all their tables so we could sit together and even the people already dining moved around which was pretty nice. The staff at the restaurant spoke no English and we spoke no Chinese. But somehow we
Our epic dinner
We conquered the language barrier managed to convey what we wanted and our meal turned out to be sensational.
After the meal, we ordered countless bottles of a local Chinese beer and the staff joined in on the drinking and shenanigans. They brought down their camera and wanted photos with us and we all got ours out too. I have to say communicating with speakers of other languages after a few drinks is great, great fun. It's like a never-ending game of charades but everyone explodes into cheers and laughter when a sentence is finally understood. I'll definitely be up for more dinners out in local restaurants like this.
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