Shanghai - Sightseeing Day 1

---

So to start the day I found out that all of China has the same time zone. I woke up thinking that I was late for meeting in the hotel lobby. Turns out that the sun rises at 4 am. So at 6 it would look late. But you don’t know this in a Chinese hotel because there are no clocks in the room. There are no clocks on the walls, on the phones, or on any of the 71 channels that make up cable television. Luckily my roommate had a cell phone and it auto-updated after 30 minutes of scouring for the time.

Breakfast was good. There were a lot of different pastries. There was also fried rice with scrambled eggs and ham mixed in, yummy. There was also chicken sausage, bacon that was actually a step down to ham, ham that was a step down to processed meat, and hard-boiled eggs. To drink there was also an odd, watered-down melon juice that was a little like sweet orange juice.

The first actual thing that we did today was visited the People’s square and the Shanghai Museum (as a cool side note I learned that it was international museum day today, cool to find myself in a Chinese museum today. It had so many cultural artifacts. There were 5 floors and different rooms on each floor dedicated to showing the time progression in different cultural categories. For instance the first room was where they had the metal artifacts on display from the Shang dynasty (16th century B.C.) until about the 12th century A.D. It was so cool to see how there bronze pots became molded goblets with complex mold on them. After that was the porcelain room. The coolest part about this was seeing how the Chinese were able to start adding colored glazing, the style of which I could recognize in old English porcelain. Turns out that the English got the technique during the Colonial era. Give a little perspective on how long it has been “made in China.” The things you learn. The currency room was interesting, but there were too many coins , so I went to the furniture room. This room reminded me that I wasn’t looking at artifacts that just anyone had, It was funny because was triggered the thought was that I could not imagine a redneck put any of in the back of his pick-up truck or in the front yard. Oh what America has taught me,

Then it was on to see the Temple of the Jade Buddha, which is this magnificent temple that is kind of the headquarters of Buddhism in China. The temple had many ornate statues that I could not take a picture of due to the death of my camera battery (we will hope that I am able to se more of it through pictures that I steal from others). It was probably the biggest place of non-Catholic worship I have been. The place smelled heavily of burning incense and there were many people on kneeling pillows that were praying and trying to get around all of the tourists getting in the damn way.

Lunch was again strange experience. It was served the same way as dinner from the night before (each item was on a plat and the plates were on a big rotating disc in the middle of the table that anyone could spin and get what they want). The food was more authentically Chinese, which I personally thought was better. There was a sweet and crispy roll, beef stew, muscles, and among other things that I could not remember there was everyone’s favorite – sticky rice.

After Lunch we went to the Yu Garden, which is a very large private garden the state now owns to preserve old culture. There was a lot of nature still in it; more of a forest with a person weaved in instead of the opposite way found in the States. Then we shopped around the area and paused to take the bus over to Nanjing Street and continue shopping,

Dinner was even more Chinese then lunch, and I don’t think I approve. Too much tofu. The only meat was a whole fish, which I will admit was very delicious.

The last thing we did today was see the acrobatics of Shanghai. Just picture the stuff you see at Barnum and Bailey’s, just with better stuff. The performers were incredible. The show had everything from a guy balancing on 5 boards balanced on a cylinder catching 4 small bowls on top of his head thrown simultaneously by his foot to no less than 7 motorcycles doing tricks in a large sphere. Definitely the Broadway of acrobatics.

Well that does it for the day. Until next time…

---

Photos

Shanghai Museum
Shanghai Museum entrance. The inside is even more sophisticated.

Temple of the Jade Buddha
These are two of the Golden Buddhas in the Temple of the Jade Buddha. I was no able to take an actual picture of the Jade Buddha because photography was not permitted.