Temples and Tourists

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Since leaving the university i have found Shanghai to be less exciting than i imagined! Don't get me wrong, I have been having fun and amusing myself, but the general drone of the city, the continual noise, the continual prescence of people without a moment to yourself; its starting to become quite draining now.

On Saturday i gained my baerings of the waterfront (the bund) and the main shopping road (nanjing road) and people's square (the park that marks the city centre), and i moved into my new hostel. The captains hostel is quite nice and clean and smart, and it has a nice bar, but the staff are unfriendly and the room mates that i have been lumbered with are miserable! Most seem to be long term Chinese residents and i therefore feel like an unwanted guest in their room. Nevermind, i managed eventually to meet up with Greg and Kez on Saturday night (if you flick back through my blogs you will find that i met these guys in Plettenburg Bay in South Africa last year), they are living and teaching here now and know the place quite well. They took me to what is essesntially an Aussie bar called the Eager Beaver in the French quarter of the city and i met loads of aussies and drank lots of vodka! It was great to catch up with them and i felt very much at home dancing on the bar to western songs! We ended up in a night club which is underground, but, if you pressed me on it i would have no idea where it was or what it was called! All i know is that we danced alot and didn't leave the club untill 6am (much to my dismay, i am still jetlagged and it felt like 11pm to me!).

Suffice to say i did not do much on Sunday! I headed over to 'new Shanghai', the Pu Dong region where there is a lovely big park called Century Park. It was my salvation on Sunday! It was so nice to get out of the city and into a place with trees and grass. I wandered aimlessly, watching Chinese families enjoying the sunshine, lounged on the grass reading my book, and refrained from returning to the city untill it was dark! When i did return i was sitting listening to the saxaphonist on Nanjing Road when a middle aged Australian man approached me and started chatting. It turned out that he was a lecturer of economics in Sydney, and was currently touring China by himself, and would i like to have dinner with him because he was desperate for some western company! I was a little cautious and chatted to him for a while before taking up his offer, but he turned out to be a very nice man! Not only that but he warned me about a scam theat i almost befell the very next day! In China there are alot of students who talk to westerners in order to improve their English, and mostly they are very friendly and nice people, they chat for 5 or 10 minutes and then go about their business. However, there are some who take advatage of this and by inviting you to a tea house under the pretence of practicing english, they then proceed to rip you off with the tea house charging maybe 10 dollars for one sip of tea, yet the ceremony involves five sips of tea and you have 3 students with you! Before you know it you've spent $200!! If i had not acquired this information i may have been tempted to go with the nice students who stopped to chat to me in people's square the very next day! As it was i refused and went to the city planning museum instead...

The city planning museum was pretty cool, its all interactive and there is a HUGE model of the whole of Shanghai with every single building perfectly crafted and put into position. I may have been intersted in much of the museum because of my PhD, but i defy anyone not to spend at least half an hour staring and wandering round such an amazing model!

Last night i walked up Nanjing Road in the dark... except that it is like daytime! It is all lit up and the shops remain open untill 10pm or later. Its hypnotising to watch all of the lights, and many families bring their small children out to play even at 9pm, because they love the lights. It is alot like New York City, or Blackpool on acid!

Today i went to the temple of the jade buddha, and it was a fascinating analysis of human behaviour -east meets west! The temple is fantastic, the statues are beautiful -particularly the Jade Buddha itself, which i became entranced with for quite some time. However, it is so sad to see that it has become a market for the sale of cheap souveniers. The statues are amazing, if you ignore the stalls that sit alongside them selling everything from mini buddha statues and incense to necklaces and paintings. The monks do still practice in the temple, but many times they were interupted from going about their daily business by tourists asking where the toilets were. And people who had genuinely come to pray to the statues risked having their photographs taken as they bowed forwards. It was quite sad really, i'm sure that the curches and cathederals of England are not upset in quite the same manor.

The temple of the town God's was also a fascinating visit this afternoon, there are no practising monks here, and the temple is surrounded by a beautiful garden in which you can get quite lost in its nooks and crannies. I sat watching the wildlife (birds, fish and tourist alike) for quite a while, before heading to mcdonalds for fries (i have to point out here that i dislike macdonalds immensely, but without it i may have starved to death by now, partly because i have eaten enough chinese food to last me the rest of my life, and partly because i cannot explain that i am a vegetarian in Chinese!!). This evening i have been shopping and haggling in the shops near to the temple ( i love haggling over things!).

I'm not sure what tommorrow will bring, but Toby (go back to travel blog on Tanzania and you will find him, another person who is co-incidentally in the same place again!) arrives in Shanghai on Thursday, and so that should liven the night life up a bit!

I hope everyone is doing well back at home. I'm missing you (you know who you are)!

Anna x

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