March 25, 2016

March 25   Shanghai   

    We slept well and were awake shortly after sunrise, which was around 5:50 a.m.  I took two photos of our view toward The Bund including zooming closer to shoot a small enclave of residential 3 or 4 storey apartment buildings several blocks away.   The raised roadways are laced through the central area of Shanghai. We travelled mainly on freeways yesterday on our ride from the airport.   This morning is sunny with a bit of a haze.   The temperature is around 10 C.

   Breakfast was a fascinating buffet of western and Chinese dishes.  We sat with Americans Jerry and Carolyn and Lorraine and Gary from England. The selection included scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, muffins and Danish pastries.  There were Chinese delights such as congee, a hot cereal; fresh fruit dishes that included pineapple, melons and dragon fruit; stuffed Chinese dumplings, fried tofu, buns with tofu or bean curd fillings and thick noodles in sauces.

   Our group of 24, our guide for the trip, Gao, and the bus driver had our names tags fastened and were on the bus by 8.  There are four people missing that did not arrive yesterday, they may join us later.   We are the only Canadian couple in a group also consisting of British and American visitors.  There are also some Australians who will be on the ship.  Gao passed out audio receivers to use for the morning tours. The first stop was The Bund, which looked different in the daylight, is located in the former International concession.  Our hotel is located in the former French concession.  The boardwalk wall near the ramp leading up to the Bund boardwalk, has a colourful mural created from thousands of purple and yellow pansies.  There are many planters in the area filled with bright pansies. We had a 30 minute stop for pictures from the promenade along the water and to learn some of Shanghai’s history.  The Opium Wars, the first one in 1842, had a great effect on Shanghai which became one of five treaty ports to allow European and American goods into China.  Buildings were built in the second half of the 19th century as well as the first third of the 20th century, especially banks, trading companies and hotels.  On the Bund at one end is the Astor House Hotel, Shanghai’s first foreign hotel, built in 1846. The area around the Bund is where the first opium warehouses known as “go-downs” were built in the 1840s. At the other end is Art Deco style hotel, called the Cathay, built by Iraqi Jewish British Shanganese businessman, Victor Sassoon. Noël Coward wrote the first draft of "Private Lives" while staying at the Cathay in 1930.  The name was changed to the Peace Hotel in the 1950s. It was a taller than 10 storeys building because Mr. Sassoon founded the Aerocrete Company, which produced a lighter, “aerated” concrete that further diminished the load of a building on the swampy Shanghai soil.  The old Bund buildings stretch for about a mile. Mr. Sassoon’s city residence was built as the top storeys of the building.  His out of Shanghai “country estate” is now the home of the Shanghai Zoo.  There is an old water signal house on the boardwalk side of the street and one of the buildings near the middle is the old Customs House with its clock tower modeled on London’s Big Ben clock tower. Number 33 , The Bund consisted of  two buildings built in 1872 originally the British consulate and the consul’s residence.

   Across the Huangpu River, the tallest building tower was just completed two weeks ago.  In it is an elevator that takes you to the top in 55 seconds at a speed of 80 meters per second.  Next, we travelled a short distance to Old Shanghai with its red tiled short buildings, and the Yu Gardens which are now within a bazaar in Old Shanghai. It was a two hour walking tour. The first construction of the Yu Gardens was in 1559 when the Ming Dynasty official Pan Yunduan commissioned the renowned architect Zhang Nanyang to transform his five acres to honor his father.  It took nearly 20 years to complete.  The Yu Garden has been destroyed and rebuilt several times over the past 450 years. The four elements of a Chinese garden are buildings, rock, water and trees, plus flowers. You see a large rock or boulder as you enter. Traditionally the boulder blocks the view into the inner garden. There are several different red tiled roof pagoda style buildings starting with the reception building which included some 16th century Ming Dynasty mahogany chairs, used to entertain guests.  There is also another building, the study, that the owner used for himself and entertained close friends. There were several other pavilions and courtyards and a number of bridges over ponds.  The ponds contain dozens of carp, some being almost 50 centimeters long.  There is a small 15 meter high artificial “Mountain” from which originally you could view the Huangpu River from the little pagoda at the top.  There is a 400 year ginkgo tree and a 100 year old magnolia tree in the same courtyard.  Just outside the main garden area is a pagoda style tea room which is entered via an angles zigzag bridge. Since evil spirits only travel in straight lines the zigzag design prevents them from entering the tearoom. We had 30 minutes to wander around the bazaar before meeting to go to our lunch restaurant.  The bazaar was busy with lots of food for sale, even cotton candy.  There were deep fried items, dumplings with different fillings, fried tofu, small barbecued birds the size of Cornish game hens, kabobs, steam buns even a bun with straws in them since they contained a soup to be sucked out.  There were clothing stores and kite vendors, several silk fabric stores and even a department stores as well as small kiosks selling souvenirs.

    We continued on and passed by older and newer residential apartment buildings. People now have to buy their apartments, rather than rent them.  Some of the more expensive apartments can sell for $1,100 Cdn per square meter.

    The streets are very clean, maintenance people are seen with their brooms and dustpans sweeping leaves and debris from the streets.  There are thousands of people travelling on bicycles and various types of electric bikes and small electric motor cycles.

    A short walk away was a shopping center where we viewed a silk embroidery workshop.  We saw demonstrations of silk hand embroidery pictures which can take weeks to produce using threads that can be very thin and take a 3D look from the textures of the thread.  Selling price for a 40 cm by 50 cm picture can cost about $4,000 Cdn.  There was also a demonstration of a handmade silk rug which can take months to make, requiring 1,200 knots per row. The rugs were more expensive than the pictures.  We enjoyed a Dim Sum lunch at local restaurant, at tables of 8 with the Lazy Susan platform in the center of the round table used  the selection of  over a dozen dishes that we wished to sample.  The table was set with a soup bowl and Chinese soup spoon, black lacquer chopsticks and a fork. The choice of beverage was Chinese lager style beer, Pepsi , 7up or bottled water .

   After lunch, we walked back to the bus parking spot, then, had a short drive to the Shanghai Museum, where we walked through four floors of galleries in 90 minutes.  To step up our walking, we were the only ones of group to take the stairs, rather than escalators, to the fourth floor to start in the gallery featuring displays of Ming and Qing carved wooden furniture.  We worked our way down to the other galleries in the 10,000 square metre museum, which covered more the 3,000 years of history from the Neolithic Age to the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. The exhibits included ceramics, bronze weapons and sculptures, calligraphy, paintings, porcelain pottery, ethnic clothing from different regions of China, old coins and seals from many dynasties, jade carvings and jewellery, even a model of the process of ancient jade mining and processing it into goods to trade. The group was driven back to the hotel around 3, so people could take a break and get ready for an early dinner at 5 in the hotel’s 5th floor restaurant.  I worked on writing this blog entry.

   The group members gave their passports to Gao before dinner, in order to process the flights to Wuhan tomorrow.  We sat with Cindy and Dave from our group at dinner.  The meal started with a seafood broth with a spicy tang to it in a bowl and used a Chinese soup spoon; the rest of the food came in individual 4 compartment black lacquer trays containing fine noodles in a light sauce, white rice with corn, peas and  small cubes of carrot; pork in a sauce,  thin cubes of barbecued duck, lotus root and a dessert of fruit – a piece each of dragon fruit wedge, orange, melon and watermelon.  No one was able to finish the meal since it was substantial and lunch only ended at 12:30.

   After dinner, Gao’s group met at 6:20 to have enough time to negotiate through Friday evening traffic to get the 7:30 Shanghai Acrobatic Troup show. The acrobatics and other performers’ skill and strength were astonishing.  The acrobats feats involved contortion, trapeze tricks performed on narrow trapeze, which looked more like a ladder, held by two people; rope walking ; tumbling and artists jumping on a teeter-totter to send another acrobat up and backwards to land of the shoulders of a person already balancing on someone else’s shoulders.   The finale of the 75 minute show was a demonstration of driving skill by up to eight motorcycle riders on small motorcycles inside of a metal link globe, speeding around the interior curve of the sphere and performing crisscross manoeuvres.  The group was taken back to the hotel after the show. We were back in the room by 9:30, ready to call it a day. We managed to hit our walking goal of 5 miles, by walking 5.8 miles today.