September 17 - China: Shanghai
Last night, we had some strange dreams and nightmares. It's not part of the daily journal, because it's a bit outlandish and sounds silly in the light of day. But I wrote it up anyway because I want to remember it.
Air Conditioning
Just as a side note, the night before last we awoke burning up because the air conditioner had switched off although we have local controls for it. Jon called the front desk and had them turn it back on. We've experienced this in hotels before, where they turn off the A/C in order to save electricity money. And they turn it off for a few hours in the middle of the night hoping that the guests won't notice. Well, Jon's A/C instincts are telepathic, and he usually wakes up as soon as it turns off.
So yesterday, he spoke to the manager to make sure it wouldn't happen again. But it did again last night, and he had to call downstairs to ask them to turn it back on. Unbelievably, the woman at the front desk said, "Oh. They're doing maintenance. Can you wait an hour?". To which Jon replied, "No. Nick the Manager said that my air conditioning wouldn't be turned off. Please turn it back on.". So five minutes later, it was. Maintenance at 4:30 in the morning? I think not. What kind of a place is this?
Jon Goes for a Run Along the River (special appearance by Jon: run #5)
Last night I decided that yesterday's run went so well that I would run again today. Learning my lesson from yesterday's outing I decided to head out early and managed to get out by 8am. 8am may not actually be early, but when you're on vacation it seems early! Yesterday's run was south along the Bund, which is the old British-style area along the Huangpu Jiang river so today I decided to run North. The path along the river ended after a couple of minutes so I ended up running in the bike lane in the street; not exactly the scenic view of the river and its opposite bank, but still a good run nonetheless.
The only major excitement was when I tried to go from the bike lane to where I figured the river path would be (my bike lane was inland from the river by about a block or so). I ran through a little gate which I figured was there to prevent cars from driving close to the river path...I had just watched a woman walk her bike through the gate and this seemed to support my initial thoughts. About 100m after passing through the gate I could see the river path ahead of me and felt secure in my decision to go this route. By now I am maybe halfway between the gate and the river when I hear someone yelling after me. It turns out that the gate must have been some sort of security checkpoint and I must have caught the guard slacking off because I now had a man in a Chinese Army uniform frantically trying to catch up with me, shouting something in Chinese. He seemed to be telling me that I wasn't allowed here and needed to turn around. Without breaking stride I just turned around and continued back to the bike lane and continued with the run. Lesson learned: If you are going to run through gates, run faster!
The Sex Museum
Jon, Mel, Ken and I went to the infamous "Shanghai Museum on Chinese Sex Culture". We had heard about this place from a few people, and it's actually quite well-known here in Shanghai. Unfortunately, it's also moved locations. We walked to the first location, only to find out that the new building is across town a taxi-ride away. So the four of us piled into a taxi and headed there.
The museum was full of all sorts of interesting stuff such as statues, painted porcelain bowls, chastity belts, tiny shoes for women with bound-feet, and various phallic symbols. But - by far - the most entertaining part of the museum was the English translations of Chinese museum text. For example, the exhibit had a European tour, and there were commemorative pictures of the exhibit's days in Germany. One caption read, "Many German students came and were very excited". Yeah, no kidding.
Jon snuck a few photos of the museum exhibits while we were in there, and has fought long and hard to have at least one of the pictures on the website. However, I want to maintain some sort of taste in our journals (C'mon! My grandparents read this!). So we reached a compromise --- here is a link to a picture, which is known as a "Widow's Toy". You can only imagine.
Shanghai Art Museum
We are suffering from sushi withdraw from our favorite place in New York - Jelleado - so we went to Sumo Sushi for lunch. It wasn't nearly as good, but it was nice to pretend for a little while. After that, we walked down to the Shanghai Art Museum which we accidentally wandered into on our way to the Shanghai Museum yesterday and it looked interesting so we decided to go back. On the ground floor was a huge contemporary glassworks exhibit. It was beautiful. The sculptures were huge and colorful, and from artists all over the world. There is apparently a push in the Chinese art world to reincarnate the glass art movement. So the end of the exhibit was dedicated to some of the bigger Chinese artists. These exhibits had an Asian twist to them that we didn't see in any of the other artworks - they were lovely. Here's an example by Loretta Hui Shan Yang:
"West Lake, The Mirror" by Loretta Hui Shan Yang
We spent a while in the glass exhibit, and then wandered upstairs to additional floors. The second floor had sketchings and small paintings from Russia, but all the captions were unfortunately in Chinese so we couldn't appreciate the artists. We spent a few minutes more there, but we were getting tired and wanted to see if there were interesting things on the other floor.
Floor 3 was partly paintings from South America, and partly Chinese art. It was the latter that interested us the most. We spent a lot of time in an exhibit called "Leather Art". All the art in these rooms were displayed on the wall via light panels. This is because the leather was so thin and intricately carved, that we couldn't admire it any other way. The leather was carved into people with ornate clothing, buildings with elaborate carvings, and furniture with beautiful colors. It's so hard to describe, so here's a picture:
Leather Art
This picture really doesn't do it justice, but all the white you see in between the colors are holes carved out of leather which is really only 3-4 mm thick and almost transparent. The carvings of people were always done in silhouettes, and some of the leather was carved so thinly that the lines of leather were pencil-thin. Many of the characters had movable joints, and the leather of their elbow and forearm were attached by a knot or a separate leather piece. And later on the exhibit described why: these are puppets, and the buildings, furniture, and dragons were part of the set. This is called shadow puppetry. Their hands would be attached to sticks and operated from below, and the entire puppet show would be done in front of a backlit sheet or white screen. So amazing to think that these gorgeous leather carvings were actually for functional use!
Dinner and Nanjing Xilu
We walked back from the Art Museum to the hotel, picked up our laundry from the man in the little shop down the street, and then went to the Internet Cafe. We met the group for dinner and went to a restaurant just across the street from the hotel. But the food wasn't very good, and Jon and I were at the opposite end of the table from where the food was served. So we got the plates after most everyone had served themselves and didn't get to eat a lot. (By the way, we eat Chinese style where we order for the table and we all share). We left the restaurant very hungry and walked out to Nanjing Xilu to hit McD's for burgers.
I don't think I've described Nanjing Xilu yet. This is the street around the corner of our hotel, and part of it is a pedestrian mall. It is quite the place to be at night, and is always crowded with people. The stores are lit up by big neon signs and the walkway usually has something fun to look at. The other night we saw a huge group of kids with Chinese flags running down the walkway and cheering and singing. It turns out that they were celebrating the win of some soccer match. Tonight, Jon and I walked around for a little while and then went back to the room to try to sleep.
Nanjing Road at night
