Sunday, April 19th – Monday, April 20th
We spent the next couple of days exploring countless art galleries, drinking only a few less milk cheese teas (think tea with a layer of cream cheese type foam at the top that you drink through, something Christy had discovered in earlier explorations), and enjoying life in a crazy big city.
On Sunday we headed over to an district of art galleries. Lots of fun experimentation going on, and it rained steadily on us a lot of the time but we had our umbrellas from Taiwan and felt right at home!. Instead of cool art you get a photograph of a bridge and ton of construction. Shanghai! What follows is just kind of a random scattershot of photos from the couple of days.
Monday we took the metro over to the Pearl! You can pay an outrageous amount of money to go up to the various viewing areas. Which we might have done except it was super foggy out that day (see top picture and one above this). Instead we gazed up at it from the base, then got some ice cream. Cheaper and tastier!
After the foggy Pearl we headed to People’s Square and visited the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art. I don’t know why Brutus Buckeye is being attacked in the picture above but it was a strange reminder of home.
Oh, god. These were so awful. I ate one and tossed the rest. Some kind of wet doughy substance in the middle, like the consistency of ground up tofu. Terrible and yet commonly seen.
After that I had one of these dessert waffles which are even more common and this time for good reason. They ask you how you want it flavored, I did “cheese” flavor at their recommendation. It’s just a powder they throw into the batter before they cook it, and the flavor was pretty subtle, but hello dessert waffle! The post-mushy-cube-of-death evening was saved!
These pictures are pretty random. Shanghai is full of interesting things to do and just walking around the city itself is great. I find this is common with me, the parts that stick to my brain are the feel of walking about and in Shanghai this means busy alleys and side streets, sidewalks appearing and disappearing, bicycles piled all over, people strolling wherever in a constant low level bustle. There’s a clear push and pull between folks jaywalking and people trying to obey things like traffic signals; to a large extent generational with younger people more likely obey the signals. The bicycles locked to every surface seem a newish change; the government recently encouraged a couple of bicycle rental companies to really have a presence. They’re managed differently here, the wheel locks and the bike can be left anywhere (not like the US ones where you have to start and end at that company’s bike rack) and customers use their smartphone to say “find me the nearest bicycle” and uses GPS to locate one This seems super convenient and tons of people are using them. Unfortunately that also means they end up parked all over the city’s already busy sidewalks, alongside everyone’s (often electric) scooters. It’s a fascinating and amazing city.