Shanghai

The second of 2 posts today

We don’t usually take one of the ship’s tours, but with our berth an hour away from this city of 16 million people whose primary language is in an alphabet we can’t read, we decided we would. It turned out to be a good decision. The tour bus picked us up at the ship. The tour guide was a young, unmarried man who told us all about his family, including mother, father, auntie, and their customs and traditions. It was interesting and informative to hear about their culture. Not far away is the city of Chung King, a city of 32 million people, which ballooned in population with the relocation of factory workers from Shanghai. Close to 50 million people in just these 2 cities.

Our first stop was downtown Shanghai in front of the Jin Mao Building and Oriental Pearl Tower, their television tower. Just about every city now seems to have a tower for observation from a high perspective. Jin Mao is a tall building, 88 stories high, which was the largest building in Asia until Dubai beat them by more than 10 floors. So now they are building another skyscraper that will be 110 floors. The lower floors are usually banks and shops, middle floors are hotels and restaurants, top floors are offices.

After that the next stop was The Bund, which is the elegant riverfront promenade, lined with lovely 19th century buildings. The river carries an enormous number of vessels of all kinds, many container ships on a very busy waterway.

There is surprisingly a Chinatown in a city in China. When the Europeans first began trading, there were established zones, American, British, French and of course, Chinese. The Chinese section became known as Chinatown. The Old Town stop included a walk through the narrow, winding streets lined with shops (a Starbucks) and a temple.

The Children’s Palace, is an after school center run by the government for economically disadvantaged children 3 to 7 years old. The school emphasizes the arts and provides one-on-one training on musical instruments, in dance, and visual arts in an attempt to make up for the time and resources that more affluent parents put into extra lessons for their children. In appearance, the school could be a day care center in the US except for the language. Cute little kids entertained us playing the piano, violin, zither, cello. One child was very much like one of our grandchildren with a twinkle in his eye as he leapt off the stage to shake hands with gusto with each of the many tourists in the audience.

At the Jade Buddha Temple we climbed flights of stairs to see two statues carved out of one large piece of white jade. Quite nice pieces. In the tea house we sampled 4 varieties of tea, some good, some bad depending on individual taste. Each of the teas was supposed to be good for various ailments, such as insomnia, headache, and cancer.

At lunch time, they took us to the 14th floor of the Jin Jiang Hotel, which opened in 1929 and is now the only 5 star hotel in Shanghai. It is the hotel where in 1972 President Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai signed the papers to re-establish US-China relations. We sat at large round tables, with a turntable in the center for passing around the various dishes. We enjoyed corn soup, dumplings, rice, Tsin-tao beer, spinach, and an assortment of Asian dishes unknown to us, but very tasty.

Then back to the pier and our ship.