Shanghai Visit

by Rachel

Last week Charlie and I took a brief vacation from Mongolia and ventured back south to China. We stopped for one night in Beijing, visited Jason and Lauren and revisited our love affair with Chinese food. Then we headed to unexplored territory: Shanghai.

This was promised as the city of the future, and in many ways it was. We visited the
”Planning Museum” which I would have renamed the “Propaganda Museum.” It makes the case for Shanghai as an incredibly planned city, with great thought given to construction, transportation, green space and all kinds of good things. All that is great, but I am not sure if I need to go to a museum about it. Highlights included an amazing scale model of the city, and a sort of planetarium movie tour of the city with child narrators who kept exclaiming, “waah” in awe.

It was fun to be here on the eve of the Chinese New Year, because the red lanterns were out in force (but maybe it is like this all the time?)

We went to several museums, walked along The Bund, and ate plenty of street food.

We went to Yuyuan Gardens, which was a lovely sanctuary from the hoopla of the rest of the city and had tea at a teahouse you reached by walking on a zig-zag path, which keeps the evil spirits away.

We went to the Peace Hotel, which features a septuagenarian jazz band.

The highlight, however, was our Wok Adventure, which Charlie will tell you about soon.