The previous post is Hefei (May 09).
The next post is Hangzhou (May 11).

Shanghai (May 10) · May 13, 10:40 AM

I arrived [May 09] during rush hour at Nanzhan, a bus station on the south of the Shanghai Metro Line 1, and the taxi drivers were out in force with a chorus of persistent “Hellos”. Instead I walked to the metro and rode a crowded train north to the center of the city (People Square) and transfered to the East-West Line 1, which I took East to the end of the line. There I called Minmin for directions, and took too long to get onto a bus. First, waves of commuters packed each new bus, leaving no room for my pack and I. Second, the buses were named with characters — no numbers, no readable pinyin. But I managed because I had to. Minmin met me at the correct stop “Chuan Sha Park”, and took me out to dinner after dropping my stuff at her place. Gu Yu, her husband, returned from work just as we returned from dinner, and we chatted before I took a shower, caught up on email, and then went to bed.

...

Sun Minmin and her husband Gu Yu are friends of Chen Du whom I worked with in graduate school in Florida. Minmin and Yu have taken me as a houseguest, showing tremendous hospitality. Today [May 10] Minmin led me around the city. We started with a hot soy-milk soup with steamed bread and a light fluffy friend breadstick for me before a misty morning stroll down the Bund — colonial architecture on this side of the street, skyscrapers from the future on that side of the river. Next — Lu Yuan, gardens with Qing dynasty halls, hidden courtyards, ponds, rock gardens, all connected with an elegant maze of passageways and walls. In the immediately surrounding streets foreign and Chinese tourists shopped the bazaar under reconstructedly traditional rooflines. Minmin took us through a traditional Chinese medicine pharmacy with shelves of dried things, rows of bottled stuff, and display boxes of ancient ginseng root. We took lunch at a large and crowded buffet — foreigners conspicuously absent. Minmin selected a Shanghai spread; I forget the menu, but I took pictures.

We took a taxi to the house of the first secret meeting of the CCPC. It was small, well-kept, and deathly quiet. And then we hopped over to the Shanghai Museum.

If you only have two days in Shanghai, spend one-half of each of them in the Shanghai Museum. The building is gorgeous. The exhibits are world-class — sculpture, bronze, pottery, jade, calligraphy, furniture, and on the fourth floor a temporary exhibition from the gem collection of M. Scott. Any one is worth the admission.

Four hour later, we exited to meet a Beijing friend of Minmin for dinner at a Sichuan restaurant: spicy chicken (“mala” spicy), spicy beef, spicy pork, spicy shrimp. The bright red peppers were chopped up and piled everywhere, leaking hot oil and seeds. A tofu & egg dish, a cold salad, and a warm soup provided relief from the burning heat of the main dishes. After dinner we sipped a flower tea — I checked the teapot … yup, flower tea sweetened with chunk sugar crystal — waiting for the sun to go down. With the sky dark and the neon bright, we got up and slowly wandered east to the Bund: past fantastic signs of many colors, blinking and animated; past passenger trams ferrying tired tourists; past the touts. All evening I was turning away blinky roller-skate shoe attachments, “rolex” watches, and the occasional lady massage. I took many pictures and bought a strange frozen treat with frozen cream around a core of ice-cream and something dark and chewy.

At the Bund, we turned North to stroll past the glowing concession-era architecture to the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel. We took that under the river, over to the space-age skyscraper East side. That five-minute tram was slightly below Burning Man on the “tripped out” scale.

The far side was free from crowds, wide open, with scattered modern skyscrapers piercing up. We found a taxi for Minmin’s friend and then journeyed home (on foot to metro to bus to apartment). The morning was chilly, windy, foggy, and rainy, too, but by the time we finished the scalding dinner spread, the weather had cleared. It made for an excellent evening.


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