The highest observation deck in the world is not of much use if it is so high that it is literally in the clouds. Cold, cloudy weather forced us to change our plans. We took a brisk walk down to the waterfront -- brisk by necessity because we had to stay warm.
On a sunny day, it would be a nice place to spend some time, just watching children playing, ships passing by and admiring the view of the colonial-era buildings on the Bund, the historic waterfront.
Instead of going up, we went down. After Kate took her kids home, we went to the Shanghai History Museum, which is housed in a circular display beneath the Pearl Tower.
The museum offers an interesting telling of the history of Shanghai, complete with a victim’s perspective on the imperialist “invasion” by the British and French, and little mention of the social purges and destruction of Chinese cultural artifacts under the Communist regimes. Because Shanghai has always been the Chinese city with the most interaction with the West, the history of its attempts to incorporate Western influences is fascinating.
Michael with a Chinese-made post-WWII Buick, a product of one of Shanghai’s first industrial alliances with the West, a venture that continues, along with a similarly prolific arrangement with VW, to this day:
Walking through museums is exhausting, of course, so we found our way back to the subway and successfully negotiated our way all the way back home. We rested during the afternoon, looking forward to our evening excursion. By coincidence, one of our friends from Southern California was in Shanghai overseeing the installation of massive sound and video systems in several of the pavilions at the Expo. We arranged to meet him for dinner that evening, so off we went again, this time taking a taxi all the way downtown, into the drizzly Shanghai night.
Shanghai is no Tokyo when it comes to dense, bright neon and LED signage. However, it doesn’t take much rain at night for an Asian city to evoke the set of Blade Runner, especially when blue neon tubes are affixed to the under sides of the raised highways. Other than the first moments of our escape from the airport, Shanghai never felt more foreign, or more exotic, then during our taxi ride to our friend’s hotel. Cars and scooters were everywhere, as usual, but the haphazard light reflecting off the damp pavement and buildings gave everything in view an utterly surreal, hard-edged character. Our friend was in a very nice studio apartment in the Marriott, halfway up the tall pointy building shown in the entry for Day 4 (the picture with the old clock tower in the foreground). The building was as modern and as exotic as it appeared from the outside. However, in our ten minute walk to a nearby restaurant, we immediately plunged into a dark labyrinth of alleyways and one-lane-streets where an occasional tiny store or restaurant with one or two tables remained open.
We shared a terrific meal with our friend, although we sorely missed the expertise of our hosts when it came to ordering food. The wait staff was incapable of communicating in English, as incapable as we were at speaking Chinese. Thankfully, the menu had pictures for most items. However, we were surprised when a couple of the dishes we ordered were substantially (really substantially) hotter than similar items we had eaten elsewhere. That ruined Michael’s might, and he eventually fell asleep, but we had a great time catching up about good times we had in Southern California as well as a fascinating times we had each had in Shanghai. (As of the date of this writing, more than a month later, he is still in Shanghai overseeing many of the pavilions at the Expo.)
We were among the last patrons to leave the restaurant, even though it was not much beyond 9 PM. The streets were a little quieter, but the distinct sense of being in a foreign city remained. As we walked back through the side streets and alleyways to the hotel, we came across more than one tiny restaurant where people were outside cooking up unidentifiable food that smelled terrific, attended by small groupings of what must have been local residents. Then, by the simple act of crossing a street, we sidled between Bentleys and Maseratis, passed through immense glass doors and found ourselves once again in an elegant hotel lobby that would not be out of place in any major city anywhere in the world. The doorman hailed a taxi for us, and after scrutinizing our “Take Me Home” card, the driver whisked us back to our home away from home.
We had 3 ½ days remaining of our trip, but we had accomplished many of our objectives, all of them without a hitch. It is not easy to travel widely if you don’t know the language, but if you know just enough about your specific destination, it can be done with a minimum of fuss. Another great day in the books.
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