Shanghai Museum, Tianzifang, Yuyuan Gardens, French Concession and the Maglev :)

There are many, many milk tea shops in Shanghai, some with long queues outside. It's a little more difficult to find coffee shops (especially ones that aren't Starbucks or Costa) but we managed to find a good one near People's Square and had coffee and a muffin for breakfast on Saturday, then wandered through the park at People's Square, admiring the extremely impressive giant floral sculpture before checking out Shanghai Museum. We saw ancient bronze artefacts and jade ornaments, beautiful pottery from ancient times up until the late nineteenth century, calligraphy and lovely paintings. There was also a visiting exhibition of landscapes from the Tate Britain, so a whole range of things to see.

We found a nice restaurant and had dumplings, shallot pancakes, rice cakes and Chinese broccoli for lunch (so much food) then wandered through Tianzifang, which is an old area of former workshops, now with many small shops ranging from boutiques and art studios to souvenir shops and little craft businesses. There are winding alleys like Xintiandi, but many more of them and not so perfectly manicured, which gives it more of a charm I think.

Mr Dr L was on shopping duty at the Baby Sale to End All Baby Sales, so we had running updates through the day on the 70% off deals for baby Dr L, arriving in September. We met up with him in the evening to go to Yuyuan Gardens, where the ancient temple of the city god is, but the main attraction here was the newer streets of old-style buildings with lights on all the roofs and shops and food everywhere. The place (like most places in Shanghai) was buzzing, and we spent a while trying to find the best place to get a stone seal carved with my name in Chinese. In the end, the best price and the nicest stones were from a man at a little store, who power-drilled the characters into the stone and demonstrated the seal on gold-leaf-sprinkled rice paper.

People were wandering around with large dumplings with straws sticking out of them, which I had heard of before and wanted to try. They were sold out at one busy food court place, but we found a small restaurant that did them for 20 yuan (about $4 Australian), which Mr Dr L thought was expensive, even for a large dumpling. It was good though - crab soup inside that you suck up the straw, and then pull apart the rest with chopsticks. I also tried Nanjing rice balls with sweet sesame filling which were pretty good, served in a clear soup.

On the way back to the metro station, we passed several large groups of older people line dancing to multiple sets of loud, duelling music. Apparently this is outlawed near many residential buildings because of the noise it makes, but it's extremely popular with older generations, and the younger generations complain about the noise and people dancing late into the night...

My final day in Shanghai, we went to find the French Concession, which is actually a very large district that contains Xintiandi and Tianzifang (so we'd actually already been there multiple times). After a good brunch in Xintiandi, we walked down streets lined with plane trees and tiny shops to find a neighbourhood of some old French Concession buildings, Si Nan Mansions. There was a market on with stalls of jewellery and tea, as well as a man who was making candy floss flowers. Most of the buildings here have been converted into shops, restaurants, breweries or Starbucks/Costa, though some still seem to be lived in. We came upon Zhou En-Lai's house, which is now a museum describing the shaky times in the 1940s when the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party were vying over rule - the Kuomintang posted secret spies across the road, which the CPC guards had to keep an eye on.

After some more wandering we found Bridge 8, which is an old car factory now turned into a creative district with a huge art and design bookshop with books all up the three-storey walls, but which was invitiation only (a bit frustrating). Across the road there was an art gallery with an exhibition that Dr L said was from Korea - I didn't realise until later that she meant North Korea. The many, many paintings were beautiful, but a huge range of styles all mixed up together, with impressionist cherry blossom scenes, idyllic farmland, happy workers in a factory, stylish young women in traditional or modern dress, horses, mountains, romantically crashing waves upon cliffs... I was particularly struck by a wall-sized seemingly-dystopian painting of Blade Runner-like modern towers at the edge of a harbour with traditional fishing boats moored below, wreathed in mist, juxtaposed with a natural landscape on its adjacent wall. Definitely an experience, and one I quite enjoyed.

Next up was Fuxing Park, which is one of the oldest public parks in the city and beautifully manicured. There were lots of families running around on the main grass area and people flying kites, people sitting under wrought iron arches with ivy running over them, around fountains and the swirling rose garden beds. By this time we were getting quite tired, so we looked for a cafe that wasn't Starbucks or Costa and managed to find a beautiful one in an old house near the park, filled with interesting antiques, a verdant bricked courtyard and an upstairs with a bar, Tiffany lamps and 30s music.

Soon it was time to get my bags and make for the airport for the next leg of my trip. Dr L and Mr Dr L kindly took me to an easy transfer point for the maglev train to the airport, which takes 8 minutes to go the 30km to the airport. Some of them are express trains and go over 400km/hr, but unfortunately I didn't get one of those and we only got up to 301km/h. Amazing to see everything speeding past like you're in a plane about to lift off.

And then I was onto my 18 hour trip to Stockholm...

Sydney to Shanghai: the plane, Xintiandi and the Bund

Every few years I do another post saying 'Wow! It's been X years since I last posted! I should do more on this blog!' So here's the latest one. :)

Wow! It's been 5 years since I last posted! I'm on my way to Europe via Shanghai for a conference in Sweden and roadtripping with my bro and his beau and friend, so I thought it'd be good opportunity to document some stuff :) I went to the US for the first time in the middle of last year, and Austria in November/December (coincidentally, about the same time I was there in 2012) but the travel diaries from there are on paper and scrivener... such as I did them.

In any case, I'm now sitting in my seat taxiiing down the runway in Sydney while the safety video plays and everyone ignores it. I was going to walk to the airport (I live half an hour walk from the Sydney International Terminal which is awesome!) but it was kind of raining and cold and my clothes are geared for summer so I took the 2 minute $18 train ride instead. I successfully checked in and notified the airline I'm doing a 144 hr TWOV in Shanghai (transit without visa), and have been reading the inflight magazine, which informs me that China Eastern now flys directly to Stockholm! Unfortunately I've booked with Air France, so will have to stopover at Charles de Gaulle... There's lots of interesting tourist information about Sweden though, with such gems as "A winter's day is long and cold in Sweden and life cannot be without cheese".

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Almost there! I've watched Woman in Gold (excellent), Mermaid (a Chinese dramedy involving mermaids, also excellent in a very different way), done a reasonable amount of work and have been practising my Mandarin. So far I've got hello, thank you and good bye down, but still working on I'm sorry (duì bù qî) and 'how much is this?' (zhège duōshao qián?).

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I successfully managed to get through the 144 hr visa queue and get my 'transit without visa' visa! Then, with the help of my friend Dr L on the other end of the phone, I managed to get a taxi to her place :) I found out from some small print on the back of my departure card that I needed to register myself as a temporary resident within the first 24 hrs, so our plan for Friday was to check out Xīntiandi and the police station, then the Bund and Oriental Pearl Tower.

After xiaolongbao and soy milk for breakfast, we took the subway to Xintiandi. This area is a former residential area of Shinkumen (stone gateway) houses which was redeveloped into a boutique-restaurant-cultural quarter, with the building that was the site of the first meeting of the Chinese communist party at one side. It's an incredibly successful development that with a mix of historic buildings and new additions, alleyways and hidden corners to explore. We had lunch at a nice Spanish place, then went to find a police station.

Registering as a temporary resident is something your hotel does for you if you stay in a hotel, but if you stay with a friend you need them to show proof they own the property you're staying in...! We think it's probably the same procedure as for long-term temporary residents, and they haven't caught up wth the new short transit visas. It was a bit of an adventure, because we had to go to the police station twice, once to find out all the documentation we needed and a second time to hand it all in, with photocopies. Then we retired to Dr L's and had hot chocolate before venturing out in the rain to the Bund.

The Bund is technically 33 buildings built in different European styles by invited architects, lining the west side of the Huangpu River. Reclamation in the last few decades created a wide promenade beside the water, from which you can look across the river to the newer Pudong district and see the Oriental Pearl Tower and Shanghai Tower (over 600m tall). It was just on dusk when we arrived, with light rain, and we wandered along the promenade admiring the brightly-lit older buildings on one side and the phantasmagorical light shows playing out on most of the modern buildings. Some of the buildings have advertisements, as if they're Times Square billboards at 100:1 scale, and some have beautiful patterns, like the building with a golden butterfly slowly moving its wings. We took the ferry across the river, which is a really good way to see the lights, especially given it's only 4 yuan, but halfway across the river, I realised I’d lost my camera somehow. Once we got to the other side, we asked the ticket office man to call back to the opposite bank ticket office, and waited while they checked to see if they could find it. Luckily, they did! I've now attached my camera to a lanyard, which makes me look more like a tourist, but at least I won't lose it. Though I probably shouldn't jinx it by saying that...

We met up with Mr Dr L on the Bund side of the river for Shanghai fried buns (really good) and dodged the rain (not very successfully) back to their place for the night. I got pretty excited in the metro, because they have flashy light displays on the tunnel walls that show ads as you're speeding past them. It must be something similar to a frisbee I had once where you could make it spell out your name as you threw it, but a lot more sophisticated... unfortunately it doesn't photograph or video well...