Jade, Dumplings, Exhaustion

Saturday dawned while I was still awake, so it was with a decided lack of energy when I emerged from the metro and stumbled down some streets towards the Jade Buddha temple. I stopped in some temple supply stores on the way and scored a bracelet, keychain, buddhist stickers, incense, and the most glorious yellow silk monk robe, all for less than $30 US.

I found the temple and the hole in the wall ticket counter at the same time I found out there was a special ceremony including a parade, music, extra fancy monk costumes, tons of devotees in black and carrying candle holders, a television crew and a few newspaper reporters and cameramen. Sweet. There's a large, central courtyard that the parade emptied into with two large temple building facing into the courtyard. All around the outer edges are more mini-two-story-courtyards filled with statues and shops. The covered walkway all of us non-parade-participants stood under had a ceiling lined with red lanterns. Red ribbons decorated the branches of every tree, and huge swathes of incense filled the cold air.

The music continued for a while, interrupted by chanting, speaking, more chanting, music. It was spectacular and a wonderful background to my mini-courtyard explorations. I made my way around the entire complex, snapping photos, buying paper cutouts of tigers and owls, purchasing seals with the name Aaron and Randy written in Chinese characters, getting a wooden bracelet for Aaron with Chinese characters burned into each bead, and spending a little time with my favorite statues doing the three-bow obeisance I'd learned in Thailand and letting my thoughts and unspoken wishes float through my consciousness with an attachment and a release of that attachment. Everything is as it should be in red and yellow silk, white jade with dark eyes, and perfumed air.

The main temple hadn't emptied out much when the ceremony was over, but I had a chance to get in there and admire the very complex and unique walls covered in statues and that twisting sculptural stone.

Devotee accessories

Center Yard Action

Gold bird

Walls of these kinds of statues

blowing that thingy

These guys were way into this parade

handfuls of incense

statue in between temples

mini-courtyard

lantern walkway

spectacular lighting in the main temple

monk

burn stuff

Parade

ribbons

cool stone thingy

I lingered far longer than I thought I would and enjoyed every minute. The rest of my afternoon was spent heading back to the metro, by way of standard street life with different foods for sale and I stopped to take some pictures. I purchased a cake of the flakiest crust, filled with sweet bean deliciousness and polished that off with generous swigs of milk tea before I boarded the metro yet again to head to Nanjing Pedestrian Street for some shopping.

Hot street food sold by hands red from cold

discards

key blanks

corner mahjong

seal across from jade temple

local rental market

toppings

On the shopping mall, I purchased face cream filled with gold flecks at the same cost of a nice anti-wrinkle cream by loreal at Walgreens, two pairs of scissors from the old scissor and knife store, and a couple of other trinkets before heading back to the hotel armed with two bowls of soup both Aaron and I would eventually reject due to disgustingness. Exhausted and hungry, we met up with Carrie and endlessly wandered around looking for a place to eat dumplings. After three and a half hours and every place closing as we approached, we settled on Japanese food. Aaron was too sick and tired to eat his soup, I hated mine, and when Aaron started to fall asleep at the table, I paid for the meal, apologized to Carrie, and hustled us into a cab to the hotel.

Sunday was my last day in Shanghai and I had a list to end all lists. Nevertheless, only about two items were checked off by the end of the day. I wandered through stores selling toys on my way to the Confucius temple that was actively hosting a book sale.

Book Sale!

Monopoly

Taikongshenrs!

My next stop was more interesting, the antiques road of Dongtai. I took my time at first, but as stall after stall repeated the same stuff (sometimes with EXTRA DUST!), I made a few choice purchases and moved on. I did buy two bowls with naked ladies in the bottom, an extra treat when you finish your dish, which inspired my china saleswoman to sell me tiny bottle with a little picture hole that allowed a picture to come into view on turning the bottle inside of the bottle. Want to guess what the picture was????? Yup. You're right!

Great antiques though at some stalls and I had a great time before I moved on back towards Nanjing in the hopes of getting to an art gallery. This was thwarted by a lunch date with Carrie and a serious clothes shopping binge at Forever 21. What can I say?

Lunch was fantastic and turned into dinner when we were joined by Aaron, Ruth and Paul a few hours later. We did one more turn about the Pedestrian street and stuff a few more Shanghai dumplings down our throats before bidding good-bye to our fantastic hostess, Carrie and headed to the hotel to pack.

Aaron had wicked food poisoning and was stuck in the airline bathroom the whole flight. I'd never seen him so sick. By the time we landed in Manila, he was too weak to do much more than let me grab our bags, flag down a taxi, and mutter curses at the slow driving all of the way through our slums of Moonwalk, to the tiny twisting street leading deep into the suburbs of Paranaque and home.

It was hard to come home after the posh and culture-rich city filled with art, museums, green spaces, and best of all, excellent food. But we're adjusting...

Instruments