The directions I was given went like this: Go that way, small streets. You come to big street. Go past on small street. You see temple. These were accurate directions and the wandering through the small streets yielded so much information about life in Shanghai that I would have otherwise missed. In this older part of town, the people live in teeny-tiny houses, often just a single room. Cooking and cleaning is done in shared courtyards and in the streets. Bedding is hung out every single day through out the city and these cramped little wandering streets are no exception. I stopped at one of the little fruit sellers markets and paid close to $5 US for a handful of fat, almost black cherries. Making embarrassingly satisfied sounds and doubtlessly smearing black cherry juice everywhere I continued. After crossing the big road, however, I came into what is new Shanghai. The tiny streets were all gone, replaced by a massive construction project, a common event according to Carrie. She says that people are paid very well for their homes/properties, but that this has meant that the city rarely has any structures older than the 1800s.
This sheet is so cool, I wanted one and never found one despite looking everywhere!
Street Food, with a gas line beside it
Street Kitchen
This guy has strapped a large-screen TV to his bike.
I found the temple beside the construction site, crossing over a thick mud temporary road with some wood thrown down as the sidewalk. It's a Daoist temple and I must confess I know next to nothing about Daoism. To me, it seemed like a Buddhist temple, Chinese style, with different faces on the statues, tons of incense, and on that day, a ceremony. I considered myself quite lucky to be there for this event and poked my head into the source of all of the clanging music, drums, and chanting. I couldn't get a clear shot and folks were not happy I got in there. The door was closed to that room and I spent the rest of my time in the temple enjoying the sights and trying to stay out of theirs. The music and chanting was a nice backdrop to my exploration and I found walls of little red tiles with characters on them, statues with complex headdresses through which you could see intense eyes, mops and shoes drying on the roofs with views of the downtown skyline, and walls full of little statues, each with a little orange light.
Tao gaze
Tao
This house will burn, after it gets a driveway, hedge, and car... of course.
details of wall of lights
glowing, golden wall
old city wall with Daoist temple
I emerged from the many rooms on the second level, each with it's own set of statues, glowing wall arrangements, kneeling furniture, and donation jars, to see the family emerge from the ceremony room with the priests/monks (?). They set up a paper house in the central courtyard, arranged a driveway with paper car on the front, and started piling boxes of paper items into the huge, blackened urns around the courtyard. There was a lot of discussion and not-happy glances at me watching so I headed out before the first match was lit.
I had one more stop to make before joining Aaron at the hotel, then traveling across town to meet up with Carrie and friends for a night out on the town. Ignoring my feet shooting pain (they've been in flip-flops for a year and the most comfortable running shoes were murderous), I hustled toward People's Square. This involved a lot of walking, getting lost in a mall/metro entrance complex looking for an elusive women's bathroom (almost used the men's before a man pointed up - the women's bathroom was on the floor above me), and an overpass road with a great view of the city.
Afternoon sun over People's Square
The line to the Shanghai Museum was intimidatingly long and four-people wide. I got into the last position, checked my time and museum info I'd scribbled on a note sheet and assumed I had another hour to get through line or I'd be out of luck that day. The line moved quickly though and built up behind me just as quickly. Eventually I was inside, having my bags searched, and then inside-inside and I hadn't paid one yuan. This museum is totally free to all, a concept I've appreciated about the Smithsonian museums in D.C. and was thrilled to see that like in the States, if a museum is free, the people will use it.
The current, featured exhibit was a series of French Impressionist paintings I'd seen in France, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and possibly other places too. Very popular and well-known Renoir's, Degas', etc. I passed up the line to that exhibit and headed directly to the tea and refreshments shop. One overpriced coffee and sandwich later, I coaxed my feet into moving again and headed to the top floor to work my way eventually to the ground floor and out.
I spent a lot of time in the first exhibit room, enjoying the native costumes of the many tribes that lived in China, then sped through the seals, calligraphy, ceramics, coins, and jade rooms, finally skipping the ground floor exhibits entirely and speeding out to catch a metro to East-East Pudong in the hopes I'd get a nap before Aaron and I would go out.
This mixed body ceramic "pillow" is a great mixed body example with the distinct colors & total adhesion, but pillow??
My favorite seal is so old, cracked and used, the red ink almost reaches the other end
Those mops need to dry somewhere...
entrance to the Shanghai Museum
One piece of jade
Seals
Yeah, right. Aaron caught some shut-eye and I planned to join him as soon as I had the directions to where we were meeting Carrie totally written down and understood. I wrapped that up just as the alarm went off. Now, I haven't gone out in a very, very long time. In fact, if I'm to really recall the last late-night I've pulled, I'd have to look all of the way back to this summer in Portland. So I had a lot to prove, right? I layered up, put on extra makeup, put my protesting feet into shoes, and hobbled out of the hotel, into a taxi, across several metro stops with line switches, and then a long walk to Spicy Moment, a Hunan restaurant in the French Concession with great write-ups and catering particularly to the 20-something Chinese crowd (like our dining companions).
We had a private back room to ourselves and a table that filled the room with seating that lined the walls. A lazy susan functioned to provide both entertainment, bits of food stolen by chopsticks, and a touch of competition between the 8-10 diners. Carrie's friends are very well spoken, intelligent, Shanghai natives with a range of careers from dive master, teacher, attorney, to marketing for China's largest airline. They were dressed to the nines and ready to hit the town. After sharing morsels from a huge variety of dishes and paying US prices for it, we walked to a speakeasy-style club deep in the french concession streets lined with trees and cobblestoned at parts. Monkey Champagne is hidden behind what looks like a very respectable restaurant, with dark little passageways beside the bathroom to a tiny club.
Our table promptly had huge buckets of ice filled with Grey Goose and road flares coming to the table and waiters hovered to fill our glasses endlessly. I'm not drinking right now, so I enjoyed cranberry juice and water while a "DJ" played top 40 club track after top 40 club track. She did her hair during song changes in the mirror behind her equipment, had two exactly matching sound waves in her Serrato program the entire time, and occasionally fist-pumped when she "dropped" a hot track (or one came up on her ipod). I couldn't dance to any of it and I love dancing, I love music, but when I'm tired, annoyed, and the top-volume music preventing any kind of conversation is such crap I can't dance to it, I quickly lose patience. In addition, everyone smokes heavily and I'd inhaled at least a pack in 3 hours just by being in the same room. My eyes were burning from that much smoke and I'm a newly quit smoker - in other words, no stranger to it - it was that intense. By 1am I was trying to avoid getting kicked and punched any more by drunk "dancers" and putting bets on the fist-fights breaking out on the dance floor between competing women while stationed near the door. ***I should note here that these are quite literally all excuses for my mood. Which is usually under my control and therefore not the fault of any single person, bad club song, or cigarette smoked.***
By 1:30 I was yelling instructions to my drunk boyfriend about our tab as he tried to pay, and at 2:30am we were finally in a cab. It was 3:30 by the time we made it into our hotel room. 4:00am had come round when Aaron, newly emerged from the shower in an attempt to stop smelling like an ashtray, slipped on the very slick marble floor and went down on his face and thumb.
Aaron got an hour of sleep before stumbling out of bed and heading to day 2 of his conference, and I managed to get in another three hours of sleep before I couldn't justify unconsciousness when all of Shanghai was out there waiting for me.