DAY FOUR – SHANGHAI | Tracey Jackson

Dec 31 2012 | 1 Comment

DAY FOUR – SHANGHAI

First off most of you will be reading this on New Years Day – So from all of us to all of you a Happy, Healthy New Year!

Yesterday was our first day in Shanghai. To say this city is massive is an understatement. While I have been in some of the world’s largest cities nothing quite feels like this, and I suppose that is due to how spread out it is, though so is LA and Mumbai, the density, but it has nothing on Calcutta; perhaps it’s the size of the buildings and way seem to have been planted next to each other.

There is very little old left, every now and then nestled amongst the skyscrapers is a tiny street or enclave. Now, admittedly we have seen little of the city, but that is what we’re picking up.

Don’t ask why….but we started the day at the Shanghai Jewish Museum. My friend Lynnda Blitzer said this was a must see, and I thought we might get it in at some point. But when I came down to breakfast Glenn said it was our first stop. We do have history of spending New Years in some form of Jewish Museum. Last year we started the New Year at Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam. The year before we spent New Years Day in Daniel Lieberskind’s extraordinary Jewish Museum in Berlin. So, of course I guess we would start out our stay in country that is home to one point billion Chinese and three thousand Jews with a stop at the Jewish Museum.

It’s small and touching, a memory for a time when Shanghai excepted Jews during World War Two when much of the world turned them away. Of course in forty-seven they all left.

First Stop

Lovely Touches

Since Lucy is spending many weekends going to Bar Mitzvahs this felt right.

The best part about being there was we ended up on an old street that seems to have been left intact. So we wandered.

The kind of streets we like.

Street store.

Michael Blumenthal who was Secretary of the Treasury under Jimmy Carter lived on this street.

This was his house.

A bit of the older way of life.

I have a thing for hanging laundry.

Never get enough.

We had a game plan written out by the hotel. We had a taxi we kept all day. Next stop was a part of town where I don’t think we saw everything we were supposed to. It’s not easy finding things and most people don’t speak English so you just sort of fly by the seat of your pants. We do get those Luxe guides with walking tours and we always wind up lost.

Yesterday we did find our way to Yu Garden…OK,we did not make our way to the Yu Garden. We could not find the Yu Garden, though we were in the vicinity. However we did make it to City God’s Temple which if we had made the right turns would have taken us to the Yu Garden.

Lucy at a Chinese Temple.

An altar in the Temple.

Temple Gods. Or just scary guys.

Unlike with HIndu Temples I don't know anything about the practices here. But there was a lot of burning of things going on.

How can you not love this? Whatever it may mean.

The entrance to the Temple and the exit.

While we lost the garden we did find an outdoor market that was in front of a modern mall. The best of all worlds and typical of the new China.

Ducks at the market. There is a red haze as the whole place was covered in red awnings.

There is not part of an animal you can't find in a Chinese market.

I don't think I get enough pig face in my diet.

What I love is this was about twenty feet from the pig faces.

Lucy who does know how to read a Luxe guide found what was reported to be the best dumpling place in Shanghai, so we made our way to a food mall where after a lot of wandering we found the dumpling place, the tell tale sign that it might be the best was the forty people in line waiting to get in. So we found a bun place, where lucky for us the buns looked a lot like dumplings.

Lunch.

I just like this shot, I took it of the girls in the food mall.

In the afternoon we thought we were going to a neighborhood called the French Concession. We ended up in something called Xin Tian Di. Which we thought was the French Concession though today we decided it was not. It is however a spot where they took over some of the old classic buildings of Shanghai, cleaned them up and put in a bunch of trendy stores and Starbucks. Tons of young people walking about all doing the same thing people now do all over the world, drink expensive coffee and stare and their smart phones.

One of the new trendy hoods.

Trendy shops and restaurants.

See...

Loved her.

Taylor picked up some cool panda ear muffs.

The new China. A big apartment building. Leaves no question as to who lives there.

Glenn and I took a walk on the Bund at sunset. I will do a whole blog on that.

The Waldorf Astoria dressed up for New Year's Eve

The view from The Bund.

We are not big on New Years. It was too cold to go out and way too crowded. Many years we are asleep by midnight. Last night was not exception. We ate in the Chinese restaurant in the hotel and called it a year.