Shanghai, China

Wow, we woke up to a fantastic view of Shanghai from our cabin this morning. One colleague commented it felt like we were fast tracked to 2025. Shanghai, like Hong Kong, is extremely modern and urbanized. In fact, during our city orientation, the tour guide would comment that a building was “old” because it was built in 1999. That is only 12 years old! We were fortunate to receive pricey tour tickets for free from two lifelong learners that ended their voyage early due to health issues. This day trip was a city orientation on steroids. Among all the sites, it included lunch, dinner and a theater performance!

The city orientation started in old town viewing of Yu Garden, a classical Chinese garden consisting of rock gardens, bridges, lotus ponds of goldfish (also known as Coy fish), trees and shrubs, and pavilions. After shopping in the old town bazaar and lunch, we visited an active Buddhist temple with 70 resident monks where there is a large Jade Buddha and some other impressive large-scale gold statues of Buddhist warriors. We also visited the museum and saw some beautiful jade carvings, ancient furniture (to make our family proud, we stepped in for a quick look), costumes, and currency. It was really interesting to see the progression of currency in China, and consider the general concept of currency development. Once a need was seen, people developed small knives and tools to use as currency, which eventually became round coins with a square in the middle, which eventually became coins with intricate designs and writing on them, until eventually there are paper bills. One paper bill in the museum was worth 100,000 in local currency. The creation of currency was not something I had put any thought into prior to this exhibit. Anyway, we then went to dinner and the highlight of the day, the acrobat theater performance. Wow, the talent in this show was amazing. There were contortionists, a large man throwing around a large, heavy pot and twirling it on his head, jugglers, plate spinners, etc.

We had such a fantastic feel of the city the first day that we weren’t really sure what to do the second day. Plus, we were both feeling a little sick. So, our friend, Stephanie, joined us and we just walked around the city more, ate some delicious dumplings, and shopped more (Stephanie can be blamed quite a bit for her influence on us with buying…though, she commented she didn’t know Chris was “such a shopper”). Chris says that our families will be thankful though for his shopping when we get home and we present them with fun gifts. In this last photo, we are in a stamp shop that was featured in the Amazing Race!