Part of a series of posts detailing my adventures in China a year ago.
Monday 26th February 2007
We rose early this morning to leave at 6am to walk to Lu Xun Park, where the tomb of Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, is found, and to see Chinese people up and about early doing things like tai chi there. The park was really busy with people out exercising and dancing and things, and the walk too and from there was our first real glimpse of the streets of Shanghai. It also helped work up an appetite for breakfast!
In the morning we went to the Temple of the Jade Buddha, which was interesting and impressive. A really busy place, with ordinary people there to worship, often by burning incense, so it has a very distinct smell. But it was also rather sad to see people literally bowing down to and making offerings to idols, no matter how beautifully made those statues are. (Though even then, some of them look rather alarming!) Upstairs in one of the side buildings was a real tea shop, where they made us tea and had us try all different sorts. I bought two tins of different teas. For lunch we had a vegetarian soup of mushrooms and noodles which was fairly nice but I couldn’t finish it.
Later we went to the house where the Chinese Communist Party was founded, which has been turned into a museum and sells things like Chairman Mao watches. Then we went to the Shanghai Museum, and saw sculptures, bronzework, clothing and other artefacts from across China’s many areas and long history.
This evening we wandered around for a bit as Greg tried to find a particular hotel; it had been refurbished, and wasn’t particularly wonderful – they didn’t have any rice when we got there! Some of the group had gone off to meet a friend of one of them who’d offered to take them out for dinner, but we had some interesting conversation in our rather smaller group, discussing family and marriage and compensation culture. We walked back via the Bund – tomorrow is Nick’s birthday.