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Happy shopping day, everyone!
Today in Shanghai marks Day 2 of birthday festivities (the American birthday), so we started with an extra rowdy trip to a local market to buy chopsticks! Actually, it wasn’t very rowdy, nor was the trip to the City God Temple and Yuyuan Garden, but what the places lacked in carousing, they more than possessed in prettiness!
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Pan Yunduan had this garden constructed for his aging parents from 1559 to 1577. He was an administration commissioner of Sichuan Province and a grand dreamer at that: He added “mountains” and “lakes” to these five acres of flat land and constructed over thirty buildings among them! Each of these buildings was designed to promote success, longevity, and health, and the passages between them were specially shaped to frame the sights on the other side!
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The garden has seen a lot since its construction. It served as a meeting place for the Xiaodao Hui, a revolutionary group who fought against Qing Imperial leadership, yet were really nice to the European colonists. The garden has housed important meetings, operas, and even magic! The Exquisite Jade Rock, for instance, one of the prizes of the garden, is shaped in such a way by nature that if you light incense under it, the smoke will come out evenly through all holes. Also, if you pour water over it, the water will flow out of each hole. I would have tried, but it was fenced off by a railing and a moat.
Oh! That reminds me! The moat was full of goldfish! “That’s not so unusual,” you may very well say, but do you know why they’re there? Well, do you? Chinese superstition holds that evil spirits live in still water. The goldfish are there to bring enough light to the water that the evil spirits won’t want to stay there anymore. What mighty fish!
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Ellen turned us loose in the marketplace for about an hour before meeting us back at the local Starbucks (Yes, Starbucks!) to take us to lunch at Sunny Teppanyaki, where steak and noodles were prepared in front of our eyes and were so, so, so delicious. With our bellies full, it was time to see the most famous landmark of Shanghai: the Bund! The Bund is a stretch of European-style buildings along the Huangpu River, facing the futuristic Shanghai skyline. The word “Bund” apparently means “Embankment” in Hindi/Urdu, but I wonder why those languages would take precedence in a European colonial area. The buildings were very pretty but seemed out of place across the river from the futuristic skyscrapers. I puzzled over this for a while until I stumbled upon a gaggle of three-year old girls in heavy makeup dancing onstage to a song performed by one of their kind. Children’s Day is coming up, but if I can be honest, they were much scarier than they were adorable!
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We were given a good hour and a half to finish off our shopping for the trip, and what better place to start than the famed Nanjing Road, right? Well, if you’re shopping for clothes and cosmetics, sure, but I wanted something more adventuresome. I tried a durian. Now what is a durian? A durian is a gigantic, spiky fruit that has a smell and taste that have no words in English to describe them. Maybe “old socks?” I opted for a smoothie, but I hear the real challenge is to master the texture of the fruit. I took a sip, and two things happened at once: I actually enjoyed the flavor and I learned a sixth Deadly Art: the DURIAN BELCH! I mean it too! Nothing repels a pushy vendor faster than a swift blast of durian breath. I’ll bet it works equally well on bullies, bears, and weird old men at Tang Dynasty shows. Try it some time! It’s worth it!
Our day came to an end at the top of the Pearl TV Tower, the third tallest TV tower in the world! Only, it’s not just a TV tower; it’s got a shopping center, a hotel, an arcade (with a roller coaster), and a rotating restaurant! The last one was our destination but not before we took in the extraordinary views from the top of the tower. There is a level where visitors can step out onto glass floors from a quarter mile in the air! It’s like levitating, but I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone with acrophobia. From above, the old side of Shanghai looks a little hazy, but the new side, with its tallest building resembling a giant bottle opener, looks like it comes right out of the pages of a science fiction comic!
As for the buffet, if you can imagine spinning around 360 degrees of deliciousness for over an hour, brace yourself. I’ve never seen so many varieties of foods before! Apart from the four styles of duck I counted, they served longans, dragon fruit, abalone, mantis shrimp, and snails! And oh! The dessert bar! I learned a valuable lesson about buffet eating: take small portions of a lot of dishes; you’ll get to try more and, odds are, you’ll leave without feeling too stuffed!
Happy dining!
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