May 20 - Afternoon
Explore Shanghai
In the afternoon, aided by my map, I
walk south across People's Square to the Shanghai (History) Museum. Along the way, I saw a little more
of the Square. As it was hot and muggy, every bit of shade was filled
with people. Here is another of the statues in the park.
Admittance to the museum was 20Y, but I could have spent 40Y more to
get an English-language audio tape.
I found the museum to be historically oriented but first rate and ended
up buying some gifts from its
modest gift shop to take back to my family. The museum had four floors,
with four exhibits rooms per
floor. Pottery, stamps, coins, dress, weapons, calligraphy and
paintings were included. There was even an exhibit of relatively modern
Western (Europe and US) paintings.
I was using a digital camera to take the pictures included in the
diary. It had room for about one hundred shots, so I felt somewhat
constrained in the number of shots that I took on the first day. Here
however are several of the exhibits that caught my eye.
Back to the hotel, I went to the
top-floor restaurant where an illustrated menu helped me select prawn and a tasty crab soup. The
prawn was in its shell and covered with a sauce. I could not figure out how to deal with it with
chopsticks, so I ended up using my fingers and learned the purpose of the damp washcloths that were
distributed with virtually every meal I consumed in China. The soup was excellent but the sauce on
the prawn was a little sweet for my taste. The hostess also suggest some fried rice, which turned out
to be expensive and a little oily.
After dinner, I tried the Business Center in the hotel
in order to access the Internet and let my family know that I had
arrived.
The cost was 22Y for .5 hours. I also found an ATM in an office adjacent
to the hotel. I was able to easily request another
500Y to compensate for what I had to
pay for the taxi ride into town.