Day One (Jason Skinner)

Day one
May 20, 2008
Shanghai, China

Day one, as scheduled on our itinerary, began with a 6:30 am wake up call – enough time to fit in yoga. Breakfast was served at the hotel; a full buffet of fruit, breads, eggs, sausage, bacon, dumplings, rice “soup” (sort of a runny oatmeal), orange and mango juice, coffee, tea, and an omelet bar was available. It was a diverse offering of Western and Chinese foods. Our guided tour began at 8:00 am; we left about five minutes late.
We visited the Jade Buddha Temple; monks were praying and so were tourists and, I’m sure, many local residents were present. Bundles of incense, about a foot and a half in length, were being burned to communicate with Buddha.
The temple is home to a giant Buddha carved from Jade. The Buddha (unfortunately I don’t have a decent picture of it) is much larger than life. He is sitting, meditating, and must be over eight feet tall and almost as wide.
Next, we walked on the Bund - a pedestrian concourse along the Huangpu River. There were many tourists taking pictures and annoying locals trying to sell us roller-blade-wheel-attachments for our shoes, as if walking just wasn’t efficient enough. Flags and toys were also being sold; within a few minutes we learned how to refuse this junk by indicating we had no need for it: Bu yao (Boo yow).
There were vendors selling treats and food; I bought caramelized sugar-glazed hawthorn berries on a stick and they were delicious! We shared the sweetened fruits and headed for Nanjing Road, a well-known and very popular shopping area in Shanghai.
Perusing the street and the shops, we were warned about “salesman” who would lead us off the street to sell us more crap: watches, sunglasses, shoes, DVD’s, and bags were what they offered, “What you need?” they would ask us. These losers would follow you and bug you for a whole block, despite numerous refusals and attempts to ignore them. So, some guy overheard me talking to Jake, I was wanting to buy a watch because I did not bring one; and, yes, we followed this guy - he was polite, not annoying – up a flight of stairs and behind a closed door to a wonderful display of cheap, knock-off, “high quality”, brand name watches, handbags, shoes, and accessories. I looked at a couple watches and asked for prices. The girls in the store spoke minimal English, but we communicated; she told me how to say ‘black’ and ‘brown’ in Chinese and I her in English. Moving on to a “lesser quality” watch, one that wasn’t such a pricey rip-off, I tried to negotiate a price for a fake Longines watch; eventually I still paid too high a price of $35 – I’m really not the best barterer, I prefer sticker prices and sales; I don’t want to offend anyone, but whatever. (Later during our trip, one of the band straps broke off and the buckle also popped off – but this may also have been due to my 5:00 am return to the hotel from the bar across the street, it’s hard to tell. The watch is still wearable, and continues to serve me well) I had much fun shopping and the rest of the group was quite aware of it.
There are a couple things I would like to make note of; for lunch we had a “Mongolian BBQ” style meal – it was very good. An all-you-can-eat buffet of thinly sliced meats (lamb, pork, beef), veggies, and sauces were available; after piling the goods into your bowl, the contents were sautéed on a hot skillet the size of a card table. Three cooks were busy at each station; your bowl of food was rotated amongst each of them and then given back to you. The beer, Snow, wasn’t that good; it’s what I call keg-beer, or piss-beer – something you drink and then proceed to urinate. It wasn’t that flavorful or filling.
My second note is about the local newspaper; it’s posted behind a glass display case along the main shopping street, so news is available for free to the public – pretty cool. Lastly, there is fresh fruit being sold out of baskets on all the busy streets. About every block or two we could have picked up a bag of fresh cherries, loquats (like a small peach), bea-bearries (similar to a strawberry-sized raspberry), and liche fruit (I don’t know how to explain these, nor can I verify the spelling – they’re very watery, sweet, have a pit, and are translucent white in color; I guess they are comparable to a grape).
After lunch we went upstairs to a rug store. We saw silk rugs being woven by hand and there was brilliant display of rugs, large and small, for sale. Silk is colored with natural dyes; there are 650 knots in every square inch and some rugs take over 14 months to weave! No one in our group made any purchases; the smallest “rug” – more like a carpet square – cost $500. Sorry, grandma, maybe next time.
We visited the YuYuan garden; it is a “scholars garden”. We liked it; I don’t have much to say because most of the Chinese gardens we looked at are similar. Water, rocks, bonsai, leeched views, buildings, fancy floors, cranes, dragons, phoenix’s, high walls, easy to lose your sense of place, many small spaces, moon gates (the circular doorways), and lots of tradition, meaning, and significance for the way the garden was built and arranged.
Jake and I met a couple art students outside the garden after we finished our visit; they showed us their work and their professor’s work on display in a mall just outside the garden – I bought a painting, unfortunately I don’t remember the name of the student I bought it from, nor did I get her email – whoops.
Earlier in the day we walked around the Bund; as evening approached we enjoyed a short cruise on the Huangpu River – the river that the Bund overlooks. It was a very relaxing way to begin our evening; much of what we saw we had already seen, but the water was nice and the sunset was pretty.
Our dinner was “hot-pot” style; plates of food were brought out to us and then we cooked what we wanted in a pot of boiling broth in the center of our table. End of day; I forget what I did for the rest of the evening. I think we all went to bed early because we were so tired and had a long day.