We started at People's Square (3 stops east from “our” stop on the metro line 2). We then visited the Shanghai Museum (lovely bronzes, porcelains, paintings, and more we ran out of time to see). Then we looked in on the lobby of the Marriott (it's located on the 38th floor!). And we finished up with a tasty dinner at a restaurant called “Vegetarian Life Style,” before returning back home from West Nanjing Road (2 stops east).
This produced a set of pictures – taken very rapidly, not really breaking our stride, so apologies if some are a bit “haphazard.” The last nine were not taken “on the run,” but may suffer from being taken “through glass” – as they were snapped from the bar in the Marriott lobby while we were enjoying our rather civilized sundowner cocktails.
You can see all these pictures here.
One of the pictures shows a pudgy little blue entity (perhaps you could call him a meat puppet?) called “Hai Bao,” which deserves a small explanation. Shanghai is poised to have a big international exposition, kicking off in 2010. Hai Bao (or, “Baby Hai”) is the official mascot of this Shanghai Expo 2010. He was actually chosen some years ago, even before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. One literally sees this baby everywhere in Shanghai, along with a countdown of the number of days til Expo 2010 opens, currently 230. To fill in some more detail on this critter, I could do no better than simply to quote this from his very own web site:
Haibao is a blue “人,” or “human-shaped form.” As a combination of tradition and modernity, the mascot represents “treasures of the seas.”I do hope that clears things up for you.
A video about Expo 2010 can be seen here. The planned China Pavilion for the expo is already taking shape. You can see a picture of this iconic building here.
Here is a piece of “subway art” I snapped the other day and forgot to share with you til now:
The top is clearly a schematic depiction of the Shanghai metro system. The part I found artistic is the colored part at the bottom. I instinctively thought this was quite beautiful when I first saw it. I wondered who the artist was, and why there was art like this adjacent to the subway map. It turns out that this isn't art at all – it's an extremely concise way of conveying the price of every possible subway ride. You look up your ride's start and end points, and the color of the little pixel where the start row and end column meet tells you the cost. Yellow is ¥3, blue is ¥4, pink is ¥5, green is ¥6, and finally, orange is ¥7. I still like it.
Tonight's dinner at Vegetarian Life Style had just a touch of the surreal about it. It took both of us a few minutes to pinpoint just why. It was the piped-in music. Here's what we heard, in the order we heard it, as I made sure to note down in a memo on my iPhone, so I could accurately report it to you. Perhaps you know these works?
The First NoëlSome of the pieces were admittedly hard to recognize, since they were at (approximately) one quarter of their respective usual tempos, and the instrumentation (if that's the word – it all sounded like synthesizer) was just a tad odd. I bet you were wondering when those Christmas decorations would start appearing this year in the states. Well, Shanghai has probably got most of the states scooped, because it's only September 13th and, at least as far as the sound track at this restaurant, it's already haute saison. Strangely, there were an absolute zero of visible signs of Christmas there.
It Came upon a Midnight Clear
O, Holy Night
What Child is This?
Come, O Come, Emanuel
Do You Hear what I Hear?
We Three Kings
Adeste Fideles
Hark, The Herald Angels Sing
Silver Bells
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