No Call Number: Yuyuan Gardens and the French Concession

We were going to visit the Expo today, but Bobby pointed out that it's Sunday and there will be less people there tomorrow. We will never be able to avoid crowds; not in Shanghai at this moment. I don't know if it is always this crowded or if people have poured in for the Expo. The event is evident all over Shanghai. There are signs, statues, and topiaries that say Expo 2009, and there are police everywhere. There are bag scanners in the subway, and wherever we go, tons and tons of people.

Anyways, Expo tomorrow. We decided to go to Yuyuan Gardens, which is lovely in the pictures and right in the middle of Old Town. We got there to find a huge crunch of people. “Old Town” doesn't look particularly old, though the traditional architecture is beautiful. It's a cluster of stores that was jam packed with tourists. We found our way to the gardens and paid the entrance fee, which got us away from the overwhelming crunch. The gardens were lovely. There were clusters of pathways, lots of pagodas, pools with koi, and grottoes. The whole thing used to belong to the obviously well heeled Yu family back in the 16^th century. We laughed about what old Yu is thinking now, with his estate packed with gawking commoners and foreigners. Even with all the people, it was peaceful.

We wandered back through the crowds into a temple. It looked like a Korean buddhist temple, but there were no Buddhas. Instead, there were several different structures honoring different gods. China has many gods, most of whom were real people at some point. I was excited to find the temple to the god of literature. There were a lot of people praying, and each of the gods had offerings of dumplings and fruit. Bobby pointed out that at one shrine depicting three gods and a tiger, someone laid out a dumpling for the tiger. There was one temple with three different gods of wealth, and another shrine had a god of war and wealth. It was no surprise that Shanghai, with it's relentless commercialism, has four different gods of wealth in it's town temple. In retrospect, I realize that several of these gods are in Buddhist temples in Korea, though Buddha gets the main slot. Buddhists, I remember, are allowed to worship other gods.

We pushed our way into a three story dumpling shop (“dumplings again? Says Bobby”) but there was absolutely no space. We wandered a bit until a woman lured us into her restaurant, which had dim sum but “expensive” enough so that we didn't have to deal with crowds (our meal was less than $30). We had fabulous dim sum with Chinese businessmen and European tourists.

We noticed some cats outside of the gardens, and more around the city. One was sleeping in the rafters of a temple. Shanghai is a cat city. I bought this kitschy porcelain cat, the kind of tourist fare I normally avoid but I love cats! I have been living in an anti-cat country and was thrilled to see Shanghai's appreciation of their cats. The strays all look very clean and well fed.

We went out again for dinner, but this time to the French Concession. This was a true old town, full of colonial French buildings. One of these was the site of the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, a holy place for Chinese Communists. We found a bunch of restaurants, one of which was German. I told Bobby he could pick where we ate dinner since we had dumplings AGAIN, so this was serendipity for him. We ate on the sidewalk and watched all the tourists trundle by. We noticed a Haagen Dasz, which prompted me to wonder if there's a Haagen Dasz at every tourist spot in the world. I never see them in town, but you go to, say, the Old Church in Amsterdam and there's the Haagen Dasz. We walked among the buildings, which are stunning. I'm glad Shanghai kept them.