lost or what?

I got off the subway at Shilong road, which is an elevated monorail, one stop before the Shanghai South main station. It was not an inspiring area, but there was a family mart. At this stage I thought the garden might be a debris field, I was having flashbacks to a previous visit to Shanghai when I traveled a great distance to go to the aircraft museum, only to find it had been removed 3 years prior.

The entrance area was about what I expected, ok but nothing special. Still grey skies at this point, but that would change as the day went on.

Things started to look a bit better once I got past the entrance annex development staging, ticket check and bomb scanning area.

And then I went into one of the pay to enter areas, I had bought a combo ticket that gets me into all of them, and it was amazing.

A very large very formal very new Chinese garden full of bonsai.

There must have been hundreds of these bonsai trees on stands all around the garden.

Nice creek and bridge and hut on bridge and real wooden railing. Generally what looks like wooden railing is made from recycled plastic. Not this time.

Nice rocks with bonsai. I like Bonsai.

A view from the top, the garden was lots of individual walled off areas linked by circular arches in the wall.

Those are real rocks. Very impressive arrangement.

I just showed a heap of photos of a brand new area of the garden, here is what its replacing. Kind of awesome! So dusty and falling down. I dont think this area was supposed to be accessed by the public. I swam up the creek under a bridge.

Here is another of the pay areas with a tea house. The garden had 3 pay areas and they were very quiet compared to the rest of the place. The combo ticket cost about $8 to get you into everything. In China everything has an entry fee, its the only way to keep the people out of the peoples park.

There are a few rides for children, but if you are very lucky you can get a little fishing rod and try and hook a gold fish.

Here is the tropical conservatory, Adelaide (my old home town) has one of these, it was built to celebrate the 150th birthday of Adelaide. It is highly amusing that since then, Adelaide can no longer afford to operate its gift to itself, so now its semi abandoned and falling apart.
Also a single dog guards the entrance here. He did not like me.

The inside was indeed very tropical, I wished they would turn on the misting system so I could cool off and contract legionaries disease. The sun was out by now.

Like all such facilities, you can climb up some stairs and look down on the tropical trees and throw things at the monkeys.

That is all real trees and plants, although they have potted little orchids inside the branches of the trees.

Time to follow another creek and see where it takes me.

There was a second smaller bonus conservatory, as well as these colorful flowers it had a cactus section, but they were all in glass boxes making photos difficult. Inside this garden there is also a herb garden that only scientific researchers can access by appointment, it looked huge.

Those are all real, very impressive. I got chased by a bee.

I did suggest there were still a lot of flowers to gawk at.

Clearly the best part of the entire park is the bullet train flower display.

You can rent row boats if you want, no one was. There are probably 20 or so bridges like this throughout the garden.

This is the rose garden area, I thought I would mention that in case you have never seen roses before. It was also impressively large, but I think we are just past the peak of the season. Let me consult the star charts, yeah, 3 weeks past peak.

If you run really fast you can travel over this pond on the lilies. In that little building on the other side, a huge group of old people were singing songs about the fallen ideological martyr of the great seventh assembly of the boisterous referendum for the historical society of the sacred brass tulip.

Have a few more lilies. There were frogs, I could not photograph them.

One last swamp photo, this swamp had particularly clear water. Very nice trees.

After fleeing the garden and boarding the subway back to the city centre, I got off a couple of stops early to explore tourist spending zone, Xintiandi. A sandwich here is $20. The place was full of French and German tourists, all thrilled to pay $20 for a sandwich.

I think at most places foreign tourists outnumbered people that looked Chinese. It is a nice area, made to look like its old even though its new. I think it gets bigger each time I visit Shanghai. Most of the big western brand hotels are near here. Wolfgang Puck, Gordon Ramsay etc etc all have restaurants along here.

Have a nice tree.

I was starving, so wandered away from Xintaindi far enough to afford lunch. Even though I had wandered away from the central tourist fleecing area, I still got deconstructed noodles!
I took a wider shot here of my vomit colored soup with submerged rice noodles and bowl of things to pour into it so you can see the barcodes.
There is no way to order here unless you have a Chinese social media app that works with Q-codes. Each table has a barcode, you point your phone at it, the menu comes up on your phone, you select what you want and you pay via that apps payment system.
They really did not want me as a customer, but a person who I think was the owner came out, used her phone, did the barcode routine and then I paid her cash. That was of course after we did the 'no! too spicy!!!' routine....
The noodles were actually delicious!