9 May 2018
I found another park
Zhongshan park in Shanghai
Earlier I was wrong. Earlier I said I had visited all the parks in Shanghai. I found another one. NOW I have visited all the parks in Shanghai.
The final park was Zhongshan park.
I used to thing Zhong Shan meant central mountain, and it does. I was wondering why every single Chinese city has a central mountain street / park / suburb / school / public toilet, even when there is no mountain anywhere to be seen such as in Shanghai.
I recently learned that Zhongshan is the name Chinese people have given to Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China. So if you were to wander around the centre of any Chinese city and ask people where the mountain is while pointing at the street sign, they might thing you are an idiot. Actually they will probably find a young terrofoed girl to talk to you using terrible English, no matter how good you think your Chinese is.
I am running out of things to talk about so its time to talk about Chinese TV! Generally most hotels have only one English channel, CGTN, Chinese Global Television Network. This is a news and propaganda channel available all over the world, I think I even get it as part of my expensive cable tv in Australia. Anyway, today Trump threw out the Iran deal, CGTN is talking about how this is fantastic news, Iran will now have to buy everything from China. Also, Kim Jong-un is in China, again. This is reported as 'Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un are finalizing wide ranging economic and trade agreements for the future development of the Korean peninsula ahead of a symbolic meeting between Kim and Trump'. Then there are the soy beans. With the possible trade war, China stopped buying soy beans from the USA. Every day CGTN has a story about soy beans from some other part of the world. If I wanted to bet on what other products China might retaliate with should things escalate, I would follow around CGTN reporters to see which farms they are visiting in Argentina, Australia, Namibia, Estonia etc, because I think they are already filming those stories now.
One last thing, China really really hates India. With all the rape murders happening in India, China TV is finding an endless parade of idiotic Hindu government spokesmen to appear on tv and suggest that the girls got what they deserved.
There will be a lot of park pics. Here we have the noise meter. Locals compete to see who can register the loudest noise. The winner by far was a woman cracking a whip.
There will be consequences for this unharmonious display of kiteophobia. Unharmonious.
This park was full of cats, all the reincarnation of Sun Yet-sen.
Parks are very old person friendly, here they have provided large text books for the far sighted.
These photos were taken right on dusk, so the color is not great!
Nice lilies.
What is that metal ring around the pond? I thought it was to detect people fishing, or to electrocute the cats. No it is really cheap crappy lighting. Very ugly.
It was a very large, very nice park, being enjoyed by many people, there were lots of joggers and a couple of nice cafes that stay open after dark.
The centre of the rose garden was guarded by a baby dinosaur gargoyle.
Here we have the worlds 91st tallest building! I wonder how often they have to change the sign?
The bottom of the worlds 91st tallest building is a huge mall, which in English is called the cloud 9 mall, but in Chinese its called the Dragons dream shopping centre. No one seems to know why it needed different names for different languages. I had been here before, it is very famous for having over 75 restaurants on its upper levels, all huge, I wrote about it extensively on a previous trip.
Instead of going upstairs, I went to basement 2 and had an excellent ma la dry pot. At this place you select what you want, but you dont select it yourself, the girl loads your bucket for you. A lot of pointing and miming occurred to select my ingredients. She was very concerned I had not selected enough food. It was delicious!