6 November 2011
Xintandi
Sunday seems to be like any other day in China, everything opens at the same time, the same number of people seem to be out and about etc.
Xintandi is the hipster capital of the city, in order to make a nice place for people to park their fixies, the government sent 30,000 Chinese families living in a traditional neighbourhood off to a new city being built somewhere near the border with Myanmar.
They then cleaned up the place and filled it with restaurants whos menus have no prices, vinyl record stores, shops selling scarves and black rimmed glasses and designer t-shirts with ironic messages.
A quick walk through was enough, the buildings are nice, they claim to be restored old style buildings but I have my doubts, to me they look brand new.
Back in peoples square, there are huge busloads of Chinese tourists enjoying the gardens and nearby free museums and art galleries.
A narrow alleyway with a tapas bar on the left and expensive gourmet hamburgers on the right.
The cafe strip.
The apartment buildings built on top of this area look very nice, they are surrounded by electric fences and door men with guns.
The park has a nice lake, actually theres a lot of parks in central Shanghai and they are all immaculate. Most have lakes, presumably artificial, and they dont seem polluted. The trees and whatever seem to thrive despite the rain being laced with burning acidic lead.
An example of restored (rebuilt) ancient neighbourhood housing.
A bus load of nannas in pink coats assembled to beat the crap out of some drums to signal store opening time.
The Shanghai museum. Its free and well organised, with English signage. It is however mostly pottery and calligraphy. No swords, definitely no dinosaurs!
I think this is the nearby art gallery, but I am not totally sure.
Inside the museum, it is surprisingly full of camels, and also jade things stolen from the maoris in New Zealand. At least half the museum is dedicated to jade.
This was called 'The great hall of Chinese seals'. I expected fur and blubber but was dissapointed to find some wax stamps.
If you are tired of standing you can take a seat on this cool red chair.
The central atrium is quite nice.
For my lunch I ventured back to Food Republic to use my card. The girl on the right is making my lunch fresh, I prefer that to the stuff that has been sitting out in the open since sometime last Tuesday.
Roast pork, prawn wontons in chicken broth. A great number of different animals are killed for each meal in China.
Shark fin soup restaurant has a shark tank out the front. These sharks still have their fins. The sharks are real, but not very big, but what looks like a coral reef is just painted on the tank.