The great loop of China - April 2018 - Page 9

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!

Near my hotel there are a few different specialist goods streets. Musical instruments, books, trophies, curtains and stationery. Here we have a cat who owns a fancy stationery shop. He greets everyone who comes inside, then flops about on the tiles.

I was so amazed at the blue sky I thought I had better snap a photo as I boarded the subway to head to the other side, just in case it had disappeared by the time I came back above ground.

Now we start the series of boring photos of modern buildings. This one is not really that modern, but I have not seen it with such clear skies before.

The walkway across there, I am also standing on it, it is a giant circle for viewing big buildings, and the central garden and passing traffic.

The worlds second tallest building, now called the drain pipe, flanked by smaller neighbours in the foreground.

I have had the Chinese business news tv on, and found the stock market report confusing. China thinks red is good, green is bad. The exact opposite of how its reported in the white person countries. Red is the most harmonious of colors.

Here we have all 3 together, the one on the right is substantially taller, despite appearances in this photo.

It is easy to ignore all the other buildings, I guess most people would ignore all buildings because building photos are boring. I liked them because of the nice light and clear skies. I am very easily amused.

LAST ONE (in the daylight anyway).

Here is my extensive and expensive dinner. Hot and sour noodle soup and some very delicious wontons. I think my dinner was vegetarian. Often it is hard to tell.

Here is my attempt at the bund from the far side. It wasnt really working for me.

Instead of photos of the bund, have some more tall building photos!

I then hijacked this helicopter and flew through the keyhole on the keyhole buildings. Fun times.

Lots and lots of photos today so dont expect long detailed amusing descriptions. Here we have a local neighbourhood early in the morning. Terrific blue skies again...terrific!

Garden #1 for the day, the peoples square. No entry fee for the peoples square! The entry is very colorful.

It is a very nice park with lilies and exercising old people, there was a mass group of them doing stretches with accompanying long drawn out deep moans alternating with high pitched sharp screams.

Last photo of the peoples square, not too many people in the peoples square today.

I headed west, this is taken roughly from the hotel I stayed at on previous visits to Shanghai, a very busy part of town.

I soon found myself at the sculpture park. Countries from all around the world have donated sculptures, this one is from Belgium. Why they have donated I could not work out?

This park is still being expanded, I do remember it being here last time I was here but it was a lot smaller then. I dont know which country donated the bulls but they are pretty great.

A rabid wolf. Those are full sized shipping containers it is sitting on.

A pile of busted violins is the best the French could manage.

After leaving the sculpture park, I decided to follow the piles of black hose and see where it took me.

The pile of hoses ended at a picturesque street corner, featuring a sculpture of a human child playing games on his phone resting in the flower bed.

Nearby was the Jing'an Buddhist temple, time to do some golden Buddha appreciation.

A rubbish fire had broken out in the forecourt amongst the parked luxury cars. I think some people really were burning their entry tickets.

The mandolin is mightier than the sword. I am wondering if I had a bit of smoky lense!

The main Buddha here at the golden temple is not even made of gold. Really crap photo, smoke got in my camera!

Smoke must have cleared from the camera, because this is a decent photo again.

Out the back the gold ends and it becomes impressive wooden Buddhist temples. Real monks live here, and dry their Gucci clothes on the balconies.

Over the road from the golden temple is another park, where you can admire a family of petrified rhinoceroses. The grass police blew their whistle at me while I was taking this photo. The grass was nothing special, I didnt think it was a special historically preserved grass covered harmonious area for the peoples preservation of historical grasses.

The grass police guy was following me around now, so I took about 11 minutes to set up and take this photo to tease him. On my way out I peered over a fence into a construction site, he blew his whistle again about 3 feet away from me.

If you get caught stepping on the sacred grass three times you are forced to put on a special yellow idiot suit and balance a stick on your head for 3 months.

I stepped into this phone box to make a call. I wanted to be the first person to use a phone box this century, only to find that its now a library.

I passed yet another garden. Too many gardens.

My extended journey took me into another trendy shopping area, this is a clothing boutique, that features a pile of dirt in the middle of the shop. Its not under construction, somehow dirt pile is fashion. So fashion!

After another hour or so of walking past expensive shops, I arrived at the special tourist area for selling of souvenirs and arresting of people selling souvenirs known as Yu Garden Garden. These are all souvenir shops, KFC, Starbucks.

Still fake modern shopping area. But impressive fake.

This is a Chinese ancient peep show! 10 RMB to stick your eyes over these holes, contract conjunctivitis, and see an ancient silhouette of a concubine doing a fan dance.

These are tea houses, but they are still outside the pay area that is the actual old garden.

I got to this point and realised this was as far as I had got on previous visits. You have to pay to continue beyond this point, today I paid!

At first I was a little disappointed, its a rock garden with a few bonsai, didnt look very impressive.

It started to get nicer, all the areas are quite small, hard to get a decent photo.

I believe these are genuinely old, also you can see the new drain pipe building towering above it all!

This child was feeding his feet to the piranhas.

Probably the nicest place for a photo, that couple sitting on the bridge thought so also. Me and 25 other people waited for ages for them got get out of the way, they never did. They are still there now.

In the meantime the small child had been completely consumed by the fish.

Have a bit more ancient garden tea house / jade viewing gallery.

I was again impressed with the trees here, I noted that they wrap the trunks in cloth to discourage growth.

Last photo from yuyuyuanyuangardengarden is the free ear piercing Chinese orchestra display. Why was it so damn loud?

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!

Shanghai has an Ishibashi - the famous Japanese guitar store. Better than that they have an annex store selling secondhand stuff. However it is closed and from what I could see, extremely expensive. Top tip, buy guitars in Japan, send to China, sell to rich Chinese, oh yeah thats what Ishibashi is doing.

Have another bund photo, I was up bright and early, just me and the joggers.

Here he is, the chairman, all hail.

There was still time to appreciate a ridiculous mini garden. The guy in the foreground is really really appreciating it.

One last photo of the giant buildings in Pudong, taken from afar.

Here is a Chinese bookshop. A truck backs up and pours books out. They must be presented this way by law, in the centre of each pile is a bundle of petrol soaked rags in case an urgent book burning is required.

Here we have the maglev, magnets, how do they work? I feel ashamed.

Bonus maglev photos of the thing the mags lev, the train! the train! Shame levels increasing.