Shanghai Days

We woke up on Saturday to a cloudy (but not rainy) day so we decided to trek out to the Shanghai Zoo. It was slightly drizzling and the zoo was about an hour from the hotel via metro and taxi, but to heck with convention, we wanted to see some pandas, gosh darn it. The zoo itself was huge, over 600 species of animals, although we skipped the reptile terrarium on my insistence. Think of any animal with legs, and we saw it: panda bears, monkeys, tigers, ostriches, giraffes, bears, cheetahs, even baboons with little red bums. In the middle of the zoo were huge fields of green grass the likes of which I hadn't seen in 3 months!

The best part by far though, was the elephant show. OSHA regulations gone by the wayside, the elephants came right up to the audience so we could touch them and feed them cucumbers.

The elephants really stole the show though. They danced, walked the balance beam, stood on their hind legs and front legs, played basketball (although to be fair, they had a slight height advantage) and even played football (er, soccer), Beckham style!

There was only one tiny mishap. The show started off with 5 elephants and 5 trainers but at the end of the show, there were 5 elephants and only 4 trainers:

Ha ha, just kidding but seriously, who would want *that* job??!??!?!

Later that afternoon, we took a walking tour of the Bund, the promenade next to the Huangpu River, aided by our friend, Lonely Planet. By then, it was raining again but since we'd already done some sightseeing during a typhoon when we first got there, we thought, "what's a little rain?" Luckily, it wasn't nearly as windy as it was the first night. We learned about the magnificent buildings that made up Shanghai's "Wall Street" in the early 1900's and Marc took pictures of each individual building. I'll spare you with just this one pic:

Just across the river, the neon buildings in Pudong make up Shanghai's "Wall Street" of the early 2000's.

Who knows what the Shanghai "Wall Street" will look like in the 2100's.

The next day, we only had a few hours before we had to catch our flight back to Hong Kong, so we went to the Shanghai Museum, by far one of the top 3 museums I have ever been to. From bronze water vessels from the Neolithic Age to stone sculptures to Chinese paintings to calligraphy to intricate jade figurines to furniture from the Ming dynasty to coins used in trading on the Silk Road to Nepalese costumes and masks to blue and white porcelain pieces, it is no wonder this anything-but-boring museum is one of the 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. Over 5,000 years of Chinese culture displayed with signs in English! We learned so many things about these magnificent temples we have been visiting and even learned that the Chinese invented coin money and porcelain (they don't call it China for nothing!). It was very neat and if you get the chance to go to Shanghai, you do *not* want to miss this museum.

We could have spent another couple of hours puttering around and listening to the audio guide but alas, we had to go. So, after packing our souvenirs into 2 more carry-ons than we originally brought, we hopped on the plane back home to get ready for our next adventure in Thailand.

Bonus material: Check out these links for 2 more elephant videos.

The first one is where the soccer-playing elephant missed his first shot. I think he had stage fright.

The second one is the grand finale with all the elephants taking a bow. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SR40A2REXo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0SVvMsVlaY