Day 20 - Shanghai

Day 20 – His

So, the main plan for today is to visit ding dong street market (though I am told it is actually called Dongtai and although the name won’t affect what is on the street it may impact on our ability to find it) and after to visit the natural history museum – which is supposed to be an experience in itself. I was once asked what the difference between an experience and an adventure was. My answer was that an adventure rarely had negative connotations whereas an experience could well have. In this case, the museum was an experience.

 

Ding dong market is a collection of half a dozen streets with, supposedly, antique stalls. We got there about 10 and only about half the stalls were open for business – my guess is that it gets more lively later as the tourists spill from their hotels after breakfast looking for presents for home. Even so it was quite lively with an eclectic mix of real and ‘fake’ antiques. The fake antiques were relatively easy to spot – they looked antique and there were piles of them on every stall. The real antiques just looked worn out. The fake stuff encompassed coins, boxes, chess sets, go sets, terracotta warriors and brass Buddha heads aplenty. The real stuff was mostly Bakelite radios and gramophones – though I did spot an ancient mimeograph machine. If only it was easy to carry I would have bought it because oddly enough I have wanted a mimeograph for quite a while – I wonder if they will ship?

 

Most of the real antique stalls were crowded down one end of the market and the tourist stuff was spread out along the rest of the streets. We wandered up and down resolutely not buying stuff – though Patti was tempted by a couple of boxes she saw and we managed to walk away without getting anything. Quite an achievement when you consider the persistence of the sellers who will quite happily stand in your way attempting to kettle you into their shop.

 

As we finished the market around 12 we decided to head off to the museum. It is actually listed as one of the top ten things to do and this kind of sums up Shanghai. Shanghai isn’t a town where there is a great deal to ‘see’. It’s more a place to soak up atmosphere – which for most people means going to a bar and getting drunk enough not to know what city they are in. Consequently somewhere like the natural history museum can make it to the top ten when in any other sane city it would merit a well if you must.

 

On the walk to the market we had noticed the signs for the museum so we though it couldn’t be that hard to find. How often does one speak too soon? We headed off in the general direction and saw street signs aplenty to help us on our way but after an hour of walking and reaching the river the signs had disappeared. We decided we must have simply missed it. So, we turned around and headed back and sure enough the signs appeared again directing us on. We followed them for a while and totally failed to find it. Like confused walkers in a wood we did exactly what you are not supposed to – we walked in circles for an hour getting hotter and hotter and more and more bad tempered with each other. Mostly it was from pure stubbornness on both our parts. Eventually, we gave up and went back to the hotel to look it up on the internet.

 

In the cool of the room and over a cup of coffee we discovered the museum was, in fact, only a block away. So, we set off again. This time in a grid search pattern. Again, we failed to find it. We decided to ask the concierge and so returned to the hotel. The concierge had never heard of the place. By now we had invested so much time in trying to find the place we were definitely going to find it. The guide book had said the museum was in the old cotton exchange and that the elevated road was mere centimetres away from it. So we followed the elevated highway and when it came close to a 1920s looking building we inspected every doorway.

 

And there it was! We had actually walked past it twice. In our defence the museum entrance is pretty non descript looking like hundreds of other doorways we had passed, but just inside was a tiny notice telling you (in Chinese) that it was the museum. It was Patti who noticed a small blue barrier tape across a flight of stairs saying queue here for natural history museum that was in English.

The guard directed us to a small grilled dirty window where someone was handing out tickets if you shoved 5 Yuan in at them. The window was so begrimed I couldn’t see the person on the other side. We went into the museum and it exceeded all my expectations. The building really is falling to pieces and the elevated highway really is about 30cm away from it. The place is being held up by sticky tape wishes and promises. The paint is peeling off in great chunks and plaster is missing but the faded grandeur is unmistakable behind the smell of mould and formaldehyde. The exhibits truly belong. They are mostly pickle jars with half dissected frogs and worms, cases of moth eaten mammals and displays of stuffed fish that have been repaired with chewing gum and paint.

 Looking beyond the shabbiness and faint feeling of being in an over large Victorian living room reveals what a treasure this museum is. They have four full skeletal dinosaur fossils on display in the main hall; a triceratops, a brontosaurus, a stegosaurus and an iguanodon (the British museum has only one.) The side hall has a display on the development of mankind that made me wish I could read Chinese as there weren’t many English signs and the few there were allowed me to understand briefly what the display was about. Though dusty, the sculptures and dioramas were first class and the display hall covered the development of man, society and class through history. True it had a faintly 1950s darwinianism about it and it had been clearly approved by chairman Mao himself (lots of party line references) but I loved it. The rest of the museum was filled with stuffed animals as i have said and reminded me of the squirrel museum i had once visited. The squirrel museum was a curiosity in England that has, i think, long gone. In it were glass cases of stuffed squirrels arranged in ‘poses’, playing cards, drinking coffee with friends, smoking cigars in a squirrel pub – that kind of thing. Hundreds of squirrels must have died to make that place. The thing that did for the museum though was the case of 100 stuffed kittens at a garden party. It’s a shame it has gone. These are the kind of grotesque things one really ought to see in life just to teach you how odd people can be. Anyway, the Shanghai museum of natural history certainly made me think of it. That aside i came across animals i never knew existed – how curious the world is.

After the museum we wandered back to our hotel and briefly considered telling the concierge where the place is – but we decided to leave it as most people who come here probably wouldn’t even think of going to see the place. A great shame I think.

 Day 20 – Hers

 We had two ambitions for the evening – one: to have the ‘famous’ crab dumplings and two: to have a drink in a riverview bar. (Okay, a third ambition – not to fall out with each other as we searched for places to achieve the first two...)  I had seen a place to have crab dumplings on our first day – so we studied the map and set off for the Disneylandish tourist centre, finding it quite easily.  The restaurant was actually signposted once we got into the winding streets – and our waitress spoke enough English for us to achieve ambition number one.  We know we probably paid over the odds – we also had spring rolls and some sort of sweet semolina-like cakes – but still, a meal for two for less than £10 in a signposted tourist district seemed a bargain to us. 

 We also achieved ambition two – drinks in a bar overlooking the river, blue-lit tourist boats and dark goods barges passing by, multi-coloured towers on the opposite bank – and not one cross word between us.