Day 21 - Shanghai

Day 21 – Hers

We had to move hotel rooms today – same hotel, same price, even the same floor, but when our itinerary changed we needed another night here and we booked it through a different company.  What a shame... now we have a queen-sized bed, river view and complimentary coffee as well as everything else....

Our main adventure for today was designed for little boys interested in science.  I happen to know one of those whose chronological age is forty-hmpetyhmpt.  We walked to the nearest metro station, figured out how to buy tickets and go the right direction – and went 4 stops under the river to the Museum of Science and Technology, set in the absolutely enormous and beautiful Century Park.  The guide book had, rather condescendingly, stated that the exhibits were a bit dated – though very interactive and worth a visit.  I must say that we found it very impressive, well-laid out, fun - and certainly more up to date than the Science Museum in London, unless that has changed dramatically in the past year.  Some of the sections – the natural environment (Ah, that’s where they took the non-moth eaten specimens from the old museum...), the geological journey into the earth and the computer-aided design and manufacture exhibits, in particular – allowed you to actually explore the world yourself.  You could have a bust of yourself laser-designed and 3d printed while you wait.  There were films and shows in many of the sections - as well as IMAX 3D and 4D cinemas on site.  The building itself is extremely well-designed – very few places felt at all crowded; despite 12,000 visitors in the time we were there.

 I lost Rob for a while in the history of invention exhibit – I eventually found him examining some cathode tube thing in detail – and again in the section looking at the genetics of phosphorescent plants......  We played around for a while in the huge energy transfer learning centre; called ‘The Light of Wisdom’ (All the galleries had very interesting names when transliterated into English.  For example, the section on fossil-dating of the Earth’s rock strata was labelled ‘the Bible of the Earth’s evolution’ – a possibly contentious juxtaposition of ideas....) and joined groups of excited children in the perception, health and fitness, volcano and earthquake interactive areas. (They wouldn’t let us into the ‘Children’s Rainbow’ gallery – any adult had to be accompanied by a child and we couldn’t find 2 children to borrow...)  We watched robots solve Rubik cube puzzles in under a minute, play requests on the piano and dance to a song chosen by visitors.  We admired China’s plans for space exploration and technology parks – and realised that they certainly have found a way to excite their next generation of scientists, designers and engineers. 

 Our guide book also recommended the huge underground shopping mall near the museum, so we walked through it on our way back to the metro station.  You could buy anything there – hand made shoes, hand-tailored suits, electronics, jewellery, leather goods, souvenirs, T-shirts, etc., etc., etc.  The map of the mall showed that it went on for blocks – all underground.  Clearly other guidebooks have also recommended it because we saw more European faces in our half an hour there than we have in the whole of our 10 days in China anywhere else.  The shopkeepers stood in the doorways and tried to entice us in with their few words of English – but, as with most places here, a simple ‘No, thank you’ got them to lay off.

 A quick metro-ride back and a greasy – but delicious – fried vegetable pasty from a street stall saw us back in our room. Time for some of that complimentary coffee, I think.

Day 21 – His

While we were wandering around the Museum we walked through the human and health section and stopped outside a series of displays concerning mental health. Proudly displayed in English and Chinese was a sign and this is what the sign said.

HOW TO KEEP A HEALTHY MENTAL STATE

Mentality is a psychological state that is concerned with a person’s attitudes and reactions towards various things. How can we have a healthy mental state?

Here is some advice:

1. Form good habits and be a cultivated person

2. Have a scientific way of living and an optimistic attitude towards life

3. Be able to cope with failure and keep active

4. Have a sincere and loving heart

5. Learn to cooperate with other people and be sociable

 Don’t you just have to absolutely love it? It operates on so many levels. For a start it is true. Secondly it is so Chinese. Thirdly can’t you smell the communist sentiment beneath it.... and so on and so on. I could wax lyrically about the sentiments and significance of this simple sign for hours. But the thing I really want to draw your attention to is that it was just displayed in a museum. We saw a similar sign in Beijing outside a park. The Chinese seem to take this sort of stuff pretty seriously – particularly point 5.

On the tube back to our hotel was an American Chinese woman with her two American Chinese kids. She was clearly on a ‘visit-grandma-in-china-and-rediscover-her-cultural-roots’ trip. Her kids weren’t behaving particularly badly – no more boisterous than many American kids I have seen in America – but far too boisterous for the Chinese around. Because the kids looked Chinese the expectation was that they should act Chinese and there was a lot of murmuring going on. The American Chinese mother looked mortified, particularly when the Chinese grandmother started to apologise to everybody around her in Chinese and English for the children’s bad behaviour and she started to loudly blame it on the American education system. I can only imagine what was going through her head – but, remember point 5 above.

Cultural attitudes are so curious. Patti tells me this was particularly noticeable in the women’s toilets. The Chinese have two kinds of toilets. The older’ level-with-the floor-and-squat’ type, common in France for a while, and the normal – to us – ‘sit-on-it-and-do-your-business’ type.

Apparently, at the woman’s loo the squat type always had a huge queue whereas the sit type was always empty. It seems the Chinese women would attempt to hover over the sit down type as it never occurred to them to actually sit down on them. They must have found the sit down type so uncomfortable – having to hover that high up . I am willing to bet they just couldn’t see the point of them and saw them as completely unhygienic.

Our dinner was pretty fantastic. We ate a small place at 224-226 Guangdong Road in case anybody ever visits that part of Shanghai. The food was good, the place clean and the staff helpful and we came away stuffed having paid the grand total of £5.40 for the two of us. If you eat in a western hotel or go to the Raffles bar you can expect to pay normal English prices for dinner out (£30-£50 for two). But there is really no need. Just about every street has hundreds of places to eat. Every 5^th or 6^th shop seems to be a restaurant and you can eat for as little as £1 per person. I suspect that most people in the city eat out at least once a day. I am sure I have commented more than once that the Chinese live their lives on the street. On the way back from dinner we passed a mother playing badminton amongst the traffic with her son. She was terrible and knew it. So we laughed with her at her playing skill as she had embarrassedly  caught our eye. As we passed she invited me to play with her son – so I did – only in Shanghai i feel could dinner be rounded off with a game of badminton played amidst the moving traffic using a nearby scooter as a net.

 Shanghai, like most other Chinese cities is growing at a rate of about 1 million people per year. Thousands drift in every week with their belongings on scooters to look for work. They don’t only bring their kids, cats and clothes with them but their country attitudes to life too. The roads in Shanghai are good with clearly marked cycle lanes running beside both sides of the road so cyclists can go with the traffic. Most scooters, motorbikes and cyclist ignore this though and go wherever they like. Crossing the road means looking around constantly for traffic coming every which way all the time. I keep expecting a half mad country cyclist to drop from the sky one day.

This is our last night in Shanghai and China and I will be sorry to be leaving.