Seeing Shanghai with Tracy

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I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Shanghai…because that would mean my trip was coming to an end…

I took a fast train (D5411, which would go upwards of 180 miles an hour at times) from Nanjing. The trip took about 2 hours. When I got off with all my luggage (a big rolling suitcase, a carry on size rolling suitcase, a large daypack, a camera bag, and a belly pack), I realized that I was pretty stupid for not having made a hotel or hostel reservation, as I now had no idea of where I would stay and had to drag all this with me until I found a place. I took the subway from the train station to People’s Square and decided I would walk until I found a Motel 168 (Shanghai’s equivalent of a Motel 6). There were stairs everywhere (including walkovers just to cross the street) which were quickly draining my enthusiasm. I walked about 7 blocks and then, as if I had planned it, a Motel 168 appeared!

I got a room for 2 nights and got in touch with Tracy, who is a professor at Shanghai University. Tracy is good friends with Zhang Yi, who is a visiting scholar and one of my English students in Tallahassee (Hi, Yi!). Tracy came to the Hotel and we walked back to People’s Square to visit the Shanghai Museum.

The Museum has a very impressive display of pottery and ceramics, jade, official seals (stamps), Chinese painting, Chinese calligraphy, etc. The nice thing about it was that the displayed collection wasn’t so large that it overwhelmed you with quantity, rather each piece was extremely well preserved and a good specimen of what it was intended to be. I am amazed at the quality of workmanship in pottery that is thousands of years old!

Here are a couple of examples from the collection.

The first is a landscape done in 1346, during the Yuan Dynasty (the one started by Chengjisihan (Ghengis Khan)):

Chinese Landscape painting from 1346

The second is a calligraphy sample from 1313 (also the Yuan Dynasty):

Calligraphy dating from 1313

After going to the museum, Tracy was going to take me out to dinner at a fashionable (and really good) Sichuan restaurant. Unfortunately, it was so fashionable that by the look of the line waiting for a table, it looked like it would take until the next day! Seriously, there were well more than 200 people waiting in line. It was on the fourth floor of a building and its English name was simple and cool: Spicy Joint.

We decided to try another restaurant that Tracy knew about, but had not tried. It was a fairly long taxi ride away (half because the traffic in Shanghai is terrible and this was rush hour). She had called ahead for reservations, so we were seated promptly. The food was delicious, including my happiest food surprise in China….frog legs! Before you turn away, I had tried these one time in a restaurant in the Untited States and I thought they were pretty bad. I could not see why anyone would want to eat them…they were a little fishy tasting and chewy. But, they were also frozen and I realized they were probably not the creme de la creme of frog legs, so I made a mental note to try them again. This was the time, as Tracy ordered them. OMG, they were fantastic! I can now heartily recommend that you try frog legs…but ONLY at a place that makes them fresh and knows how to cook them.

OK, they did taste a little like chicken, but they were delicious!

The rest of the meal was very good, too, including a standout fish dish (partly standing out because it was the first fish I had in China that did not have bones to watch out for!):

Another delicious dish in Shanghai...

More good food!

The other dishes were (clockwise from top left): a chicken dish which we both thought was not special, a very nice spicy cabbage, salty duck (though a heated kind, not cold…it was very good!), pressed bean of some type (not tofu), and a green bean type dish.

After dinner, Tracy treated me to a Dairy Queen and we called it a night.

The next day, after she had to attend meetings, we got together at a park for tea (the main picture, above), and visited a temple in the old park, Yu Yuan. The park was relatively peaceful and quiet and a nice place to talk and unwind.

It was very nice to meet Tracy, who is studying the environment and would like to do research on ways to stop algae blooms.

Tracy, thank you so much for showing me Shanghai!