Rain rain go away...

View from the hotel

A few notes from our last week in Shanghai before flying out to our current location, Qingdao. Last week as I began writing this entry in the wee early hours in the morning, the view from our hotel windows brought nothing more than a dull gray haze, spontaneaously interrupted with brilliant flashes of lighting. The pouring rain emits a constant soundtrack, as if we are sitting on the shores of a rushing river. I don't remember weather like this, 80 degrees, extremely humid, and absolutely pouring rain -- and I didn't pack an umbrella. That last roll of thunder shook our windows.. should be a great day for a tourist with nothing but an REI poncho.

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One of the last nights, our group ate dinner at a "Uyghur" restaurant. Pronounced "Wigger", its a small Chinese ethnic group along the Northwest border. Think Mongolian dancers and gyros. At the end of dinner, they had all of us foreigners join them onstage for 10 minutes of ridiculous dancing. Can you guess which uncoordinated, oakey white guy got the chance 

to make a fool of himself first? Yup, and I'm sure Karen will post the embarrasing video to prove it - once she gets around to creating her blog. You can be sure it won't be posted here...

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Some other adventures of note...

We visited the Shanghai Museum situated on the People's Square in the Huangpu District of Shanghai.  It’s a 

museum of ancient Chinese art, whose building is designed in the shape of an ancient, bronze, tripod cooking vessel.  The building has round top and a square base, symbolizing the ancient Chinese perception of the world as "round sky, square earth".  The museum has a collection of over 120,000 pieces, including bronze, ceramics, calligraphy, furniture, jades, ancient coins, paintings, seals, sculptures, minority art and foreign art.

We took a sightseeing boat down the HuangPu River, which is the largest river in Shanghai, and divides the city into east and west sides.  The west bank (Puxi) of the Huangpu River is the cultural, residential and entertainment center of Shanghai.  Many historical buildings left over from Shanghai's colonial days have been preserved along the west bank. 

The east bank of the river (Pudong) is the newer district of Shanghai and its financial and commercial hub. Steel and glass structures areabundant here; you can see skyscraper hotels lit up at night, with HUGE LED screens and advertisements everywhere.

Other landmarks on this side include the popular Oriental Pearl TV Tower and the Jin Mao Tower (now the 2nd tallest building in China, as of last week).

We also had a chance to witness the view from atop the JinMao Tower.  Its an 88 story landmark skyscraper that until 2007 was the tallest building in mainland China, the fifth tallest in the world by roof height and the seventh tallest by pinnacle height.