A morning in Suzhou

The most interesting thing we did in Suzhou was checking out the local stores. For instance, we found a TV store...

... a kitchen supplies store (check out those wok burners!) ...

... and a bath supplies store, where you can get your own wooden bathtub.

These doors, however, were not for sale and simply up for grabs. Too bad they didn't fit in a suitcase as they would have looked great in our living room.

There were also plenty of local delicacies to try, like little birds (pigeons?) and pigs' noses. We stuck with sweet sesame dumplings.

Traditional buildings by the only remaining canal inside the town

A view of several bridges over the canal. Unfortunately most of the buildings around it were built recently and are nothing special.

The Venice of the East

I couldn't understand how appropriate the above name was for the city of Suzhou until I saw some pictures on the internet after I returned. Having just two days to explore Shanghai and its outskirts was not enough, and a morning in Suzhou was the best we could do as far as getting out of Shanghai.

Suzhou looked a lot more like Venice in the old days, when the main way of transportation was by water. In the new China of automobiles most of the canals were paved over and you have to get out of Suzhou city and into the country if you want to get a glimpse of its watery past--which we weren't able to do.

Still, it was interesting to see what a smaller city looks like, and, to be fair, the center of Suzhou is still well-preserved with its narrows streets filled with traditional businesses and stores. Unfortunately, there is only the main canal left. A visitor with more time can take a leisurely walk alongside the waterway or visit the numerous gardens. We sat down at a tiny traditional restaurant and had some sweet dumplings before heading back to the metropolis.

A Walk on the Town

European Architecture around the French Concession

A view into a courtyard. The two-wheeled vehicles and the laundry hanging outside are Shanghai staples.

A well-lit building downtown, opposite the historical People's Park

The lights and crowds of Nanjing Lu, where all domestic and international tourists must set foot at least once.

Another view of Nanjing Lu

Moving pictures from the temple

The courtyard in the Jade Buddha temple

Past, Present and Future Buddhas

City in motion

Video, at last! Nanjing Lu by night...

Bright Lights...

After visiting the Yu Yuan Gardens, our guide brought us back to the French Concession, where our hotel was located. He recommended this restaurant specialized in traditional Shanghainese cuisine and left after we sat down. At first ordering was easy because they had bilingual menus. However, to order more dishes turned out to be pretty difficult, since the waiters did not speak a word (not even yes or no) of English.

My parents and I have been in many situations where we don’t speak the language of the place, but this was probably our hardest time ever trying to communicate. Gestures and pointing were somehow not working, no matter how many different waiters came to our table trying to help. We did manage to get second helpings of one dish, but getting mooncakes or watermelon for desert was a real challenge. Eventually we did get some watermelon.

It had turned out to be a nice day, so we went for a walk after lunch. Around the French Concession there are a lot of small boutiques selling very cute, original outfits for prices that give even Singapore a run for their money. Of course we did some shopping and kept walking, taking notice of the European-inspired architecture as we went along. We made our way to the river, passing the historic People’s Park and busy Nanjing-Lu, with its plethora of neon lights a la Times Square.

It was already dark by the time we got to the river, to take a different look at the Bund and the Pudong. This time it was really hard to see anything at all. Apparently, this is the busiest time of the day to come here, and so we had to hold hands to make sure we didn’t get lost in the crowd. Catching a taxi back to the hotel was difficult too.

We had a quick dinner around the hotel (my mom and I had congee--porridge) and then went to the Cotton Club. Shanghai is somewhat famous for its jazz scene. Especially well-know are the jazz sessions at the historic Peace Hotel, right on the Bund. Unfortunately, the Peace Hotel was closed for renovations, so we took our guidebook’s suggestion to check out this Cotton Club. This place is an unassuming bar not too far from the French Concession where there are live bands every night, including a lot of jazz.

On that night, there was rock and folk on the menu (performed by Americans, even though the audience was mostly Chinese), and since it was a weeknight, it wasn’t very crowded, so we had a nice view to the stage. It was a different way to experience Shanghai.

Rocks and dumplings

Gardens seem to be a very important element of Asian cultures. An excellent example is the Kokoen gardens in Himeji, Japan, but it’s definitely not just a Japanese phenomenon. The Chinese gardens we’ve seen in our trips tend to be grander, rockier, and more complicated than their Japanese counterparts. The Summer Palace is a larger than life example, though the garden at the Forbidden City was another instance of a garden comprised of a number of pavilions, some trees, and many funny-shaped rocks.

The Chinese look at rocks the way we look at clouds: the imagination turns strange shapes into familiar objects or animals. In the Summer Palace, for example, there was a group of rocks names after the Chinese zodiac signs, though I couldn’t tell the monkey from the snake. If had had more time, however, I would have liked to try and find out.

In Shanghai, one of the major attractions is the YuYuan gardens. Unlike the Summer Palace or the Forbidden City, these were private gardens at a time, and belonged to a government official. For a garden that didn’t belong to the emperor, it is quite large. It is comprised of several sections (hence the plural “gardens”), and includes a few ponds, a zigzagging bridge, a corridor with a lane for ladies and another for gents, a theater, numerous courtyards, and, of course, hundreds of rocks.

On top of a white wall separating two of the gardens lays a grey dragon, undulating for many meters. Apparently the emperor was not amused when he heard of this dragon wall. After all, the dragon is the symbol of the emperor and not something commoners should be using to accessorize their gardens. The owner avoided this issue by giving only four claws to each of the dragon’s hands. It’s really a technicality, but since the emperor’s dragon has five claws, the dragon on the wall did not represent a threat.

Outside the gardens, there is a huge bazaar. It’s a whole neighborhood of buildings mimicking a traditional style and narrows streets packed with tourists. Most of the buildings house souvenir stores, but there is also a number of restaurants, including a very large one famous for its xiao long bao, or Shanghai-style dumplings. You can see the cooks at work folding many dumplings per minute, or you can go upstairs and try some yourself. They are very, very recommended.

Below are some views of the YuYuan Gardens.

The View from Huangpu Park on a Misty Day

Some of the Bund's iconic buildings

Many tourists and almost as many vendors in Huangpu Park, with some of the Bund's buildings in the background. At sunset, the number of people in the park is multiplied by at least ten.

The Pudong, with the distinctive Oriental Pearl Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center a little to the right

The Old and the New

If there’s one area of Shanghai that can be considered an icon of the city, it’s the banks of the Huangpu river: the old-world Bund on one side and the shiny, brand-new Pudong on the other. Flocks and flocks of tourists gather here, to the point that it’s really hard to take a picture in any direction without getting at least a couple of heads in the front. Keep an eye on you belongings and your companions! Together, the Bund and the Pudong summarize a lot of what the city was and is about.

The Bund is a water-fronted avenue, lined with buildings made by Europeans in the first decades of the 20ty century, when Shanghai was the sin city of the East. These buildings include Art-Deco type hotels, several big banks, and headquarters of large corporations, with a very European flair and every single one of them topped by a few Chinese flags (all of them belong to the government nowadays.)

On the other side of the river it’s all about the modern buildings in dramatic shapes, like the Oriental Pearl Tower, with an architecture that looks it was inspired by some old sci-fi illustration, the tall Jin Mao building, which houses the luxurious Grand Hyatt hotel and has a terrific view over the city, and the brand new Shanghai World Financial Center, the world’s third tallest building, which is still in construction.

Everything in the Pudong looks new, and I doubt there’s any building there that’s more than 15 years old. It feels like all those steel-and-glass corporate towers and the predominantly white residential buildings all suddenly sprouted of the ground like mushrooms.

A recent addition to this interesting dichotomy is a tunnel under the river, which connects the two banks via a neon-lit psychedelic-type experience. Add the even more neon-filled Nanjing Avenue nearby, and it’s like Shanghai is steadily turning into Walt Disney World.

Buddhas that aren't golden (for a change)

I met my parents and the guide at Shanghai airport. Our guide was in his twenties, with an ear piercing and a flashy cell phone he had trouble putting away. In the morning of our first day he took us to the Jade Buddha temple. This temple reminded me a little of the Lama temple in Beijing. While the Lama temple is housed in a former palace, this one looks like it used to be a wealthy person’s home, in terms of architecture. And while the Lama temple features some Tibetan art and imagery, the Jade Buddha temple features, well, a Buddha made of jade. Actually, there are two.

According to the story, a monk brought about five jade statues from Burma, though three of them were more like statuettes. The two large ones—one a sitting Buddha and the other a reclining one—were actually hidden from view from the Cultural Revolution until the eighties. They’re significantly smaller than many other Buddhas I’d seen on my trips, but none the less impressive, given the material they were carved out of. Unfortunately, photos of the jade Buddhas were not allowed.

The jade statues aren’t all there is to see in the temple. I found two other interesting statues, the Laughing Buddha (also called Budai), and the armor-clad Veda. There was also a curious depiction of a female deity, Guanyin, whose particular role in the Chinese Buddhist pantheon I cannot recall.

The incense burner in the main courtyard

Depiction of Guanyin, a female deity

Another courtyard, seen from the hallway leading to the Jade Buddhas. From here, the temple really looks like a villa, I think.

Shanghai or This Blog isn't Dead

Just because six months have come and gone and we have been back from Asia for quite some time now, it doesn’t mean the tale of our travels is over. It’s just that it’s harder to find both the time and the mental availability to update this blog these days. We ended up staying in Asia for one more month than the six originally planned, and aside from exploring more of Singapore, we were able to take two more trips abroad.

In late September, it was Steve’s turn not to go, this time to Shanghai. I met my parents there, who had been taking essentially the Beijing tour we’d been on back in July, except for a stop in Xi’an.

Shanghai is a very different city from Beijing. Sure, they’re both quite large and populous and undergoing and immense development, but in feel they are very apart. For all the glass and concrete skyscrapers, Beijing is still very much the stately head of the government, while Shanghai is the cosmopolitan center of business. If I had to choose one of them to live in, I wouldn’t think twice about picking Shanghai, since, at least for the time being, there is a lot more to do there, even though there are certainly less tourist attractions.

Said tourist attractions are the centered around the European-influenced Bund and French Concession, the Yu Yuan Gardens, a (then) privately-owned and more sensibly sized version of the Summer Palace, the Jade Buddha temple, and the new developments around the city, namely the Pudong.

Besides these must-see places, Shanghai is a fine place just to walk around, admiring the European and industrial-type architectures, or shopping for great bargains at a thousand little boutiques that seem to sprout like mushrooms. It’s also the original place of Dim Sum and therefore a great city to indulge your palate, not just in Chinese cuisine, but in many other types of food you’ll find in all sorts of restaurants. At night, there are several bars and shows to choose from, as well as the more traditional option of attending an acrobatics show (apparently, the acrobats are more a tradition of Shanghai than Beijing, which surprised me.)

Interestingly enough, despite a having a great number of expats and a generally international feel, it’s hard to find anyone in Shanghai—except in hotels—that will speak other languages than Mandarin. In my next posts I will go into more detail about the places we visited and the things we did. Also, I have videos.

Culinary Adventures - Beijing

In Beijing you can find a lot of the same food they serve you in restaurants in NYC (save for General Tso's), but what's the point of eating the same old stuff? During our trip, we tried to taste as many local specialties as we could. However, we left without trying the live scorpions and seahorses on a stick that were for sale at the stalls in Wangfujing Avenue...

Chinese pancake with onions is a popular alternative to rice in the countryside.

Mongolian stew. Doesn't look like much, but it's delicious.

Rice porridge with corn makes a nice side dish.

Chrysanthemum tea. We also tried Oolong, jasmine, rose, lychee, Puerr and green tea.

Mr. Sha (the cricket man) and his family offered us some cherry sweets.

One cannot go to Beijing and pass on Peking Duck.

This is duck feet. Yes, we actually ate them (not a whole lot though.) They taste very fatty and have a weird consistency, sort of rubbery. Not something on my list to try again.

Evening entertainment

Besides a lot of western-style bars and clubs, in Beijing there are many other options a tourist can choose from when looking for something to do in the evening. We decided to splurge and attended a show for every night we spent there.

The first night we went for the obligatory Peking Opera. We had an idea of what to expect, namely, long, unintelligible dialogs, high-pitched voices and a lot of drama. Well, the voices were mostly high, yes, but the show was actually very entertaining. They sat us at tables and served us tea, peaches and Chinese snacks. There were two short shows (about 1/2 hour long, each of them), thankfully more action-based than dialog-based and there was a LED display that did a very decent job of translating said dialogs. The first show was actually funny and the second one was about a forbidden love story in which a goddess had to fight the other gods for her mortal beloved (why she would fall in love with such a wimpy guy is besides the point.) Most amazingly, no-one died, so the whole thing was unexpectedly very light-hearted.






On the second night we went for a Kung Fu show that was more like a Broadway production. It told the story of a Kung Fu monk from the time he's left at the monastery as a child to the time when he becomes the new master. There was no dialog, so it was pretty easy to follow. It was cool, but we weren't supposed to take pictures and, while Julie dared, I didn't.

On our last evening we saw an acrobatics show. While it was the most mindless of the three, it was also easily the most entertaining, because the acrobats were truly amazing. I was constantly awed by the way they kept attempting increasingly difficult things. And it was humbling in the sense that, no matter how much time I could spend at the gym, I'll never be in such good shape (I can't even do a handstand!)

The Inner Court

Entrance to the Western corridor

A view of the Western corridor, from where you can access several palaces

Tile work in Yang Xin Hall. Yellow is the color of the emperor.

I believe this is the interior of Yang Xin Hall though, to tell the truth, there are several palaces in the Western side of the inner court, and they all look the same, so I might be wrong.

Another view of the interior of Yang Xin Hall

A male lion at the entrance to Yang Xin Hall

Another view of the Western corridor

The outer courtyards

Guards outside the Meridian Gate

The Meridian Gate

A view of the main courtyard

Looking back at the Taihe gate from the main courtyard

Another view of the main courtyard

Climbing up the stairs to Zonghe Hall

One of the emperor's many thrones, and possibly the least impressive. I've only seen the others in pictures, since they're in the buildings under renovation, but they're much bigger and more golden, even though the style is basically the same.

A detail of the roofs in the Forbidden City. A way of telling a building's importance is counting the number of figurines in the corner. This one is pretty important.

Behind the Forbidden City's roofs, one of the corner towers and, in the background, the White Dagoba in Beihai Park, right outside the Palace Museum.

Stone carvings on the stairs behind Baohe Hall