Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

Shanghai is crawling with tourists. Weirdly, a lot of them want me to take their pictures for them with Shanghai landmarks in the background. They're all in town for the Expo (they all agree that all of the good pavilions have multi-hour lines to get in, so I may end up skipping it), and they are all heading to the Tea Culture Festival which just opened. I met people from Beijing, Xi'an, and Hangzhou. There was even one Shanghai native, who was showing his out-of-town friend around.

I had a good, touristy day. Strolled up The Bund and took pictures of the old European-styled buildings on the left (Puxi) and the shiny glass-and-concrete Chinese skyscrapers on the other side of the river (Pudong). I passed under the river through The Bund Sightseeing Tunnel, a cross between a tiny subway and a drive-through-screensaver (featuring visual effects announced as things like "Shooting Stars", "Nascent Magma", and "Paradise and Hell"). I took a few pictures of buildings in Pudong and then took the normal subway back to People's Square.

I wonder if People's Square has the most exits of any subway station in the world. It's a transfer point for three lines and has 20 numbered exits. It took me a while, but I eventually found the exit for the Shanghai Museum.

The Museum had some great historical overviews of different kinds of Chinese art. I particularly liked the exhibits on Seal Carving and Scroll Painting.

In the evening I headed to the Shanghai Circus World subway stop (yes, that's the name of the stop) to see Era: Intersection of Time. The show was much more like Cirque du Soleil than the show I saw in Beijing: more focus on individuals and small groups doing hard tricks rather than large groups synchronizing medium-difficulty tricks, thematic interludes, musical pieces, large apparatus acts. There were a couple of acts (shooting stars, plate spinning) that seemed like they were just there because they were expected standards, but most of the acts were quite impressive. They closed with a motorcycle act where they had 8 bikes going at once inside a metal sphere.

After the circus, I headed back to The Bund to see the buildings lit for the evening.