I love my time so far here in Shanghai. Everyone has been so gracious and welcoming. Everyone except the cashiers that won’t sell me pears, that is. Yes, I did try again, and yes, I failed in my second attempt to buy pears. Although this time, the cashier made no reference to the pastries when she put my pears under the register. And that’s when it hit me. She has no scale. There must be a scale or something back with the fruit and I’m supposed to weigh them before bringing them up to the front. I’ll try that on Sunday…
Got me good and lost my first weekend here. Well, not really lost, because all I had to do was find a metro station and I could easily get myself back to my apartment. But what I did do was to ride the subway and get off at random places, just to walk around. I’d walk for about 45 minutes to an hour, then drop back down to the subway and pick another random place to disembark. It was a lot of fun, but I do have to say it is a bit surreal getting around as an illiterate. Put me in Mexico and the letters are at least the same and I can puzzle my way through root words. Read the signs here? Not so much. Although I am getting better with my Chinese and am starting to pick out words. So now instead of hearing “blah blah blah blah blah” I hear “blah blah four blah blah”. Not great, but getting there…
For some of my wanderings, I did have specific places I wanted to go, like finding people doing Tai Chi in the park and wanted to find the Bund, which is an old colonial part of Shanghai that looks across the river to the Pudong district, where the majority of the modern skyscrapers are.
Feeling naked without a wholly-functional cell phone has also taken some getting used to, but when I found Jing’an Temple, I was OK with that because it was easier to focus on the surroundings. The temple itself is amazing. Originally built around 220 A.D, it’s been moved from its original location and even once served as a train station. It’s kind of hard to get scale in the pictures, but the statues of the gods and goddesses are not small. The silver Buddha is in the main temple at the top of the stairs is about 30′ tall and is made with over 15 tons of silver. Each of the halls honor some sort of deity and have tables in front of them to accept gifts – boxes for cash donations are also present. Each one also has a long kneeler, much more comfortable than the ones at Columbia Catholic, for offering prayers after your donation.
The girl that shows up in a lot of my pictures I hadn’t really noticed until I started looking through them when I got back to my apartment. She was praying for something significant. I wandered the temple for close to an hour. She was there in my first pictures, as well as in my last. There are bundles of incense for the faithful to light and they hold them in various ways, but always with two hands, as they bow in prayer. I felt a bit intrusive taking pictures of people praying, so as I did with the Tai Chi folks, I tried to keep a respectful distance. I really need to get a better lens for my camera…
Moving on… As I looked at the panorama I put together of the outside of the temple, it almost looks like a Photoshop fail. The juxtaposition of the ancient temple against skyscrapers and the bottom of the temple lined with shops. Just doesn’t seem right, but that’s Shanghai.
The sofa back in my apartment was not necessarily happy to see me at the end of this 9-hour walking tour, but I was more than happy to see it. Little on the short side, but a good afternoon nap quickly set in… Back out for more today – will try to do a better job of keeping up here.
