We arrived in Shanghai exhausted and crabby (or maybe this was just me!), but safely, on Saturday afternoon (China time!). Sunday we did major site seeing in the city. We visited the Shanghai Museum, the Jade Buddha Temple, and the Yuyuan Gardens, took a break, and then ended up exploring the China nightlife. (Or some of us did–some of us slept.) Most interesting to me were the other tourists–both foreigners and Chinese–who were visiting the tourist sites at the same time as us.

In the Jade Buddha Temple, we ran into a flock of Europeans each with a Chinese girl baby. Evidently they were in the process of adoption, and the tourist stop at the Temple was part of their waiting period. After trying out several languages, we figured out that they were Spanish, and Genevieve, happy to use her Spanish in China, helped us chat with one new father. His baby’s name was Karla (in Spanish) and Wei Wei (in Chinese). Each Chinese daughter was about a year old, and as they wandered through the Temples with their new parents they reached for faces and fingers. The new parents enamored of their babies, began to teach them “Mama” and “Papa.” Personally, this was much more interesting to me than the Bhuddas themselves (although gold laughing Buddha was beautiful and Jade Buddha was lovely).

The Temples are also active sites of worship, and we saw our first kowtows, bows to the Bhudda, which are done amazingly quickly and involve a fast bow with palms turned up. Incense burned in vase about as big as a traditional american barbeque pit between the Temples. The monks in the Temples were planning a special service in honor of the victims of the Chinese earthquake while we were there. While we didn’t see the ceremony, we saw the preparations surrounding each Bhudda. Later, we all donated money to the earth quake victims on our way out to dinner.

At the Yuyan gardens we learned that Chinese gardens depend on crookedness and asymmetry. They like to use rocks with holes in them. Mary Ann and I met a Chinese man who said he was a former professor of architecture and he spoke with us at length about the ideal way to plan a Chinese garden. Rocks are important. Views should hint at what’s beyond them, but not reveal them. They should be quiet places. As one of the students put it, the Yuyan Garden is really an oasis, not a garden as we would think of it.

There is really much more to say. Everything in China, Polly Evans writes in _Fried Eggs with Chopsticks_ is hard, and this hasn’t been true for us, although almost everything feels different–from the whole fish (with it’s head still attached) we sampled today at a Chinese banquet to the squat bathrooms we used at the rest stop on the trip from Nanjing.

By the way, we’re no where near the earthquakes, so although all of China is deeply concerned about what’s going on there, we’re far from any of those actual events.

Ann

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