Day 28 - Tuesday, Nov. 12 - Shanghai

Jade Buddha Temple

Not too early a start today.  All activities nearby.  We drive through streets with few scooters and even fewer bikes.  Not a single bike rental rack on our route.  Until we get to the poorer sections of town.  Parents buy their one child a car now instead of a bike, if they can.

       Our first stop:  the Jade Buddha Temple, an active place of worship in a once-atheist country.  Today’s Chinese Constitution gives the Chinese the right to believe in god(s) or not... but you cannot question communism.  And yes, that is a People’s Republic of China flag flying next to the multicolored international Buddhist flag.  The temple has existed for 100 years, since the late Qing Dynasty, although not always at this site.  (The old site was bombed in World War II.)  It was built to house two jade Buddhas a high monk brought back from Burma - one sitting, one reclining - statues from the Mahayana sect of Buddhism.  It’s all similar to those I saw in Japan, and very beautiful.  But it’s strange to me to see Chinese people bowing and praying.  And I feel that I’m disturbing them.

Old City

Tea shop

Then it's on to the Old City Market in the center of what's left of the old quarter.  Pingping (I've decided I like her real name better) asks permission of the occupants for us to take a look up an alleyway that was once the hallway of a one-family home; now nine families live there.  In two or three years, all this “old Chinatown” will be gone - excluding a few rare nice houses which will be kept as a sort of museum.  Families will be moved to the exurbs.  The new buildings in their place will be for business... for making money, not for residences.  We all visit a shop that sells jade, pearls and tea - a strange combination.  We’re served three teas brewed for us, a choice from the fifteen or so available (including a lotus tea that “regulates menstrusion” (sic), or so they claim).
       We’re unleashed for almost an hour to frequent the myriad shops.  When we gather again by the 500-year-old teahouse at the crossroads of Starbucks, DQ and Pandora, we’re laden with Things... and hungry.

Old City Market

Old City Market

Off to a western lunch along a canal at a place called “Kathleen’s Waitan”.  The menu:  kale and quinoa salad, followed by steak and mashed potatoes and crowned by an excellent crème brûlée.  We all think Stanley is subjecting us to culinary re-education before shipping us home.  As an hors-d’oeuvre, a presentation on bird preservation by a young ornithologist who couldn’t look more American if she tried (though Chinese).  Her subject:  the “aw”-inspiring (my pun) and terminally cute spoon-billed sandpiper, which is being killed off by land reclamation, invasive species and other things like pollution, nets, hunting and global warming.
       After lunch, many of us go to a silk factory cum outlet store where we get an explanation of the mysteries of the silkworm.  That one cocoon yields an entire kilometer of silk.  That it takes 5,000 cocoons to make just one man’s shirt.  That once the pupae are released from the cocoon, they are eaten or used to make things like face creams.  If there are two pupae in one cocoon - twins - their silk threads will be tangled together so such cocoons are used to make a sheet of fabric, not a thread, and those sheets are used to make duvets - 100 layers for a summer one, 300 for a winter one.  One of which I buy, to be shipped to the States.  We all buy something silk:  scarves, blouses, pajamas... After we leave, I’m sure they do a Happy Dance.

       Back to the hotel, and for me a walk along the Bund down the block.  Amazing architecture from the early 19th century reflecting the power of the economy here at that time, even though the wealth was in the hands of foreigners, not the Chinese.
       At six, we head off to a restaurant in one of those ex-concessions:  the French one.  Shanghai and Cantonese cuisine in the Lilac Room of a building where the Prime Minister kept the favorite one of his concubines.  We’ve ordered a surprise cake for Stanley, complete with a gold paper crown that only I, with my experience of “la fête des rois” (French Epiphany) can fit together.  We’ve also passed the hat for him, but he doesn’t know what’s in that present yet.  The meal - The Last Supper - ends in hugs, tears and good-byes.  We’ve become “sticky rice”, as Stanley says.  Friendships have formed and now we’ll go our separate ways.  We may see each other at breakfast.  Some will travel to the airport together tomorrow.  But for many, we may never meet again after this dinner.  Something to think about as we slip between the sheets.

Puxi and its skyscrapers, as seen from the Bund across the Pu River