Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 17

This week is going to be a short blog, I think. We are getting ready to go to Tokyo, so it is a prep week, really.

I did get to do some shopping with some American friends of mine, and one of the things that I picked up were some wine bottle covers. They are made from silk and you would put a bottle in them. They can be used at home, or as a lovely way to give wine as a gift to someone. They have various colors and styles and a few are shown below.

We took a little time also to take another stroll through a neighborhood in Shanghai that we hadn't really been to before. In this case, we walked by the Shanghai Library, Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of Shanghai. Wow, what a long name :-) Anyway, The building is quite an impressive complex when you get out of the metro.

There is a nice little sculpture in the lobby as well.

Out front, there is a statue of the Thinker.

We then headed over to a park. Right near the entrance there is a statue of someone, but neither of us can remember where exactly the park was or who the statue was. We walked around the perimeter and there were lots of plaques that told us what kinds of trees and plants they were .. .assuming you read either Latin or Chinese. There were quite a few people there on a Sunday afternoon ... some playing badminton, a couple playing something that was like badminton but with a more solid ball and different racquets, and one older guy doing Tai Chi. There was a saxophone player softly serenading everyone. There were also a bunch of older Chinese gentlemen playing something that looked like a cross between chess and checkers. We took a couple pictures and tried to watch a little bit, but we didn't want to intrude too much.

One interesting thing that they seem to do here is that someone (we don't really know who) puts lots of these flower stands outside of a new business when it opens. They all seem to look the same, and there are normally quite a few of them out front. They stay there for about 4 or 5 days. We saw them on DongChang Lu, which is nearby, when they opened a couple stores last week, and then this week they had them out front of a bank branch that opened near the DongChang metro station.

As I said .. short blog this week. We leave on Wednesday for Tokyo and so we'll have lots of blog-stuff next week and the following week, since we most likely will split Tokyo into 2 weeks.