Sightseeing

City God Temple

On Sunday, we decided to Be tourists - destination old city. We took the metro to Yuyuan garden station. The Shanghai metro is very modern, fast and efficient, English maps are available and the stations are all well marked with instructions and directions in English (and ofcourse in Chinese). The staff are very helpful and do their best to give directions with their limited English skills.

We got out of the metro station and arrived in a different world! The streets were packed with people, tourists and locals alike, hawkers and vehicles. There were many buildings with pagoda like roofs which turn up at the corners. We went to the City God temple and were mesmerized by its vibrant beauty. There were a large number of people worshipping there and entry was free. Both of us prayed there, took some customary snaps, soaked in the culture and proceeded to our next stop- Yuyuan garden. Sunshine slept through all this and woke as soon as we were inside the garden.

We decided to feed him his lunch in a quite corner. He started running all over the place and started being his extermely restless self as soon as I started feeding him. Soon many domestic tourists in the garden started noticing him, petting him and taking his snaps. Yes... they were taking his snaps like he is a celebrity. The adults were picking him up, children were holding his hands and posing with him and a crowd gathered around him. We were concerned that strangers were photographing our child- even DH who normally enjoys and appreciates all the attention that Sunshine gets which he incidentally gets a lot, because he is exotic in Germany and he can be a real monkey. But my little monkey acted like a star, striking different poses and making cute faces and generally enjoying the attention with no stranger anxiety whatsoever. All our attempts to coax him to leave the spot were summarily dismissed. People did click Sunshine in Century park and the restaurant the previous day, but that was like 2-3 snaps. We did not want to say no since it seemed to be an acceptable thing to do in the local culture and we did not want to be rude. DH tried holding Sunshine very close to him so that he wouldn't be alone in the snap, but I pointed out the futility of doing this as they can later photoshop it. Anyway, finally we managed to coax Sunshine away from there with a chocolate.

Yu Garden

The garden dates back to the 1500s and has many water bodies, fountains, bonsais and rare plants, pavillions and many beautiful stone carvings. We were not artistic enough to appreciate or understand everything there, but enjoyed its uniqueness.

After leaving the garden, we had some seafood dumplings from one of the local eateries where we seemed to be the only non Chinese patrons. That must mean that it was authentic, right? Anyway, I liked it, DH found it very ordinary. A lady tried to give Sunshine some candy, but this time we put our foot down and refused it although we felt bad about it. We wanted to shop for some scarves which seemed pretty and cheap. But after checking out a couple of shops, we decided that we were too tired to bargain and did not want Sunshine to get cranky since it was already a long day for him.

We got back to the hotel tired but happy with our old Shanghai experience and a bit more enriched. We almost had an accident because Sunshine's stroller got stuck on the top of the escalator, but thankfully DH managed to push the stroller with Sunshine in it and me out before anything bad happened. No more taking the stroller up escalators; it is either the elevator or the stairs from now on!