Shanghai (6)

Saturday 07/10

Isabelle and I wake up early to go to Fuxing Park. It’s always a pleasure to stroll in the parks in the morning to watch the Chinese perform their morning activities such as diabolo, kite, tai chi, badminton, singing, dancing, reading papers, etc. … even shaving!

We come back home to take the breakfast with the kids.

The weather is great today, and the weather forecast is excellent until our departure on Monday afternoon. We want to enjoy fully these 2.5 last days in Shanghai!

Ludivine will sleep over at Katie’s tonight and she’ll spend today and tomorrow with her.

We take Ofo bikes to the Jiashan Market, one of Shanghai’s best markets for artisan food and drink. Hosted in an old factory courtyard, in the heart of the Former French Concession and held 2 Saturdays per month, it showcases around 20 of Shanghai’s best artisan food and crafts producers. We buy some cacao products from a vendor with a global profile: he’s from NY, lives in Australia, makes his products in Philippines and comes twice a month in Shanghai to sell them…. He convinces us to buy cacao tea (to relax before sleeping) and sweetened (with coconut sugar) cacao nibs as energy snack; with these cacao nibs, you basically have the good part of the chocolate without the bad additions. Cacao assists in improving blood flow throughout your body, preventing heart diseases and giving you more energy. Cacao is the healthy side of chocolate that tastes great without the side effects seen with processed chocolate. We also meet a very nice French guy who sells cheese and olives. We discussed a bit with him, in particular about our trip, and he nicely offers us a truffle cheese.

We take the metro to the area of the World Expo 2010 site. We first see the (red, inverted-pyramid-shaped) China Art Museum, which was the China Pavilion. We just take the escalators to the top to see the view of Shanghai but there’s no such great view. We then try to see the Moon Boat, which was the KSA Pavilion (which had a huge public success) but it no longer exists. It must have been demolished recently; we indeed see a lot of construction sites around. This is typical of China: buildings or even entire districts are demolished from one day to another to make space for newer developments. Everything goes so fast here!

We have lunch in the huge Mall of this Expo area. We eat good salmon sushi while watching the cutting of entire salmons by chefs, right in front of us.

We take Ofo bikes to the Riverside promenade in Pudong. It’s great; the weather is excellent and the path is superb. We have nice views of the towers. As we approach the center of Pudong, we ride along the river.

When reaching the center of Pudong, we put the kids in a metro, to go back to the apartment. They are tired; they rode the bikes very well.

We take a few pictures of the impressive towers, enjoying the beautiful light, and then go inside the luxurious IPC Mall. Isabelle buys a nice dress at Abercrombie.

We take the ferry back to Puxi; we admire the sunset.

We take again Ofo bikes (we love them!), this time to go and see the LOOK Smithsonian exhibit at the Jing’an Sculpture Park. Isabelle follows me in the traffic, in the dark; I’m impressed…

It is a world-class photography exhibit, with incredible pictures. We enjoy it.

We take Ofo bikes to go back home. We did 25 km by bike today.

It’s amazing how much difference there is between a day with sun and a day of rain!

We have dinner at home.

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