Shanghai - Day 2

My second day in Shanghai, I decided to stay in town instead of leaving, since there were a couple of museums I wanted to see (and I didn't get up early enough!).  The first museum was the Shanghai History Museum, which was actually the best museum I've been to in a long time.  It was really well laid out and had mostly very detailed scenes with waxed figures to illustrate ways of life at different stages of Shanghai's history.  Some of my favorite scenes were the fish store:

and the opium den (of course attributed to the evils of colonial powers):

After that, I went to THE Shanghai Museum, which is more of a China Cultural relic museum. There were really good collections of bronzes, sculpture, Chinese painting, pottery, jade work, coins, and more!  I thought this food vessel was particularly striking:

This Buddhist statue was also fear-inspiring:

 One thing I didn't really realize before my visit was that Ming pottery was much more varied than the standard blue-and-white that we hear about.  There was pottery of every color imaginable and decorated with intricately painted and glazed scenes.  These vases were titled '100 deer':

I just liked this one:

 All the Chinese painting in the museum focused on nature scenes, with varying degrees of human interruption (buildings, people, etc)  Captions made distinctions of style that were beyond me - one that I do remember is the remark that for a particular painting, the fact that the monk in the lower corner was walking down the mountain instead of up was of great importance!

There were impressive jade sculptures

 And ridiculously intricate Qing dynasty furniture.

This is the museum from the outside, where it sits in the People's Square.  There were loads of people out enjoying the beautiful weather and fountains.

After the museums, I headed off to find a famous Japanese noodle joint, hidden away on Nanjing Lu, the biggest commercial road in the city.  There was HORDES of people, huge blinking signs and music and noise coming from every corner.  I never went there at night but from the postcards, it beats Times Square!

I had a yummy pork/bamboo shoot noodle dish for dinner, and then headed to the Shanghai Grand Theatre, where I had spontaneously decided to buy tickets to hear Mahler's 2nd symphony.  I think my tired and aching museum-bruised feet might have helped me decide!  This was the theatre from the outside:

 And this the view from inside.  I had never actually heard his 2nd symphony before, but it was very emotional.  Thankfully I went to the talk beforehand which walked the audience through Mahler's life and what he was thinking of as he composed the symphony.  It has 5 movements, starting out with a funeral march (apparently he was one of about fourteen children, half of whom died in childhood), moving on to a flashback of a happy memory of the deceased (with light dance music), followed by the 3rd movement with music evoking utter depression.  The 4th movement was an attempt at recovering and moving on, but it didn't really succeed, as happy tones kept sliding into minor keys and there was an anguished wail at one point.  The 5th and final movement was supposed to convey the triumph of the second coming of Christ, and a call from heaven for the dead to rise.  This part was really cool as there were actually trumpets and horns BACKSTAGE who played this haunting triumphant call with the rest of the orchestra silent.  This was followed by busy music as everyone rose from the grave, a brief quiet interlude to portray the empty Earth, and then a triumphant finale as everyone is admitted into Heaven and death is conquered forever.  I just realized I wrote more in this paragraph than about the rest of Shanghai, but it was really cool!

On my way to the airport the next day, lest I forget with all the modernity and Western music that I was actually in China, I observed this dad with his baby boy...completely dressed...mostly!