People's Square Adventure.. Where's the square?

Today being our second full day in Shanghai, we decided that we were ready to brave the subway and take a trip to People's Square, a popular tourist area just outside of downtown Shanghai. After a struggle to try and get a refillable rail card from someone who didn't speak any English except for "No English", we bought a one use ticket and followed the crowd to the train playing the usual game of monkey see monkey do so as to not make any stupid tourist mistakes. As you can see from the first picture, there were a lot of stops we could go to and the names are all in Chinese with just a caption so we ended up just counting how many we had left until we got there. It was quite the exciting trip as you can see from the pictures of us. We were terrified at first of getting on the train, but it ended up not being bad at all. 

When we got to People's Square after about a 10 minute ride, we stepped out into a huge city and became major tourists whipping out our cameras to take pictures of everything. This building was a favorite of ours just because it had cool architecture. Later on we saw the window washers all the way at the top of the spike on the building.. you couldn't pay me to get up there, that's for sure. 

 One of the areas that makes up People's Square is People's Park, which is exactly what it sounds like. We walked around and found a small amusement park with four or so rides that we could pay to get on. We ended up on the swing ride which was a lot of fun and the lady who ran it made it go forever until we were all freezing. It was really the only ride we could do since we had to tell the lady at the counter who didn't speak English which one we wanted to go on and the swings were the only one in sight to point at, and as Joe says, he "speaks point". We drew quite the crowd of Asian tourists who all wanted to get on after us (trendsetters as usual).

The rest of the area was kind of like a botanical garden/zen garden with some cool sculpture-chair type things. No clue if it was actually a chair or not, but here's me sitting on it anyway.

 Walking along the streets, there was some random stores like this Land Rover one where you can literally drive your new Land Rover out onto the street after you buy it.

At the very edge of People's Park we found a huge gathering of old people with umbrellas that had signs written in Chinese attached to them. We thought it was maybe some kind of tour planning thing where they had information because we could see a bunch of numbers. We finally found a guy that spoke some English and he told us that it was actually parents who were putting their children on the market to get married. As the close up picture shows you, they have a picture of their child and their stats written on a piece of paper and attached to their umbrellas and they stand out there waiting to see if anyone will be interesting. Quite the culture shock. Joe managed to take the close up picture before we got yelled at for taking pictures of them all. 

Across from the park is the actual "square" if you could call it that.. we found people and many squares, but we don't actually know what part was People's Square. Anyway, this was a cool theater where they have  ballets and shows each month. They are doing the Jane Eyre ballet in February which could be cool just so we could go inside the theater and see what it's like. 

 At the end of the afternoon we ended up at the Shanghai Museum which is full of different exhibitions of old coins, textiles, ceramics etc that you can walk around and view for free. It was a really cool museum and building to be in. We didn't make it through all the exhibitions because we were tired from walking around all day. One of the big things we've found is that there's not a whole lot of places to just sit down and take a break, especially with it being so cold outside, so we just end up walking and walking until we can't anymore.

When we decided that we were done walking, we got some pastries from a bakery that we found and went and sat in a McDonalds to get a drink and take a rest. While we were in there, a group of students from Shanghai University came up and asked us some interview questions for one of their classes about our first experiences in Shanghai. It was pretty cool and I guess we're pretty noticeable considering there's not a whole lot of westerners around this time of year. 

After a long and successful second day, we are now resting in our hotel room and getting ready for our first classes tomorrow. We have class every day from 9:30 to 12 and from 1 to 4:30 so it should be a pretty long day tomorrow as well. I'm sure we will blog about that and our first dining court experiences when we get some time and then our posts will probably spread out more after that. 

Hope everyone is well at home and that all of our friends have a good start to their semesters as well!

-Joe and Catriona