Jul 27.
Breakfast at the hotel and a relaxed morning. We head over to the Urban Planning Exhibit building with the intention of making it a brief visit and then to head over to the Shanghai Museum. We got the first part of the plan right but spend most of the afternoon at stop one. There is a full scale model of the city that cycles though a simulated 24 hour period with darkness and fully illuminated buildings. But, more interesting is a series of photographs of the city taken from the past. For each photograph from the past, there is a comparative contemporary picture shot at exactly the same spot and with the same orientation. The amazing thing is not the dramatic change- a street that looks like it could have been a shot after a war 60 years ago and the same street today with nothing but high rise buildings in the shot. The amazing thing is that the “historic” picture is only 14 years old.
We pull oursleves away from the urban exhibit and walk over to the Shanghai Museum only to find that it has just stopped allowing entry to the exhibits even though there is still an hour until the building closes. They are worried that visitors will not have enough time and that the exhibit may be too crowded. So much for the free market economy being applied to the running of this museum. But wait, the museum store is still open and available for the crowd to browse and purchase merchandise. Perhaps the free market economic model is too well understood. After leaving a respectable amount of tribute to the new economic system at the cash register, our group breaks up to go their separate ways for shopping and site seeing.
We gather ourselves together to attend the performance of the Shanghai Acrobats. I saw them four years ago and wasn’t expecting to see much of a difference in their performance. I had given myself the challenge to make some photographs that captured motion. I have to say that for me the performance was just as amazing as the first time. And, I believe that I was able toget a few shots that were satisfying.
After the performance, we head out for a late dinner, return to the hotel to pack, and then over for tea in the hotel lobby to recount the adventure that we have just experienced together.