Shanghai: June 15: French Concession (Part 3)

My goal this day was to finish exploring the French concession. I took these photos this day. I walked this route through the remaining part of the French concession. (As usual, the lines on the map are misaligned; mentally shift them as instructed.) The area had a nice, quiet, neighborhood feel to it. As it turned out, when I later moved to Shanghai, though I didn't have a choice in the matter, this area ended up being the area my apartment was in.

My first destination was the Shanghai Propaganda Museum (a.k.a., the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre). It's hard to find, hidden in the basement of a building in a gated apartment complex. The guard at the gate gave me a small card with a map showing how to navigate the buildings in the apartment complex in order to arrive at the museum.

The museum, housed in one large room, was lots of fun. The guy who enthusiastically runs the museum came out to explain the posters to me, describing more than the English text accompanying the displays. He also told me about himself and the museum, including, interestingly, that he mostly gets American visitors. The posters' topics ranged from warning against Taiwan, Korean, and American imperialism, promoting sending a child to the army, supporting the free right to marry, endorsing knowledge as power, suggesting using nuclear power/knowledge peacefully, encouraging steel production, and publicizing the one-child policy and birth control. Sorry, no pictures were allowed (but the web site has many images).

I also visited the Shanghai Arts & Crafts Museum, a medium-sized museum (three floors). Though a diverse museum, I took only a few photos at the museum as a representative sample of what impressed me. Also, the museum felt like a cross between a gift shop and a museum -- I couldn't guess by glancing from afar at a room whether it would be part of the gift shop (with prices) or part of the museum. There were artists throughout the museum: many at work; others asleep. (What they produced is what the museum sold.) I felt some items were overpriced: a bookmark--even a hand-painted one--shouldn't cost US$10.

Walking further, I found on Dongping Road many restaurants whose names I recognized from my research as being good. On the next street, I saw lots of restaurants with English signs, serving cuisines from western countries. Perhaps this isn't surprising given that I found myself walking by the American consulate one block over.

My final stop was Song Qingling's Former Residence & Museum. Song Qingling was a prominent female political figure during the first three decades of Communist Party's rule of China. I went in not really caring, but found the story of her life held my attention. The small museum nicely presented documents, and everything was in English. As a bonus, the residence's grounds were pretty.

Dinner, at one of Di Yin's parents' friends' places, was good, though exhausting as usual (due to language issues and how much I have to exercise my skills at observation and inference to compensate for not speaking Chinese). We ate too many dishes: drunken shrimp, sweetened glazed warm shrimp, velvet beef, asparagus, tripe salad, cucumber salad, duck with dipping sauce, fish congee, noodle dumplings filled with zong-zi-style red rice, and, for dessert, watermelon and lychee. She shouldn't have cooked or did take-out so much for just the six (?) of us.