Liquid Nonsense

Day 1 Part 2:

Today's tour of the city started off with lunch at a dim-sum style restaurant somewhere in downtown Shanghai. The first notable thing about the restaurant was that most of the staff worked on roller skates, and apparently at around noon they perform some crazy stunts as performers on said roller skates. Like picking each other up and doing some crazy spinning. The second notable thing about lunch, and this has more to do with lunch in general in China, is that poultry and fish come with the head attached.

For the record: I ate my first chicken head today. Everyone sitting at the same table as me was just kind of eyeing it in that sort of "no, you eat it" way. So, seizing the opportunity, I ate our table's chicken head. It's surprisingly good.

Our first stop after lunch was a visit to the Jade Buddha Temple in the downtown region. This particular temple is actually only roughly 200 years old, but contains artifacts dating much further back. The most notable artifact in the temple is a statue devoted to Guan Yin Buddha carved from a solid piece of white jade, hence the name Jade Buddha Temple. Many locals were present in the afternoon burning incense and offering coins. It was a weird comparison to have several groups of tourists walking through and taking pictures at the same time that these people were offering up prayers to particular Buddhas.

The next destination on the list was the Yu Gardens. Our guide informed us that "Yu" in Chinese is the word for happiness. The gardens are apparently several hundred years old and were constructed as the private gardens of a very, very wealthy government official. The gardens were reclaimed by the state nearly 200 years ago, and now serve as a tourist attraction. The gardens themselves are absolutely beautiful arrangements of plants in many different areas, separated by walls and carved rivers.

After the Yu Gardens we had a fairly uneventful dinner and then went on our river boat tour. The river tour involved a view of the skyline from the Yang Si river. There was a pleasant breeze on the river, so the humidity was much more bearable. Once again, many of the sights were incredible.

One thing that I will take a minute to bring up that is rather unsettling is the shear volume of beggars here. I don't mean like the usual sit-on-the-corner-with-cup beggar. Today I was literally accosted by several people badly in need of medical attention and food. After the Yu gardens there was a girl walking right up into peoples' faces that clearly had 2nd to 3rd degree burns on several parts of her body and face as well as leprosy indicated by her nodules and missing limbs. Earlier in the day there was a man carting around a woman on some palette-like thing because several of her fingers had fallen off and she had no legs from slightly above the knee.

This country has many beautiful sites, but there are some extreme organizational problems from the volume of people begging on the streets. The buildings are dingy and the lack of resources is clearly obvious. Our guide even told us that the nice apartment buildings we're seeing in the downtown region are referred to as "mini united nations" because the only people who can afford to live there are foreigners.