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Big activity for the day was attending the propaganda poster museum. This place was really neat, very much like the KGB museum in Prague, (see post from summer summer 2012).
It is in the basement of an apartment complex, luckily the security guys know that there is really no other reason a pair of Westerners would be here, so he handed us a business card with a lil map on it.
The place was set up in chronological order, starting with the anti-Japanese propaganda from the time Japan occupied China (wikilink here), and the Anti-Japanese War (which is what the modern communist chinese cal the period of 1937-1945, what we call the Second World War, and the Japanese call the Pacific War). The exhibit continues through to the Korean war era, the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Vietnam War, and more modern thawing of tensions with the US, and the commercial vitalization of the 1980s and 90s.
All of the posters had little cards with the english translation of major text, and a few placards around detailing what period these fall in. The end of the museum had older ads from the turn of the century, which was really cool. These ads were very cool because they predate the communists in China, and show how hard the West was pushing into China, specifically in Shanghai, all of these were for western products, some of them i recognized as in production today.
There were no pictures allowed so all i can do is link to their site. http://www.shanghaipropagandaart.com
I would recommend anyone in Shanghai visit this museum, especially if you have an interest in history/international relations/China/Communism/pop-art.
After this we were pretty hungry, and made a bad decsion, going to a shitty restaurant. They had honestly forgettable food, it took laura and i a few minutes to recall what it was. I had a beef and noodle dish, laura had a noodle soup, both were not that great.
Unsatisfied, we decided to try and find one of the pedestrian streets ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xintiandi ) we had been looking for before. We did ultimately find it, it wasnt as easy to find as the concierge made it seem. It was another very high-end shopping area, with neat restaurants that were very very expensive.
At this point we determined that Shanghai isnt for us. Its cool to visit, but it is a city of extremes. Either you go to ultra-swanky skyline bars and pay 25USD for a cocktail, and 55USD a plate at dinner, or you go to a basement restaurant where a couple can eat and drink for less than 10USD.
We certainly appreciate the inexpensive, but sometimes, we want a midgrade restaurant, a place where we get to sit on more than a stool under an umbrella, but less than a table with a special purse stool.
we did snipe the wifi at this mall to find a western style restaurant. It had prices much like prices we would pay in Chicago, I got a goat cheese torttellini, laura got a braised lamb shank, the lamb was all off the bone delicious, my tortellini was pretty good not spectacular, but pretty good. We also got desserts, two scoops of gelato, salted caramel, and baklava. The baklava tasted exactly like baklava, i dunno how they did it, but it was so accurate. the other desert we got was honey-ginger bread on a bed of poached pears. THIS was spectacular, the bread wa something i fully intend to emulate, so those of you reading this that have the occasion to meet me, look forward to eating my test-breads on this quest.
We also got a bottle of wine, this ent up being a 150USD dinner, mostly because laura messed up the math and that bottle of wine was 75USD, so it was expensive, but it was a very worthy meal.
Dont worry though, on the way home we picked up a <10usd bottle of wine from 7-11. It was chosen from the 7-11 Select Reserve, and was pretty good, way better than any quickmart wine has any right to be. so this helps to average our the wine spending...
We hopped a train, and unfortunately could not get all the way home, the subway shuts down relatvely early in Shanghai, so we had to walk the last 2 miles home.
When we got home we watched some TV and drank the wine. First we watched some Sumo with english announcers, which was pretty good, helping us understand what exactly was going on. I watched a 115kg guy go up against a 164kg guy, that is a 100lb diference, and he didnt lose immediately.
We also found a show that was basically “Japan why you do that?” It was a room of 50 non-Japanese people that posed explanations for why the Japanese do certain things, like not filling the coffee cup all the way, or why they sleep with their children for so late into their childs lives.
Watching this in China made it all the more bizzare.
We eventually fell asleep, for our last night in Shanghai.
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