Mini-tour – Shanghai

Our last stop in China was Shanghai.  We had just two days of touring here, leaving several much-needed free days available to catch our breath.  Aside from cooking classes and fan/sword-dancing, we watched an acrobat show, visited an old garden, strolled the riverside Bund and toured the well-stocked Shanghai Museum.  (Luckily we had added three days of free time in Shanghai, so we could rest up before the trip to Latin America.) Shanghai is the most westernized city in mainland China (excluding Hong Kong).  It has long been a port city and a substantial portion was developed by foreigners who owned big stretches as concessions during the 1800s.  The city was re-opened in the 1980s when Deng Xioaping chose it as a model for market reform. Our guide Stacy explained that compared to Beijing, the Shanghai native places more value on being timely (which is more Western style) and is more ready to directly say No for requests they cannot honor (rather than dancing around them to avoid a loss of face).  While Shanghai grew explosively as a manufacturing city, especially for electronics, the factories have now all been ejected far from the center of town.  Now Shanghai is focused on Wall Street activities like finance and insurance.  That is good news for the visitor because the air is cleaner than before and the city is filled with all manner of Western-style food chains and shops.  We were dazzled by the Shanghai acrobatic show.  We watched a man balancing on a board on a ball toss teacups onto his head with his foot, a strongman toss a 35-pound ceramic jug into the air and catch it on his head… balanced on the edge, four contortionists squeezed into a jar, tumblers diving through hoops and more.  The last two acts were especially gripping because we feared an acrobat would die.  They had a young couple swinging high through the air supported just by fabric wrapped around their arms.  Working without a net or wires, any mistake could be fatal.  You may have seen something like this elsewhere, but here, the woman who is in the man’s arms simply lets go (audience gasp!) and lets herself free fall until she catches on the young man’s feet with her own knees… upside down.  In the final act, lights go dark and the the back curtain opens to reveal a spherical metal bar cage with a single door.  A motorcycle comes out and to our amazement enters the  cage.  They shut the door and he drives around and around (at 30mph?) until he is perpendicular to the floor.  His lights go on and they stage lights go off and he builds speed until finally we see a circle of light!  THEN a second motorocycle drives out and enters the cage.  The two are circling at high speed in the same cage.  Then they start criss-crossing – missing each other by inches – and the crowd goes nuts.

Then a third cycle (!) comes out onto stage and everyone is biting their fingernails.  They all get in there and their headlamps look like fireflys dancing in a jar.  Well, this continues again and again, until they have seven motorcycles driving around simultaneously, and your heart is in your mouth.  What an exhausting finale! Acrobatics is definitely popular here.  There are several acrobat troops in Shanghai, mainly staffed by petite teenagers.  They come from the provinces, where they are selected at the age of 6 and train their whole lives.  City dwellers do not allow their children to pursue this profession – it is dangerous and it has no future past the age of 25.  As we left the theater, the actors lined up in the lobby to sign autographs and taking pictures.  The motorcycle drivers stood together in a special stage – one can only imagine how many hours they had worked together with their lives on the line.  “Did you ever see them?!” we asked our guide as we caught up to her in the lobby.  “Yes it’s quite exciting!  But wait, that’s strange,” she said looking over, “There used to be eight.”

The next day, walking along the riverside on the “Bund” you have a terrific view of Shanghai’s skyline.  The skyscrapers are crazy-wonderful and everything is so gleaming new, you feel you must have stepped onto the set of a movie.  The feeling is heightened by the mix of languages and a fashion shoot right on the sidewalk.  One can hardly imagine how long-time residents of Shanghai are coping with the shock of change.  There are single-story tight blocks of housing here that are similar to the Beijing hutongs, but block by block the people are moved off to the outskirts of town and their sectors replaces with new skyscrapers.  Another day, we head to the Shanghai Museum.  It is the only major museum of Chinese artifacts that clusters all the items of a certain type across multiple time periods in one room.  So you can easily trace the evolution of calligraphy across the ages for example.  The touring complete, we hunkered down in our rooms – a short-term rental apartment for the five nights – to relax before the coming long flight.  Next step:  two days of transit and 28 hours of flying to reach Cusco in Peru.