Museums and eating rabbit heads
We awoke to another grey and drizzly day and so decided that a museum was a good idea, even though we also decided to walk there. The walk was good in that it showed us a bit more of the real Shanghai of lanes and bicycle deliveries. One of the most distinctive things about Shanghai is that there are scooters everywhere and they are all, every one, electric and, so, silent.
The Shanghai Museum is a great repository of Chinese art in all its forms. Although I feel we saw the best examples of everything in Taiwan – the museum there contains all the goodies looted by the Nationalist Government – there were some beautiful pieces and the age of everything remains awe-inspiring. To see pottery that’s six thousand years old and yet incredibly sophisticated puts our Western pretensions to sophistication to shame.
Later we caught the metro over to the newer side of Shanghai on the East of the river. Luckily our destination was the futuristic tv tower that is unmissable. The museum we visited beneath the tower was, unfortunately, entirely missable. We were looking for the history of Shanghai and got a bunch of dioramas which shed less light than reading the Wikipedia page had.
In the evening we did an amazing food tour. We ate at a bunch of places we’d never have gone to by ourselves and had some fabulous food. The definite highlight was watching Declan eat a rabbit head – and the best bit of that was when he was using half the rabbit’s jawbone, with tooth attached, to prize out an eyeball to eat.
