Beautiful Day

There was a blue sky today. I never thought that I would consider a blue sky a luxury. Or grass. Sidewalks just aren't the same to walk barefoot on as grass is.
But there was a blue sky today, no smog. So it was a good day.

I decided to just go out exploring today for a few hours. It's cheap, I learn a lot, and it's exercise all rolled into one.

While wandering, I saw the Shanghai Museum in the distance and figured that was a good a place as any to spend the day; try to learn about some Chinese heritage. On my way toward the Museum, I had to go into this tunnel to go under the highway. However, it wasn't just one straight tunnel that went under the highway, it had a whole bunch of twists and turns as well as other little tunnels jutting off of it.

Somehow, I stumbled into this micro-museum/hallway which was a recreation of China in the 1930's. I'm not exactly sure why it was there, but it was and I was pretty much the only person there looking around. I'm not sure if it was even open. Sort of like a weird land of the lost moment. Walking through a tunnel and ending up almost 8 decades ago.

After making in through this bizzaro-world hallway, I finally came up on the other side of the highway. Which is odd because I must have walked a mile in what I thought was the right direction, only to come back up on the other side of the road 100 feet from where I started.

For as big as the Shanghai Museum is on the outside, it is relatively small on the inside. Rather than walk around to all the exhibits by myself, I rented a little headset that would explain all the objects to me in a elderly British accent. I was still by myself technically, but it made me feel a little better and was educational. There were four floors in this museum with three large rooms on each floor. Some of the rooms included the ancient pottery room, jade antiquities, evolution of Chinese currency, evolution of calligraphy, ancient religious figures, and old ornate furniture. I would have to say that my favorite rooms were the pottery, religious figures, and jade rooms.

Some of the pieces that I saw in the pottery and jade rooms were so small and so detailed that it was completely incomprehensible to me how the craftsmen and artists could have achieved such beautiful works of art with non-modern tools. And some of the religious figures and statues were so lifelike that it was a little eerie. However, for as many realistic recreations there were, there were just as many goofy looking statues. And both realistic and goofy exhibits were far outnumbered by the number of lions, dragons, and phoenix's that seemed to find themselves on every piece of pottery and painting.


Overall, it was a very educational, but more importantly, fun day.

Things I learned today...

1. People use just as many umbrellas when it's sunny as they do when it's rainy.
2. Pillows used to be made of stone until around 1800.
3. The Chinese people used to use shells as currency. After that they used daggers as currency before finally switching to something a little smaller and less deadly.
4. You have to pay for toilet paper out of a vending machine in some public bathrooms.
5. Try to find a way to cross the highway above ground rather than taking a spooky wormhole tunnel beneath it.

Love,
Ezra