October Holiday and Fossils

The Chinese celebrate their "July 4th" in October with a week-long holiday starting, technically, on October 1st. I say technically because many take off before October 1 and spend a week traveling to visit family or just vacationing. Our office, for example, is closed Tuesday through Friday this week. Some of the big cities, like Shanghai, actually see a decrease in population during the week as migrant workers and other domestic expats return to their home provinces. This would seem like a good time to tour around but with everyone else hitting the rails,highways and airports at the same time - it is best to stay home. That is unless you just love chaos and pushing people.

For a small sample of the chaos we headed for Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai yesterday to get G-man some of his favorite vegetarian buns from the Buddhist restaurant there. We arrived early but still had to wait in line for 30-minutes to get the buns. Fortunately, only a few people tried to crash the line and I did get 20 rmb worth of the coveted veggie-filled buns. But by the time we were leaving the crowds had swelled to enormous proportions. Feeling like salmon swimming upstream we fought our way into some side alleys and escaped Yuyuan.

From there we walked toward the People's Park area but stopped off at the Natural History Museum of Shanghai. It cost all of 10 rmb for the three of us to get inside what used to be the cotton exchange building in the 1930s. There were two huge dinosaur reconstructions in the main hall but since the signage was in Chinese and my knowledge of Chinese paleontological terms is non-existent we didn't know what we were seeing. One looked like a brontosaurus with horns. All of the skeletons looked like they hadn't been dusted in four decades. In fact, the entire museum looked like more of a fossil than its contents. Peeling paint, falling down display cases, fish in formaldehyde that hadn't been changed since 1972. Shanghai obviously hasn't invested much in understanding the past.