A Day in Shanghai

wish that the type had more room to breath?  me too but i don't have time to change it.  so this is my 3rd time to shanghai.  on this trip i made peace with shanghai and actually like it now.  just like  i made peace with korea.  what's happening to me?

this was where i stayed the first night.  jin jiang inn.  took this photo the next morning so that's why it's not lost.

this one too, took it the night before on my phone because they brough over a chair just for my camera.  thanks

the hotel room at jin jiang inn.  i think it was $28 a night and they didnt have any single rooms left so i took this double bed.  single rooms are a lil cheaper.  me and bob stayed at a jin jiang inn around the corner when we came.

my lens hood came right off without me knowing and is lost in the street somewhere.  so far, the two L lenses i've had lens hoods for have not locked on, they just twist on and off.  i knew that some day it would just twist off at some inopportune moment and it did.  I wrote canon an email requesting a new one because of this design flaw but they haven't gotten back to me yet.  Nikon lens hoods lock on.  24mm f/1.4 L , the lens hood is EW-83K.  maybe i should get a rubber one that collapses....

i did'nt book the jin jiang inn room for both nights cuz i didnt know if i would like it.  so in the morning i tried to book again but everything was full so they suggested i go down the street to motel 168, a chain.  the guy said it was comparable to Jin Jiang Inn.  how do i know a word like comparable in chinese?  I don't know, i couldn't tell you the word now but if i heard it i would know.  well somehow i just know these things sometimes and remember enough chinese to operate in china.

shanghai has all these short alleys.  the following street photos are somewhere near xintiandi

would you get your daily water from this thing?  i guess you would if that's all you've ever known or if you have no choice.

i saw a store selling these really huge hangers and thought in my dry sarcastic voice, is there really a market for huge long hangers?  and then boy did i look stupid because there is a huge market for it.  everyone in shanghai dries their blankets on them.

lots of majong games goin' on

see, more huge hangers.

don't worry purple is alive and well in China.  Didn't really see that many purple shirts like in 2008 when it was the hot ish

saw this in the rough guides book.  Propaganda art centre.  I surmised that it's this guys private collection.  the art is all shabbily presented, many times without a frame just behind an acetate sheet.  If you look past that you'll see how awesome this place is.  a treasure trove of history, art, and other good ish like that.  after looking at wikipedia i see that it's owned by Mr. Yang Pei Ming whom i met because he sits at a computer halfway through the exhibit looking online for more posters.  The guy in the store introduced me to him after i asked about the place.  kudos to Mr. Yang for keeping this place alive.  

Will translated all these for me.  his armband says revolution rebellion person, his book says selected quotations from maoze dong.  the other book isn't a book at all, it's a rubber stamp and it says poli-econ cultural great authority, the writing on the bodies of the guys getting crushed says capitalistic power yielding elements. the red words say Proletarian revolution faction holds great authority. 

mao ze dong's thinking is the peak of modern marxist lennenism 

advance at a high speed, protect and construct the motherland

i don't understand how this one is in here because it's kind of what they're not all about.  "the truth can live up to challenges and tests".

fight against america support chosun (old name for korea, but here it's alluding to north korea).  rescue neighbor and rescue self (china).  the map says american invasion plan showing that the US will go though japan to korea and through japan to taiwan and up into china.  the figures are at the border of north korea and china at the yellow river.  It's funny how they demonize the americans and brits and literally make them green and gremlin like.  the writing at the very bottom in black says its printed by an association and the associations name is that long.  the chinese people protecting world peace anti american invasion east asia association printing press printed. to the very right it says the shanghai sheng sheng art company authorized to print.

The proletariats of the world unite and send imperialism to its grave

Catch up and surpass England in 15 years. John rides an ox and I ride a horse, country bumpkin gibberish that cannot be translated and makes no sense.  There's pinyin at the bottom of everything because pinyin was just introduced at the way to write chinese characters in english and they're trying to standardize everything, and probably educate the public about it too.

the museum is tiny and is located inside this place, president mansion.  i looked for it for 20 min and almost gave up until this guy saw me looking around and handed me a card that said the name of the museum and showed me how to walk back there.

Jing'an Temple.

couldn't decide which photo i liked better.

and then directly on the back side is a mall like shopping street.

cop yelling at a foreigner on a motor bike.

papa john's.  bang yue han.  bang meaning awesome and yue han being how they say john.  go on, say yue han 3 times fast and you can kind of see.  and then you'll laugh.

yang's fried dumplings.  there's a tray of them on the right.  they fry the bottoms of these soup dumplings.

look at that!

yea buddy that's what we're all thinking.  

ok this was quite a day so i had to split it up into two posts.  here comes the night photos.