10 - Shanghai

Jola and I stopped for tea and a nice long talk in this teahouse of the City God's Temple. A sign on the stairway above says - No tourists.



No signs warned against photography of the images and figures inside the small shrines. But the devotion of the men and women, old and young, was so genuine that I could not diminish it in any way by anything I did. They honored and thanked a deity as I try to. Surely when all is said and done, it is the same Creator, Sustainer, Protector and Lover that we all thank, praise, honor, and magnify.

In the temple courtyard of the City God's Temple in Shanghai.

From a small massage shop at street edge of the City God's Temple, the masseurs called Jola, who gave it a try. She and a man from Norway, an Iraqi, joked that they were paying to be beaten. I talked to the man's wife, whose family, still in Iraq, known to be Christian and believed not to be a threat, is safe after two members were kidnapped and paid to be ransomed. The children have no life, she said. The young masseurs took all the time in the world and Jola said the massage was relaxing.

Back at the hotel, we had dinner at the Cucina, spinach salad, scallops. Delicious!
















The Oriental Pearl TV tower in Mengzhou Park, a Shanghai landmark.
















On Friday, July 17 we crossed the river again to the Bund area, a district of European settlements and once the city's Wall Street. Just finished China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power, the 2007 book by Rob Gifford, NPR correspondent. Helpful perspectives.







Bund is an Anglo-Indian term meaning embankment. It's on the bank of the Huangpu River.













A dragon guards a bottle of sun tea someone has put out to brew.































The view of the river is blocked as construction forges ahead on the nations' pavilions of the World Expo 2010. The U.S. is prohibited from using government money for participation in international expositions such as Expo 2010 and just now got enough private financing to take part.







Shanghai along the Huangpu River. OK, we didn't take a green cab but a brown cab (unnumbered inside, unmetered, as we found) back to the hotel. The driver tried to overcharge. He took the long way round, stopped 2 blocks from the hotel door (where the staff would have argued him in Chinese for us). I opened the door, Jola halved the demanded amount in stern English and we jumped out. Only incident like this on our trip, and yeah, we should have asked the cost up front.