Day 10 - Shanghai/Beijing

It’s travel day. 1^st stop, Shanghai Museum, 2^nd stop Shanghai airport. That’s right. We’re off to Beijing to spend the remainder of our vacation. The day started off as usual. People running behind and making it worse off for everyone else. Because of the lateness, we only got an hour at the Shanghai museum (which included time to wait in line). I had nearly 30 minutes to run through the various exhibits and take as many photos as I could.

First off was the jade exhibit.  It seems as jade is the most precious material to the Chinese culture. Understandably so because it’s so beautiful.  There were jade statues and incense censors. One piece of jade had a house in the mountains, next to a river, intricately carved in it.  There was a man, that seemed to be of particular importance, but I did not have time to figure out why. Next stop was the calligraphy exhibit, where they had some of the original copies of various poems and other literary works on display. The handwriting is perfect, as the Chinese take great care in their creations. Finally, I had time to stop at the Buddha statue exhibit.  To see so many statues in one place, I couldn’t help but wonder what the story of each one was and how they impacted culture individually and helped advance their society.

Now, welcome to Beijing. Since it took us a while, I merely enjoyed the view and we went to dinner. The one thing that struck me was the amount of pollution in the air. Despite the number of trees and greenery around the City, it seems that the middle class is indeed growing.  The traffic was bad, and took twice as long as it should have to get to the hotel. Also, the tour guide told us they have policies in place to reduce pollution, such as not allowing cars with a certain last number of their license plate to drive on certain days. For example, license plates ending in 2 or 7 can not drive on Tuesdays. This exception, like all exceptions, has an exception of its own that I noticed. It does not include taxi cabs or other types of mass transportation, such as our tour bus.