The Holiday in China - day 2

We found our closest train station, worked out how to buy train tickets (which was thankfully very simple) and headed off to People's Square. This is a big beautiful park, full of people doing Tai Chi and other exercises, and families with small children feeding the white pigeons. The little kids are so cute - all bundled up like Michelin babies. Many of them seemed to be with their grandparents - always the best form of child care! We bought some bags of food and fed the birds with the other families. We were quite a tourist attraction. We've travelled a fair bit but this was the first place where we really stood out as being different. The Chinese gushed over our children as much as we gushed over theirs.

A friend had told us about a good fake market at a train station so we hopped back on the train and headed there. The market was really just warming up, as were we, so we didn't purchase anything except a couple of t-shirts. (Based on the principle of "don't carry coals to Newcastle" we had brought very few clothes with us.) Outside the train station however was the shiny new Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology. We adore science museums so this was a wonderful find. It's not in my (2001) Lonely Planet China so we hadn't been expecting it. It is brand new and still incomplete. It took us a while to work out how to get in but the locals were happy to help (once they understood we had already been to the fake market and didn't want to buy a Rolex or a Luis Vuitton handbag) and pointed us in the right direction.

The museum was great, and once I can remember where it was, I will tell you. It will be better though, once it is complete. We spent 4 or 5 hours there, even having a reasonably priced lunch in the restaurant. The highlight was an interactive kids area with a "battle of the minds." You and your opponent stand at either end of a table with a small silver ball in the middle. You have sensors strapped onto your heads, and the activity of your brain pushes the ball along a magnetic track toward your opponent. Sort of like a backwards tug-of-war but with your mind. I am sad to confess that Gemma & I had our butts kicked by the boys.

We finally left the museum in order to meet up with Champs, an old school friend of Scott's who now runs a ritzy restaurant in Shanghai. We met him at The Bund and he took us to a Chinese restaurant called Shanghai Uncle which he said is a family style restaurant and there are several of them throughout the city. The meal was delicious. Their speciality is roast pork - it's pork belly cut up into chopstick-friendly portions and seasoned - yummy! It had been a huge day and my feet were blistered so it was off home to bed for us. Even the idea of shopping in the Bund area held no appeal by that time.