The Johnsons' Journal

We were worried that visiting Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai would be too much big city for us, but we were pleasantly surprised how much we liked Shanghai.

Even Chairman Mao enjoys the views in Shanghai

We haven’t been to too many museums on this trip, preferring to get out an about in each place, but in Shanghai we visited two excellent ones, the Propaganda Poster Museum and the Shanghai Museum. The Propaganda Museum gave us a tour of Propaganda Posters from the 1950s up until just after Chairman Mao died and they were no longer used.  They also had a collection of “calendar girl” posters from the 1930s and after reading Shanghai Girls, I found them to be very fascinating.

The Shanghai Museum had a very extensive display of bronzes and even had a display of how they are made. They also had a much less extensive and impressive display of 2 small traditional fishing boats. There was way more to the museum, but after a couple exhibits, we’re about museum’d out.

Thanks to my cousin Lisa’s recommendation, on our first night we headed to the famous Din Tai Fung for their xiao long bao or soup dumpling.

They were pretty delicious and fun to eat too!

We have also enjoyed the range of street food on offer in China, so we decided to spend a day scouring the streets of Shanghai to try some local specialties including fried dumplings and stinky tofu.

We had to wait for this batch of fried dumplings to be finished which was actually pretty fun to watch the whole process.

The stinky tofu is fried non-stinky tofu with a pretty pungent sauce added afterwards.

The former French Concession has turned into a trendy international boutique shopping and dining scene.  It was a great place to wander around and explore.  Scott was excited to find out that there was a new microbrewery in town, so we had to stop by for a drink.

A better pint than most of the local beers we’ve had on the trip.

Okay, a non-food/beverage picture.

On our last day, we checked out a cute little historic market where you could buy all sorts of items to remember your time in China including, at one shop, about a bazillion types of chopsticks.

They actually look like pointy Japanese chopsticks, not Chinese style