Fu Xing Park

Yesterday we hired our friendly Shanghai tour guide - Lisa - to take us around the French Concession area.  We started in Fu Xing park where every morning hundreds of Chinese gather to dance, debate, draw, do tai chi and basically just hang out.  The majority of people there are over 60 but later in the day the younger generation comes out with their one child to stroll in the park.  The dancing is probably what the park is most known for - they play music on a loud speaker and literally hundreds of couples ballroom dance up and down the paths.  The park is sort of divided into sections depending upon the activity being undertaken - there is the ballroom dancing area, the political debate area, the badminton area, the singing and tai chi area, the tea drinking area, the Chinese yo yo area, and the poker and chess area.  We spent about 2 hours in the park and really could have spent the entire day - in fact, we did come back in the afternoon to let the boys have a second round in the hamster water wheels (see the pictures).  From Fu Xing park we took a walking tour down a typical neighborhood street visiting a wet market, (butcher shop), a vegetable market and then strolling down a couple of the side alleys to see how the locals live.  The highlight was getting to go up into one of the homes and see how little space they really have.  It made us feel very guilty and thankful for the spacious abode we have.  We ended the tour at a local restaurant called Chu Chu Yuan which serves northern Chinese fare.  We enjoyed a beef noodle, some meat pies, and dumplings but we most enjoyed the menu with the chinglish translations of the menu items - like "Burn a pot of meat" or "The hot pepper steams a fish head" or "Literally Soup"  We finally made it home around 3pm.  The boys were exhausted and Cynthia and I were feeling the efffects of all the walking as well and decided to go get a massage.  We ended the day at a friends house playing spades and hearing all about their trip to Harbin to view the ice show.  It was a very good day in Shanghai.