From the Roof of the Post Office

The International Post Office is the Volvo of Shanghai's colonial architecture: boxy but good. While it's actually a very large and well-known building, on the corner of Sichuan Lu and the Suzhou River, just about every single picture of it focuses on one particularly attractive corner, with a clock and some bronze statues:



Not so long ago I blogged about the street it's on, Sichuan Lu, and I've had a number of posts about the area. Suffice it to say that the post office is in an interesting area and on an interesting street, and while the Postal Museum may not in itself be a highlight to Shanghai, it's definitely worth making the Museum part of a larger wandering. I'd also like to give special credit to Delongguan Xiaolongbao. While this branch of the chain lacks much class, it's truly excellent xiaolongbao, and just a few minute's walk away. It's also interesting walking around all the older buildings and seeing the occasional river traffic, with the Post Office on the far right:



I won't go into much detail about the Museum itself. It's located one floor up and it's crazy extensive. I'm no stamp collector, but there were a couple interesting bits: a short take on the very early history of delivered messages, from thousands of years ago, and then a collection of Communist era stamps. They often looked like Chinese Propaganda Posters, only done in miniature. However a whole lot of the museum was given to old Postmasters or 1930s company tennis teams or what have you. Anyway it's all free and the boring bits are quite skippable. At the end strangely enough there's even an old railroad car and suspended propeller plane.

The best part is that after the museum, there's an elevator to the rooftop terrace. There's actually not much to the rooftop itself, except for some astroturf and a number of the worst Engrish signs in Shanghai, all collected in one place:



There's a beautiful sweeping view over both the Bund and Lujiazui. The pollution when I took this picture turned the distance into some kind of watercolor:



While it's also possible to turn and look over at Sichuan Lu and a more typical slice of Shanghai:

Shanghai Arts and Crafts Museum

The Shanghai Arts and Crafts Museum is another tourist-oriented place that I think is worth dropping by, even for those who live in this fair city. It's located on 79 Fenyang Lu & Taiyuan Lu, which is near-ish to the Changshu Lu subway station. It's in a pleasant area with a lot of musical instrument stores nearby. The building and grounds are themselves very pleasant - it's a large mansion originally built in 1905 for a French government official, and it sort of resembles a miniature White House:



Really it's a small complex of buildings, and I gather it acts as some government-sponsored master class for teachers and apprentices of traditional Chinese handicrafts. Most of the mansion is dedicated towards display rooms, where these arts are shown. It's mostly what one would expect, for example a number of examples of carved jade:



There's also carved wood, and to honest I found those examples much more impressive, some of them were unbelievably finely detailed. This wasn't the most impressive example, but it's always fun to see artwork featuring angry proletariat:



I think I've put off talking about one big negative to the whole place too long: it doubled as a well-done shopping center. A lot of the art had price tags attached, and there was a huge gift store downstairs. That said, it was easy to ignore the price tags, there was absolutely no pressure to buy anything, and really it seemed like a good if not-cheap place to buy those kind of handicrafts. It certainly didn't have the feel of one of the (too many) places where they take tour groups and try to hustle them into buying corny souvenirs.

Moving on, there were many other varieties of Chinese handicrafts, they didn't get as large displays but they were also interesting. One favorite was Gu embroidery, where the artist takes a transparent gauze and then "paints" a scene onto the gauze using extremely fine silk threads. This isn't the best photograph, but the best examples shined with a beautiful sheen to them:



Another examples is figurines made out of dough. Actually there was also an artist there working on these when I visited, it was fascinating seeing someone work with what's essentially playdough to make actual art:

Chinese Acrobatics Show

My sister visited Shanghai not so long ago, and it was a nice opportunity to play tour-guide. I ended up going to some places that I've long wanted to visit, but hadn't yet been able to rationalize a reason. I'll have a few relevant updates about these places, the first will be the Shanghai Acrobatics shows.

There's different acrobatic shows, but I went to the one on 57 Maoming Lu. It's a convenient location, very near the Huangpi Lu subway station, and right near Jinxian Lu, which has a number of restaurants that, while not upscale, vie for being the very best in Shanghai. It all takes place in a fancy old re-purposed movie theater, with a 1930s ambiance:



The show is one crazy stunt after the next crazy stunt. Some of the stunts involved people who were just amazingly flexible, to the point it was a little difficult to watch them. I couldn't stop thinking how much pain I would be in if I even tried those kind of moves:



And there were also freakish examples of balance. This lady later climbed up onto a see-saw and started swinging around, with these glasses still piled on:



Speaking of see-saws, there were the stunts where people get thrown into the air, flip around three times, and then land on someone's shoulders:



And finally, an insane balancing act of women doing handstands on chairs while balancing themselves on other women doing handstands on chairs. The safety lines took away from the sense of danger, but it would have been insane not to use them:



Much as with gymnastics, these acrobatics are impressive enough on television, but are mouth-dropping crazy to see up-close and in real life. I'll stress on the up-close. The Lanxin Theater isn't all that large, but you don't want to be in the balcony, and I'd say try to be in the first five rows or so, or don't bother going! There's a second ticket box office near the American Center on 1376 Nanjing Road, between Jing'an Station and Nanjing West Station. The actual show is daily from seven thirty until nine.

The cheap tickets are around a hundred kuai, and the good tickets are twice that. A bit much, but as far as it goes for things that only tourists do, it's cheaper and more fun than M on the Bund!