Shanghai Day 2

Our first night in Shanghai we were SO exhausted... or at least I was. By the time I woke up the next morning my throat was starting to hurt a little bit. I was hoping it was just from the cold and would go away over the course of the day, but it didn't.

Anyway, we started off the day by visiting a temple right by our hostel called the Jing-an Temple. It's a very ancient temple (from around 600 AD or something), but has been moved, burned down and restored many times. So by now, it doesn't look quite so old. It actually seems really pretty new. It was under construction while we were there. There were people working everywhere and the pleasant Buddhist sound of buzz saws filling the air. Despite all of that, it actually was a pretty little temple. It had these ornate staircases and wood carved windows and things. But once we went inside a couple of the buildings that tourists could go in, they were just big cement rooms with a couple Buddha statues thrown in. Very odd. There were, however, practicing monks there. And we saw them come out from their chanting to light some incense.

After the temple, we wandered through some parks for a bit before making our way over to the Shanghai museum, which is supposed to be one of the best museums in China.

At this point I was really starting to not feel well, so we didn't explore the museum very in depth and enjoy it as much as we would have if I was well. But, we did see some really great Buddhist statues, beautiful Chinese ceramics and great ancient scrolls. It was really nice and everything was impressively old. And there were many statues that I've seen copies of through out my lifetime, always cool to see the real thing. (Like this horse... beautiful).

We had planned to go have a drink in the bottle opener building that evening. Apparently, there is a bar on like the 87th floor. Oh and did I mention that this is the tallest building in China? I was really excited for it, to feel fancy, have a nice drink and admire the beautiful city lights from way up high. But, unfortunately, I just wasn't feeling well enough. So instead, we spent the rest of the evening hulled up in our hostel watching movies.