Shanghai Bob

The Shanghai Museum is free, and I’ve been taking advantage of it to go during the week and just see one room at a time.  Coins, pottery, bronzes, jade.  It’s much more fun to take some time to look at one batch of objects than to try to see everything in two hours (my limit before I get tired of shuffling around).

This is the jade I liked best, it looks like a little Ebisu-sama, the Japanese god of wealth who is always depicted with a fish:

If you go to the Shanghai Museum and a young couple or a group of students asks you to take their picture in front of the museum, you might want to say no.  Since I was going every day for a while, I got asked regularly and noticed the same people — who needs that many pictures of themselves?  I searched for “people’s park scam” and found many reports of students inviting foreigners to tea, then asking them to pay the inflated bill, claiming to be poor students.

It feels rude to decline to take a photo, but the last day before I read up on this, I took four photos on my way through the park.  No big deal if you’re only going once, but tedious if you’re going regularly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 11:18 am and is filed under china, shanghai.