Enroute from Qingdao to Tianjin
Please forgive (or applaud) the silence of the blog for the past several days. Blame it on China’s war with Google. Since leaving Manila, WiFi has been very slow.
So, today, where is LFL at Sea? It’s 11:11am and I am enjoying a free Bloody Mary and shrimp appetizers as prelude to the Mariners Honors Presentation (#2 for this cruise), the Westerdam is sailing smoothly north on the Yellow Sea toward Tianjin (port of Beijing, sort of), and the blog is still in Shanghai!
So I will cover the intervening days briefly and then post additional photos from home—now just eight days away.
20-21 March 2019
Shanghai
A free HAL shuttle bus takes me the 12-mile distance from the port to the city center (see blog entries for 3 and 4 March). What would normally take 20 minutes in mid-day traffic, takes almost 90 minutes during the morning commute, even using expressways. But the bus usefully drops its passengers right at the top of the Bund, the major riverside thoroughfare and panoramic boardwalk.
The Bund offers the best views of Pudong, the newly-built section of Shanghai across the river, which I visited during the first days of the cruise.
At the top of the Bund stands the critically-reviled Monument to the People's Heroes.
But the Bund is most noted for the series of monumental and magnificent 19th- and early 20th-century office buildings lining its western side. Originally banks, hotels, and trading companies, today these buildings still house banks and hotels, but others have been converted to more contemporary uses.
The interiors are open to the public and offer views of the opulence of the British influence in Shanghai.
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| The Tops of the Buildings Present a Vision That Could Be London |
From the Bund it is a very short walk to the Shanghai Campanile Hotel, a perfectly fine 4-star accommodation, with great wifi, good beds--and knives, forks, and spoons with breakfast.
SPACE RESERVED FOR PHOTO OF CAMPANILE HOTEL;
UNABLE TO UPLOAD AT THIS TIME
After settling in at the hotel and having lunch at a Chinese restaurant in a nearby mall, I walk the short distance, in heavy traffic, to the Shanghai Museum, where I spend a wonderful afternoon among the most beautiful and historic objects still in Mainland China (that is, not in Taiwan).
Fruit trees are beautifully in bloom at People's Square, location of the Museum and other important cultural and government buildings.
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| Urban Planning Exhibition Hall |
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| Shanghai Grand Theatre |
I planned to continue this blog with photos from the museum, as well as the following morning in Shanghai as I visit a large modern commercial area and the largest remaining active Buddhist temple in the city. But the internet is finally outwitting me and wearing me out tonight. So I will try to post this and continue on with Shanghai and Qingdao in the next entries, even as my body moves on to Tianjin, where I plan to spend the day, instead of enduring a 12-hour tour to Beijing, to visit sites that are truly wonderful, but that I have seen before.
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