China Peony Festival Tour April 2009

 

Suzhou to Shanghai
After breakfast we board our coach for our trip to Shanghai, then check into our hotel, the Shanghai Hotel for the last two nights and off to explore.

We visited the Bund area of Shanghai and this is always a great place to people watch. Of course the skyline is what draws you as well as the architecture but there is always someone there selling trinkets to take home.

You walk through Yu Yuan old street and is it ever hard to keep people from wandering through the shops! But I promised them time to shop afterwards. We enjoyed lunch at a dim sum restaurant here and was it ever good!!

Our last garden visit of the tour is to the Yu Yuan Garden. We visit a beautiful garden today, the Yu Yuan Garden or as some have called it ‘the garden of peace and comfort’, one of China’s most famous scholar gardens. Close by there are shopping areas in old Shanghai. Yu Yuan Garden has many zig-zag pathways. Built in 1559, Pan Yunduan spent twenty years and all his savings building it to please his parents in their old age.

I have been to this garden before and was sure that everyone would enjoy it and they did. Totally different yet very much the same. Koi filled the pond and you could hear them as they scrambled for the tidbits that were being thrown in. Again, the striking colours of the azaleas were a highlight along with the beautiful bronze colours of the maple trees.

Shanghai - a beautiful city mixing traditional Chinese and 21st century architecture. Shanghai began as a tiny fishing village during the Warring States period (475-221 BC). It has risen to become China's centre for business and finance, and has one of the most active ports in the country.

On this day we’ll visit Shanghai’s world class museum of Chinese art and culture. The new Shanghai Museum has ten special galleries of bronze, calligraphy, ceramics, furniture, jades, minority art, paintings, sculpture, seal carvings, coins and arts and crafts, together with a special gallery of donated relics and three temporary exhibition halls. It also contains an excellent gift shop with many attractive and fascinating books about Chinese culture and art, available in English.

This time I chose to visit the porcelain and furniture areas of the museum. I could not use a flash so that is why they are dark, but I think you can get a good idea of what they looked like.

This evening after dinner, you will be guests at the Shanghai Acrobatic Show…not to be missed!! The Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe, established in 1951 is one of the best in China. It frequently tours internationally and perform routinely at Shanghai and other cities in China. An acrobatic show has become one of the most popular evening entertainments for tourists in Shanghai. You can enjoy gravity-defying contortionism, juggling, unicycling, chairstacking, and plate-spinning acts at the following stages.