On Saturday, we were up early once again! It looks as if our schedule in Shanghai will consist of waking up around 6:30a and my falling asleep before 10p! We headed downstairs for breakfast, and then Dan, Tim and I headed to the metro and went to downtown Shanghai. The plan originally was to go to the Shanghai Mueseum, but when we got there the line was incredibly long. Tim and I decided that it would be less crowded on a weekday, so Dan suggested that we go to the Rockbund Art Museum instead. We agreed, so we wandered through the city in the right direction and eventually found the museum. The current exhibit at the Rockbund was called "Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant Da Vincis" and outside of the museum there was a little wooden airplane and a little crafty helicopter on exhibit. Both apparently work! I got pretty excited for the museum when I saw these, and we went in to purchase tickets and see the rest.
We couldn't take photographs inside, but the website for the museum's exhibit is here: Rockbund Art Museum The website has a few photographs! The museum was a small building; each floor had one big room and then a little room with a stairwell, and I think there were five floors. Each floor had a slightly different exhibit. The first floor was just the lobby, but after buying tickets, we headed upstairs! The second floor had a really cool kite exhibit. There were all these little stands that had a string leading to a kite. At the top of each stand, there was a little fan that was blowing all of the kites. We couldn't figure out if the kites were actually flying, or if they were hanging from the ceiling and the fans were just making them move around a little. Tim and I were convinced the kites were hanging down from the ceiling, but the strings were really difficult to see. Dan was convinced that we were wrong. Anyhow, there were images projected onto every kite. Apparently, each kite represented one of the inventors that had worked on the exhibit. It was really cool and I really wish I could have taken a photo.
The room on the third floor was filled with all sorts of little hand made mechanical robots. There were robots that would create abstract paintings by slowly dipping a paintbrush into a cup of paint, lifting it out, and then snapping the brush so that paint drips scattered across a piece of canvas in front of them. There were little mice robots that would jump across the floor. Another table was covered in random mechanical things including a very cute merry go round. Three girls who worked for the museum were in the room, and they followed the three of us around very closely making sure we didn't break anything. Sadly, a lot of the mechanical robots were already broken but we got to play with a few that weren't. There was also a robot that would spit a stream of water across the room, which really entertained Tim. He kept varying the amount of water that could leave the robot's mouth and he absolutely soaked a part of the floor. The three girls were looking on in horror, but they couldn't stop him because the purpose of the robot was to spit water. They looked pretty relieved when he was done, but I think the only reason he stopped was because the robot ran out of water!
The fourth floor was an exhibit of airplanes, flying saucers, submarines, and helicopters. Some of them worked and some were failures, and you could read about every one on the walls of the room. The room also had a lot of birds in it, and the center of the floor was a little lawn of grass! There was bird poop all over the planes and other machines in the exhibit! It was pretty cool, though. We looked at every machine and tried to decide if we thought it would work, and then read the summary of the machine on the wall to see if we were right. There was one really fancy helicopter that we were all really impressed with. My least favorite were the "flying saucers" which were just little platforms that spun aruond and around and looked like a ufo. After we had looked at all the machines, we headed up to the fifth floor which offered a view of the same exhibit from above, so you could see the machines that were higher up a little easier. There was a little tea shop on the fifth floor as well on a balcony. We went out on the balcony to see the view, but passed on the tea.
We were really impressed with the museum, and I think we all wished that there was more! We eventually wandered out of the museum and back to the streets of Shanghai. We caught the metro into Pudong and wandered over to the Shanghai Aquarium. The prices of the tickets gave us pause, but eventually we shelled out the money and headed inside.
I have terrible luck at taking photographs in aquariums, so if you want to look at photos, you should look at Tim's, which are posted here: Tim's Aquarium Photos. At that link there are also photos of the plane and helicopter that were outside of the Rockbund Art Museum. The aquarium was pretty nice, and one cool thing about it was that it had a lot of tunnels that you walked through where there were fish swimming all around you and over you. Apparently, it has the longest such tunnel in an aquarium in the world! The longest tunnel had this little moving walkway so that you could just stand and watch the fish swim while being moved at a snail's pace through the tunnel. At first, I thought it was pretty ridiculous to have such a slow moving walkway but after I realized you could watch fish for a long time and take photographs without things being a big blur, I realized that it was pretty nice!
We wandered through the entire aquarium and when we were done, we were pretty tired. We took the metro back to Dan's place, and discovered the wonders of youku. Youku is kind of like youtube, but it is filled with all sorts of illegal movie streaming, so you can basically watch any movie you want for free. We decided to watch "How to Tame a Dragon" which I thought was really cute, but Tim hated it because he thought it lacked a plot. The chef at Dan's place made us a white lasagna of some type for dinner, which was good if a little bit bland. We added some hot sauce to it so that it would have more flavor. After dinner, we all just lazed around Dan's house, reading books and playing on the internet.
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