Election day! Well, not exactly. It’s the day before election day for you. We are on pins and needles waiting for results, which we figure will be about noon here tomorrow.

I forgot one story from our dinner with Griff and Sissy. For some reason, it was very complicated to order dinner at the restaurant. It took an intense negotiation with the waitress … first with Griff, then Sissy, then back to Griff, and so on. We never quite figured out what was going on, but the whole process took about ½ hour!

To complete our last day in Shanghai, we started with a ride through the “tourist tunnel”. This has to be one of the goofiest tourist attractions I’ve ever seen. They dug a tunnel under the river – seems like quite an expensive thing to do – then decorated it with flashing lights. You ride through the tunnel on subway-like cars to admire the beautiful lights. Since the cars don’t go through the tunnel, our driver drove through the regular tunnel and met us later in the day. The big advantage of this was not sitting in the tunnel traffic, but we couldn’t imagine that this project made any sense financially.

We walked along the Bund, the name for the embankment along the river where the former British concession was. It’s very reminiscent of Europe with its architecture (other than the red Chinese flag flying from the top of every building).

Our next stop was a tea shop where we did a tea-tasting and received some instruction in the art of tea-serving. We all enjoyed this stop very much – although we struggled to tell the difference between the finest cuts of tea and the second to finest (which cost about half of the finest). We bought some tea and tea cups, of course, in the finest gift shop.

After a stroll through a jade “museum” (where everything coincidentally was on sale), we continued to the old Jewish quarter. In the 1930’s, Shanghai did not require entry visas, and it was one of the only places in the world that welcomed Jews escaping from the Nazis. Over 30,000 Jews came here, often with the help of Chinese consulate officers based in eastern Europe.

There really aren’t any Jews left, so there is no sign of a Jewish neighborhood. However, the government recently created a lovely museum in honor of the refugees at the site of one of the Ashkenazy synagogues called Ohel Moshe. It was quite touching to see the photos of this refugee community, and to see how generous the Chinese were in welcoming them.

The caretaker of the museum, Mr. Wong, gave us some explanations in barely-understandable English. Much of what Mr. Wong said was a recitation of Jewish words, i.e. “Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashana, Kippot, Yarmulka, Matzah”, etc.

We stopped by a park near the museum where we saw people playing cards, a woman embroidering, and one of the funniest sites on our trip so far, a child with pants with a slit in it. At first I assumed that the pants were just torn. But then we witnessed the reason for the slit when the child squatted by the bench, and happily peed without the inconvenience of pulling down his pants! Lev was quick on the old camera shutter, and deviously snapped a photo of Galina with the boy in the background. Unfortunately we don’t have his photo to post right now, but perhaps we’ll do it later.

One of the most noticeable things in our travels through the city today is laundry hanging everywhere to dry. This is not just out of windows – although indeed it seems like out of every window – it also is on fence posts and strung on racks on the sidewalk. You might think that every house has a used clothing store in front of it, but it’s actually clothes drying.

After a nice western lunch (our first non-Chinese meal in a week!), we drove to the Maglev Train. This is a train built by the Germans using magnetic levitation that allows it to go extremely fast. We got a real kick out of this experience. It takes 7 minutes and 20 seconds to the airport (quite precisely). You can watch the speed on a display. Our top speed was about 250 miles per hour. It’s very smooth – you don’t really feel the speed except if you look out the window. Then you realize that the speed of the countryside flying by is unbelievable. I felt it was like watching a train ride in fast-forward setting. When the train passed from the other direction, I jumped (in spite of being warned by the tour guide). It comes and goes in an instant.

We had a delayed and bumpy flight to Xi’an, so arrived quite tired, but settled into our very nice hotel here, the Shangri-la.

-- Donna