Shanghai Propaganda Museum

on Saturday, 26 June 2010

We end up waking quite up late as usual and decide to find the apple shop as Tom’s iPod, the sound has stopped working. I look at buying a new iPod as well, but it is much cheaper in Hong Kong so will wait until we get there. We then decide to visit the Shanghai Propaganda museum, which we had been told about by a friend we had met in Tokyo, we had the address written in Chinese, but new it was hard to find as it is in the basement of a block of flats. We eventually find the place after asking quite a few people for directions. You had to go down the lift to get to the museum and there was no sign of there even being anything there, which was weird and we were a little worried it was some dodgy place. The museum had quite a lot of old propaganda posters, a lot anti American. The cartoons depicted were pretty funny on some of the posters, some with little Chinese babies bayoneting American soldiers shown with chopped of legs and usually shown as goblin like creatures. The museum was quite small, but very interesting. They also had lots of the posters for sale and I would have liked to have bought one, but the originals were at least £60 and just too expensive.

We had been told of an all you can eat and drink buffet in Shanghai and planned to eat there tonight, with some English teachers we had met at the hostel. It was a huge buffet, for 49Y, but the food wasn’t that great and neither was the beer. It was also full of really young Chinese girls eating a ridiculous amount of food, I have no idea how they are all so slim. They were also all drinking beer and they really can’t handle their drink, one girl even knocked everything of her table covering us in beer. We left the restaurant early as we wanted to visit the Bund at night, because I hadn’t seen it and we were also going up the Shanghai world financial centre, the biggest building in Shanghai, and the third biggest in the world. It also has the highest observation platform of any building in the world because the building is flat on top, so no huge aerial to make it 100m higher. We had been told you could go to the bar near the top for free, but we decided to pay the £15 to go to the observation platform. The lift was unbelievably fast and it showed how high you were as you went up. The actual observation platform was a little disappointing as the glass was quite dirty and it as very hard to get a decent photo. It may have been better to go during the day.

We stopped of at the hostel so I could drop of my camera before going out for our last night in Shanghai. For the 4th time we ended up at Muse, we had tried another club beforehand but it was full of foreigners so decided to just go back to Muse, as it was now 10 drinks for 100Y again.