A Forgotten Post

(Apparently I missed a retroactive post when I put up the other two >.< But here it is. This means I'll have this one up until tomorrow, then I'll post what I did for the last few days in Shanghai. Back in Beijing now, with internet!)

Cue Shanghai, day three... And, action!
Got up and had our hotel's continental breakfast again. I was delighted to find that there was a different selection of dishes this morning, which was a pleasant surprise. Finished there and headed over to the Shanghai National Museum. This is museum number three that we've visited here, and I recently learned that these three that we have visited are ranked as the top three museums in China, which is pretty impressive. They had a great variety of exhibits, but to be honest it can get dull seeing bronze works, calligraphy and jade sculptures in museum after museum. There was a really nice furniture exhibit, though, and I took pictures of my favorite pieces. (I'll be deciding what pictures to post when I get internet. I'll be getting another 100mb in February, and I'll use that up to post some fill-in pictures before I come home.)
After the museum we visited Sun Yat-sen's old house. He is considered the father of modern China, and had great visions for the modern nation that China could become (this was China before Mao, but after the Qing Dynasty). The house was certainly nice, but most of the items on display were mundane (a bottle opener he used, for example), and I failed to really get the impact of his significance... Just around the corner from his house was the room where the first Congress of the Republic of China was held (this distinction is important: it wasn't the People's Republic yet. That was Mao in 1949). It was a really tiny room, and there were only a dozen people there, but that certainly was interesting; such a huge nation starting out in a little dining room at a girl's school. But as Chuangzi says, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
This girl's school happens to be located very near the French Concession (an area granted to French citizens in trade agreements when the Europeans arrived here). All the buildings are in a Western style, and I was surprised at the differences I was noticing in the architecture. I usually don't pay much attention to that, but it kind of hit me after being here for so long. We were given some time to check out the area, and I wandered around checking out the shops and the park with a few other people. We got the absolute worst dinner ever on the fifth floor of this supermarket/department store complex, then came back to the hotel and checked out the nearby internet cafe. If you're thinking, "Hey, if he got internet, how come he didn't post these blogs?" it's because they had computers there, not wi-fi, so these retroactive posts that I have saved on my computer were useless. Until tomorrow night, that is! Tomorrow we're heading to the nearby city of Suzhou for the day, but when we get back that night I'm getting internet for the room so I can update everything. Day after tomorrow's a free day, then it's back to Beijing and the home stretch! It's going by so fast... Later!