Day 71 Shanghai

Today we spent a full day enjoying the back streets of Shanghai. Tom, Nancy and Sara took us to little known places that they have discovered during their 14 years in this intriguing city. They have a saying here you can get anything in China. Today proved that to be accurate. One of the places we went had bronze statues of every shape and size. Our interest was in western art so we looked for Remington reproductions. Across the alley we wandered through about 15 shops selling original paintings. That means they were hand painted. It also means they are very good reproductions of someone else's work. If you can show it to them on the computer they will paint it for you. Here we purchased three paintings for a total of about $150 US dollars. I think they will look great in Montana.
Sorry for the lack of pictures but we are on a borrowed computer and cannot load pictures tonight. Keep watching because we have a lot to catch up.
Tomorrow another day in Shanghai.

Chris - Shanghai 2 - We started today with a visit to the Shanghai Zoo which has an exhibit of 11 panda bears. They don't usually have any as the environment is too hot for them and they are usually kept in the cooler Beijing area. Shanghai will be host to the World Expo (Fair) in about 30 days and this is one of the opportunities that Shanghai will offer fair goers and all visitors. The bears were darling and about half of them were very alert, while the other half slept. I got some good pictures of one eating bamboo leaves which we will post when we get back to normal service. In addition to the oil paintings we purchased, we also bought a picture that was sewed on silk. We visited the city yesterday where the 10 best "silk artists" work, but while they do extraordinary work with sewn pictures that look like photographs, the style certainly didn't work for our house in Montana. Today, however, I did find a silk picture of a horse head in profile that displayed that kind of art and since it will work for our house in Montana, we bought that picture as well. Now getting them back could be interesting! We finished the evening with a 90 minute full body massage, which cost about $20. I could get used to this!