Tuesday, August 21, 2018
NYU-Shanghai
Visiting Shanghai Museum, Seeing my NYU-Shanghai Colleague, Presenting my Paper at Conference and Another Chinese Banquet
We awoke after a great night’s sleep—we could really get used to this luxury: an enormous King sized bed, wonderfully fluffy mattress and gigantic pillows. Plus a spacious marble bathroom and top-of-the-line toiletries. Like I said, we could get dangerously used to this!
I had another obscenely big breakfast while trying to ignore the fact that despite all the manic walking we are doing, my clothes are feeling snugger! This morning, since we have been trying to do so for two days and not succeeding, we decided to get to the Shanghai Museum first thing in the morning to do a Highlights Tour and get back to the NYU-Shanghai campus in time for lunch at 1.00pm. My panel was scheduled at 4.00pm which would leave me enough time to get ready for it. And that was what we did.
We used the subway with assurance from Pudian Road and found the right exit to take us to the entrance of the Shanghai Museum which sits right in the center of People’s Park in People’s Square. It is a very handsome building clad in rust-colored stone and resembles a vast round urn with handles for lifting. A notice at the front entrance told us to go to the back to enter the building. There we had the shock of our lives! The line was serpentine! Every Shanghainese family was present with their children in tow for a day at the Museum. We stood in the line for 5 minutes as it snaked through the front pavilion of the building. Meanwhile, there was a downpour and were it not for the fact that the line was fully canopied (these folks think of everything!), we’d have been soaked.
Entry to the museum is free of charge but you must really be a lover of Chinese art to brave those queues and those crowds! Inside, we found a gorgeous marble-clad space in an interior that managed to ingeniously seem modern and traditional at the same time. We grabbed a floor plan in English that also spelled out the Highlights of the collection with color pictures. This made it super easy for us to go out and look for them.
Exploring the Highlights of the Shanghai Museum:
The Museum is beautifully curated and its collection organized in terms of a national collection that comprises bronzes (among the finest in the world and certainly the oldest items in the Museum), ceramics, paintings, coins, jade. Using the lovely leaflet that gives the highlights, we made sure we saw all of them. It is truly an incredible place and we could easily have spent a very long while there—maybe a whole morning. But we focused only on the highlights which took us about 2 hours to do while learning about Chinese craftsmanship that goes back centuries. The more time we spend in China, the more we feel as if we are in a Western country apart from the language. The way the Museum is curated, the way its objects are displayed, the order, the harmony, the smartness of the guards and their knowledge of the items and their locations were so impressive to me, a habitual museum-goer, that my respect for this country soared all over again.
Meeting my NYU-Shanghai Colleague:
Two hours was enough for us at the museum but we also had to get out by 11.00 am to keep our next appointment: we had a meeting with Raymond Ro, my Liberal Studies NYU colleague in Shanghai. I have met Ray on two occasions in two different cities of the world—London and Florence—on past Global Faculty conferences, When I informed him, in Florence, two months ago, that I would soon be in Shanghai, he extended an invitation to get together with him so that he could show us around the city. Sadly, we did not have a long enough in Shanghai to be able to take him up on his offer—but I was keen to connect with him, even if briefly.
I was able to borrow a phone from a Chinese stranger that allowed me to reaffirm our position for a meeting with Ray who showed up just a few minutes later. Fortunately, it had stopped raining but it was still very wet outside. It made sense for us to get away from the dampness by descending underground and Ray took us to the subterranean Hong Kong Mall for smoothies to which he treated us. We had a lovely chat with him and got to know him a bit more as we nursed delicious passion fruit and mango yogurt smoothies that filled us up and refreshed us at the same time. Ray is so friendly and so outgoing that conversation with him flowed freely and made for a very stimulating exchange. He invited us to return to Shanghai another time to spend more time with him.
I returned to the campus on the subway after Llew went back to the hotel to relax. I caught another session and then we broke up for lunch—Italian this time. I had a very tasty pesto prawn pasta. Then, I spent the rest of the afternoon preparing for my session which went off wonderfully. My paper was presented after David Ludden spoke on the Rohingyas of Myanmar which I found very enlightening. I was delighted to received superb feedback to my paper. There were many positive questions, and many very complimentary remarks made about it. As Llew attended my session, he too was delighted at the positive reaction I received.
Another Chinese Banquet Dinner:
As the second day of our conference came to a close, all delegates returned to our hotel for about 20 minutes. Then, we met in the lobby and walked together as a group for another incredible Chinese banquet dinner at Jade Garden Chinese Restaurant. I was thrilled that Llew was able to join us for this one.
The food, once again, was excellent and plentiful. By this point, we knew what to expect in a Chinese meal of this kind and we enjoyed red wine hat accompanied our meal as we tucked into a variety of vegetables and salads, meats and fish including duck and braised pork belly (a Shanghainese speciality) and loads of noodles and rice.
When we had all eaten our fill, we walked back with Alex, a graduate student and other delegates and parted at the lobby of our hotel. There would be one more day of the conference and then we would be saying farewell to fascinating Shanghai.
No comments:
Post a Comment