Greetings from Shanghai from Barbara and Bruce!

 Nihao (hi) from Barbara and Bruce, here in Shanghai (coastal China).  We're here for the better part of three weeks, while Barbara once again offers her dance therapy skills and training for a course taken by local folks.

We would like to invite you to share our experiences through this travel blog.  If you don't have time to read a lot, our blog includes a lot of photos as well!  We hope you'll pick and choose from among whatever might be of interest.

The photo to the right is the ballet and dance center where Barbara is teaching.  It's a very modern building, with good facilities, used by many especially on weekends and evenings, and I feel a nice energy to the place when I'm settled into the seating area to wait for Barbara when she's s getting near the end of her teaching day.  (I'm reading a mystery novel set in 19th century Istanbul, during the Ottoman times.)  There's often ballet or other music coming from the rooms where young dancers are exercising, learning new moves, and rehearsing.  And it's only a ten minute walk from our hotel.

 Here's our curly-haired heroine herself, doing some last-minute preparations for her day's' classes.  Each day she's teaching goes from 9:00 to 6:00, so she needs to leave our hotel pretty well prepared for the day.

Here she's at the breakfast table for the daily hotel buffet--nothing too fancy, but a nice selection of typical Chinese favorite dishes to get us all started (usually all the other folks there are Chinese).  I (Bruce) often bring down some maps to pore over while Barbara plans, or buy a copy of the English-language Shanghai Daily across the street to catch up world events.

 But...on to the important stuff!  What are the typical Chinese breakfast dishes we enjoy snacking on each morning?  To the right is a nice sampling, assembled by Bruce: on the upper left, some milk coffee.  Then going clockwise, there's fresh ripe watermelon and a tomato, obscuring a view of soybean curd.  Then some bean porridge, with a choice of six pickled veggies to bring out more flavor.  Then, on the plate, deep-fried breadsticks on the upper left, then little meat dumplings, then greens, then steamed yellow yams, then fried rice with peanuts, then a hard-boiled egg cooked in black tea, and finally sweet bean paste inside a little bun.  Yum!

But of course we aren't just eating and teaching.  We arrived several days before Barbara was due to begin her classes, to recover from the long trip, the time change, the confusion of being in a very large (24 million!) city with very little Chinese, and arriving about the same time as the annual monsoon and sultry weather season (the "plum rains") (we're only half as far north of the equator here as we would be in Minneapolis).

Here Barbara (lower right) is wandering with me around Nanshi, or "Old Town," the largest area with a number of older (pre-20th century) buildings in Shanghai.  It's now largely a tourist area (often more for Chinese tourists than foreigners, now that more Chinese have the oney and interest in travel), but also contains areas of historical interest, some temples and Buddhist nunneries, and even Shanghai's two mosques.

We've also been zooming around on Shanghai's very modern (mostly built in the past 20 years) and extensive subway (or Metro) system, to places like Jing'an and its Buddhist temple, seen here to right.  It's recently been remodeled a bit, and contains housing for the monks as well as a number of places where local worshippers may offer prayers.

One small thing that puzzles us, especially with our experience with Buddhism in Thailand, is that here no one seems to take off their shoes when entering the temples.  A small puzzle, perhaps to be solved before we depart.

 The twenty-first century Shanghai Museum has also gotten our attention (as well as a few others).  We were drawn to the traditional clothing worn by members of China's officially-recognized National Minorities, some of whom we'd seen in Yunnan Province when we were there with St. Olaf students on the Term in Asia twelves years ago.  The exhibits are beautifully done, though we would have liked more information about the lives of the people themselves, and the possible difficulty of maintaining ethnic identifies and languages in a rapidly-modernizing China.

 What kind of "rapidly modernizing" are we talking about?  It seems that even within Shangai itself, many "older" areas have been leveled in favor of modern high-rises and sky-scrapers for the growing (and increasingly affluent, at least for some) population.

To the right is one of many shopping plazas or malls, this one the Raffles City Mall which in our experience is populated mostly by teen-agers and 20-somethings.  It seems like the culture is shifting towards lifestyles, personal expression, and hopes for entrance into the middle-class via education for those without affluent backgrounds.

As in the U.S., the Chinese are living with (and creating) social contradictions.  On the one hand, there is an older Confucian (and communist) emphasis on the group, and giving oneself to living within a social order.  On the other hand, there's an increasing emphasis on individualism and personal expression and fulfillment--yet also within a society in which political expression is still limited.  And while China (far more than India) has been able to significantly reduce the proportion of its population that's truly poor, Chinese billionaires are flourishing in number and overall inequality is by some measures growing.

These are some impressions; we'll try to sort them through further during our very short visit!

Best wishes, and we hope you'll visit us again.  Barbara and Bruce
(our web address is, we hope: barbaraandbruceinshanghai.blogspot.com)