Farewell for Europe: Shanghai museum

Last Thursday was a public holiday here so also the writer decided to have a smallish holiday from blogging. Since the holiday was on Thursday, according to some weird Chinese habit also Friday was holiday for most people and the school/work from Friday was changed to Sunday (yesterday). Weird indeed… The holiday was the Sweeping the Tombs, as it was nicely translated into English. The idea is families going and cleaning the tombs of their relatives on the courtyards.

My great plan was to visit small towns Suzhou and Hangzou which are both located rather near Shanghai during the long weekend but of course Thursday and Friday were raining and it was foggy everywhere. That’s it for the great plan. So instead of acquainting myself with nearby cities I decided to get to know better for Shanghai. The plan included Shanghai museum with all its exhibitions.

The museum itself is located on the southern end of people’s park. It is open every day, excluding Mondays and public holidays, and it is totally free for everyone to visit. The building is also quite a piece of art with its 5 floors. There seems to be also great lines of people getting in all the time.

The museum includes several sections, mostly focusing into China of course. I went through all the sections and my personal favorites were The Chinese painting area and Ceramic area.

All in all the museum was rather interesting but I definitely took too large bite going through all the sections in one day (excluding the River Congo). I should have choose couple of areas and focus on those. Even though I now also spent several hours wandering around, it wasn’t that enjoyable and in some point I realized I had become quite dull for the new things. This was of course a shame since the collections are quite large and well presented. But still I do recommend this place. Gives good picture about China, though, I don’t really know why the name is Shanghai Museum since there are no particularly Shanghai oriented items