Slow Day in Shanghai

How's everyone doing today?

As the title of this post suggests, we had a bit of a slow day today.  This cold has hit us both pretty hard, especially Euphy who really wasn't feeling well at all.  We weren't feeling too bad in the morning, so we headed into town, got some Tylenol cold and sinus medication and went round to visit a temple in the area.  Jing'an Temple is an absolutely massive, gold-plated place of worship.  It was actually a bit strange being in there; while they welcome tourists and there were plenty of us wandering around with camera, it's also an active Buddhist temple.  The thing with Buddhism is that there isn't a fixed time or day when you can worship, so a temple will have people coming and going all the time.  I actually felt a little bit invasive wandering around snapping pictures while people were going about their spiritual business.

The usual forms of worship seem to be the burning of incense, and praying at alters scattered throughout the temple.  One peculiar activity on display though centred around the tradition of throwing coins onto spiritual or lucky objects.  Almost any shrine in the country will be covered in coins, but what stood out about the pagoda-shaped... thingy... in the centre of the temple was that it appeared to be incredibly difficult to get the coins to stay on the sloped roofs.  I think the idea was to try to get the coins IN the giant urn at the base, but the intricate designs on the openings made that a tricky task.  The whole time we were there people were whipping coins at this thing, and often missing.  Coins were flying all over the courtyard; it was actually pretty comical.

The central part of the temple housed a massive statue of Buddha which was a really eye-catching and peculiar shade of blue.  I'm not sure what it was made out of.  I would have taken a picture but I was told during an earlier temple visit on this trip that it's considered very disrespectful to take photos of the depictions of the gods that are kept in temples.  My desire to show respect trumps my natural desire to photograph everything in sight.  I did feel a bad when I heard that though because I think that means I've disrespected a fair number of temples in my day.

After soaking up a bit of spirituality we headed across the road to a Shanghai Number 1 restaurant where we were meeting up with Euphy's friend Julie.

Euphy and Julie are old friends from school, and apparently Julie and her fiancé are moving to Calgary at the end of the year.  Calgary was already on our list of domestic vacation spots for 2013, but I think it just got a big bump up the list.

The menu in this place is a 130-page tome full of detailed pictures of every dish, as well as old photos of local celebrities from years past.

I mostly just let the ladies figure out what we were eat and kicked back on the comfy red couch.

My only real contribution to the meal was to say that we absolutely had to have Bullfrog when I saw that on the menu.

I've eaten frog's legs before, but that was ages ago, and I've never had frog just chopped up like this, so it was a fun dish to try.  The frog meat was incredibly tender and flaky, like a nice piece of fish, with an incredibly mild and subtle flavour that I got to enjoy for about a quarter of a second before my face caught fire.  Those little red peppers show up a lot in Northern Chinese cuisine.  Sometimes if you simple eat around them you're okay.  Sometimes they permeate a dish and lend their potency to every bite.  This dish was an example of the latter case.  Quite hot, but also very delicious, and I couldn't help myself, so I asked Euphy to order a Coke for me and forged ahead.

After a big meal and a dose of cold medication Euphy and I could barely stand.  Euphy was feeling worse by the minute too, so we decided to just call it a day after lunch and headed back home.  We've spent the better part of the afternoon napping, and now at 8:10 p.m. Euphy appears to already be down for the count.  I'm probably going to follow her example as soon as I'm done writing this too.  We've got an early morning flight out to Hong Kong tomorrow, and then we're catching the ferry over to Zhuhai.  I hold no illusions of tomorrow being easy or relaxing, so I'm trying to get as much rest now as I can.  I really have no desire to be getting on a plane while feeling like crap.  With any luck a good night's sleep will put us both back on our feet tomorrow.

So that's all for today I'm afraid.  Not exactly how we'd have chose to spend our final afternoon in Shanghai, but we've still got a lot of vacation ahead of us, and pushing ourselves through some sightseeing while not feeling well would have been unpleasant and likely just prolonged the problem.  So we've had a day of rest and I'm sure we'll be better off for it tomorrow.

I hope everyone has had a lovely day today, and I'll talk to you all tomorrow from Zhuhai!