Over the last ten or so years, Shanghai has planted a lot of trees. This has been in part in response to the United nations environmental recommendations and partly in preparation for the Expo in 2010. The result is that the city is actually surprisingly green, full of parks and flowers.
The great thing about this is that people really use the parks – they seem to be busy all day long.
Starting early in the morning, the parks are full of people doing tai-chi, walking backwards and other mad Chinese exercises. Something that also happens early in the morning (but which I haven’t actually been up early enough to see is bird walking. Apparently this is the time of day when old Chinese guys take their cages birds for a walk. They all hang the cages on the trees. They don’t just hang the cages any old where there, oh no. They really take care with the placement. They make sure that their birds don’t hang next to a much more extrovert bird, because that would make their bird feel bad…
During the day, the musicians come out. Groups of old guys usually with their instruments, from drums to those ones that are played with bows come out under the trees. If you are really unlucky, there’s also some Chinese singing. We were particularly unlucky yesterday on a trip to Fuxing park, as there was a lady with a microphone who was belting out a never ending series of songs that sounded like a cat-strangling medley.
The grassy bits are usually full of people too – many just enjoying being outside. You can see people playing ball sports, frisbees, flying kites, diabolo, knitting…
The best activity of all starts later in the evening. It’s what I can only describe as Chinese line dancing. Not actually wearing cowboy boots to country music (thank goodness for that) but there are large groups of women doing an identical dance in lines.
I’ll add some videos when I get a chance, some of this stuff has to be seen to be believed.