Shanghai 2018

So this isn't sabbatical, but another family travel adventure.  We have three week in China, visiting Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Dali.    Thought we should add to the blog to share and remember all the wonderful things we have been doing.

We were visiting the lab of Professor Shurong Zhu at Fudon University in Shanghai, with which Greg has had a long-distance collaboration.  This was the first  time to meet them. We spent a full day with all the graduate students, learning about their projects and exchanging ideas, exploring some possible projects, and Greg, grad student Xiang Liu, and Shurong finished up and submitted a manuscript to Ecology Letters.  
Greg and Ingrid were invited by Shurong Zhu to help teach the Fudon University Summer School Course in Ecology, with 200+ graduate students and young investigators (from more than 3,000 applicants) from all over China.   We gave our lectures there on 26 June 2018.  The students were incredibly attentive and asked lots of great and insightful questions after the talks.  Ingrid presented mostly on our work on phylogentic disease ecology and our clover studies, and Greg talked mostly about how diseases may help maintain plant diversity and work on tree diseases in Panama.

Greg eating scorpions.  The third one 'stung'
back and scratch his lip!

Before and after our talks we explored the Shanghai area, mostly guided by graduate students.  Fei Chen took us to the Zhujiajiao water town, and ancient part of the Shanghai, still inhabited but also protected to maintain the old structures.  We spent the day wandering beautiful old gardens and eating everything on sale by street vendors that we either didn't recognize or had never eaten before.  Some highlights, among many, were scorpions, spicy grilled bullfrog on a stick, taro root, duck intestines, baby quail, and a broad array of seeds and fruits.

On a boat in Zhufiajiao with Fei

Silk Embroidery

Quail eggs, quail, baby quail, and duck intestines. 
All delicious!

Spicy bullfrog on a stick

 The evening place to be is the Bund, the waterfront of Shanghai. On one side of the water are the old classical bank buildings, mostly build by concessions to the French, British, and Americans long ago as the banking district. Across the water is an amazing array of giant buildings, all brightly lit, build it the last few decades.  

In the daytime, at the People's Park, there was a Marriage Market, where parents put out umbrellas with descriptions of their 30-something unmarried kids, looking to introduced them to appropriate partners, since they were too busy to find their own spouses. 


In the Shanghai museum, we saw wonderful art from across China.  We especially appreciated the displays on art and clothes from minority ethnic groups.  It was hard to imagine wearing this salmon-leather suit, though.




We got to spend a lot of time taking the subway around to different parts of Shanghai, and felt quite confortable getting around.  We got a little lost in what must be the world's largest underground food court, below "colored egg" sculpture, but later had a wonderful meal there.

We took a day trip to Sozhou on the high-speed mag-lev train (300 km/h). We wandered the old Ping Jiang water town, with houses built along canals, and up Tiger Hill to see the famous leaning tower.

As always we ate well, walked a lot, and took in the diverse sites, smells, and bustle of this part of China.  
A highlight was the Humble Administrator's Garden, constructed in the 1400s, with spectacular water-feature gardens and a suite of beautiful buildings.  It is really interesting to compare what was being constructed here at the same time as so much of the architecture and art we was in Spain during our sabbatical. 

Ping Jiang historic water town