My friend J had a pretty nice first day in China, I think. She walked the 外滩 Bund on a sunny early morning, then met me to stroll through 豫园 Yuyuan's garden, lovely in every season. Another New Yorker now in Shanghai joined us (at a 星巴克 Starbucks) and we took the 地铁 metro to 新天地 Xintiandi to savor 小笼包 soup dumplings and eye relics of the first meeting of the Communist Party before nibbling the namesake pastry at Sunflour Bakery on 安福路 Anfulu. Before bed then enjoying Yunnan delicacies with my close friends at 人民广场 People's Square...
The shrimp-topped xiaolongbao above look a little like some of the lost phylla I encountered in a 360˚ animation of the ocean floor during the Cambrian Explosion at the 上海自然博物馆 Shanghai Natural History Museum, which I visited on Wednesday morning. No, there's no connection between the Cambrian explosion and soup dumplings, just the temporal proximity of my enjoying them. I could conjure one: it's happened before. Isn't a westerner's first encounter with China not a little like discovering the Burgess Shale?!
