文明礼让

Back in Shanghai, for the first time in five years! Much has changed, I'm sure, but I'm happy to discover old friends, like these (now a little faded) characters on the subway platform glass walls (which New York will soon need to build to ensure nobody ends up on the tracks). They still urge 文明礼让 civility and courtesy, to little avail... 

I took the subway to another old friend, the Shanghai Natural History Museum 上海自然博物馆, this time of course attentive to trees but swept away again by its mainly animal-focused 生命长河 "river of life" which reunites living and extinct, marine and land animals. As before, I found a profoundly different understanding of time and contingency.

My Chinese is back too, if very rusty. Let me try my own translation of this: 死亡，是地铁上所有生命必然的归宿。诞生，对生命来说究竟是必然还是偶然？ Death is the final home to which all earthly life inevitably returns. From life's view is birth then inevitable or accidental? The most prominently featured trees were petrified!