Guilin Park & The Tracks

Update: I changed the order of the photos and a few captions because they bugged me. Sorry for any confusion!

Tuesday morning, I set out to explore the area south-south-west of our apartment. My specific destination was a small green spot on my map, Guilin Garden. It turns out that Guilin Garden is a small public park that used to be the home of a Shanghai gangster, Huang Jinrong. The walled garden was devastated by the Japanese in the mid-1900’s and then restored and opened to the public in 1988. The elaborate gardens surrounding the main house, which is now a tea house, contain a series of courts with various focal points. In one, a raised and covered wooden pathway flanked with built in benches meanders through heavily landscaped areas and over a stream. In another, an “athletic pavilion” floats in the middle of a large pond. In a third, a large stone-paved court is surrounded by picnic tables where small groups gather to play cards, and in a fourth a flat grass lawn is surrounded by large shade trees. Even mid week, the garden was teaming with people, but there were so many discreet areas that it was easy to find a peaceful place to be alone to read my book, The Good Earth (which by the way is a fantastic book about a Chinese farmer in the early 1900’s). I will certainly return to this park throughout the summer to watch the gardens change as the trees bloom and evolve for the season.

Saturday morning, I talked Nik into exploring the south-south-west area with me. This time we didn’t have a specific destination, but wanted to get as close to the Huangpu river as possible. The thought was that we would see some pretty impressive industrial areas, but what we found were small neighborhoods, construction and markets that line the South Shanghai Railway. We were out for most of the morning, and here is what we saw.

Nik has also done a post about this week, mostly photos of yesterday: Biking, Gaming, Resting, Saturday in Shanghai