Shanghai Daily Science podcasts and the Shanghai Postal Museum

Shanghai Daily newspaper has a range of podcasts that serve as English language audio guides to an eclectic collection of museums in Shanghai. These include the Shanghai Postal Museum, the Museum of Traditional Medicine, the Earthquake Museum and the Shanghai Eyeglasses Museum. I tested one out at the Shanghai Postal Museum. After a short argument I lost control of the iphone and followed my 6 year old son around, being fed choice bits of information. It was quite a surreal experience, walking around an almost deserted museum listening to a pleasant male voice with a strong Scottish accent describe the exhibits!
Starting with bits of clay inscribed with messages for an emperor, we then passed through an interactive display of signal towers being lit on the great wall. There was a history of stamps, post boxes from around the world, posties as revolutionary fighters and unionists, and then the enormous expansion of the postal system to service Shanghai (and China's) huge population. It was really interesting.
The museum is housed in a beautiful 'eclectic style' building from the 1920s/30s, and there is a roof garden which was closed when we went. Many of the displays feature interactive elements to keep children button pushing, and there is a lot of old postal equipment on display. Definitely worth the (free) admission. The English translations are adequate but the podcast is a great bonus.

Shanghai Urban Planning Museum

Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre is at People's Square, Shanghai. Like many Shanghai museums it is pretty deserted on a weekday, so there was no problem wandering around and looking at the exhibits freely. The most publicized exhibit is of course the scale model of Shanghai, as planned for the year 2020. This takes up a whole floor, and is great on the detail. We found our very own apartment building!
It is a beautiful piece of work and shows what a fast pace of development Shanghai is undergoing, with a lot of the proposed buildings already built or currently under completion. Another floor holds a model of the Shanghai 2010 Expo site, which is also fascinating with some great building designs.

There are a few interactive exhibits to please the kids, one of which enables you to race a boat at high speed across the bay and under the proposed bridge linking Shanghai to the new deep water port facility, or alternatively to race along a road and through tunnels at breakneck speed.
Old Shanghai is documented with a display of large historical photographs and beautifully produced very large format colour books of the old Concession era architecture.
The website link to the English site version unfortunately doesn't work, so you have to just look at the pictures!

First post from Shanghai

Well, I've been in Shanghai for 10 months, and firstly wikipedia comes online here for the first times since last July, and now I can finally access this blog!
So now I will be exploring the museums and galleries of Shanghai once again, and posting any interesting observations I have here.