cerealjoe | New Shanghai Circus and a trip to the aquarium

Now this was probably two of the best experiences I had in Shanghai, the "magic troupe" and the aquarium. The New Shanghai Circus, it's not so much about the show as about the reactions of the people sitting beside you! I don't know if we fell on school night or if there are always that many students attending the performances but I would say about 3/4 of the place was filled with kids. When we got there, we had to find our seats and so we were reading the numbers off the tickets. The kids who actually understood that part were eager to help us find those seats. It was so adorable. (it's cute when they say things in English to you for a limited amount of time, when you're at the museum and you have kids running up to you shoutting things to "practice", then it's not adorable) The performances were rather good, there were some pretty impressive plate rotating/juggling/dancing, all at the same time. Some rollerblading. Two guys showing off their muscles. Five girls riding on one bike while spinning plates. Motorcycles inside a huge ball. Guys tapdancing and juggling hats. And many others. That was all lovely but the thing that amused me the most was probably the way people reacted. Imagine, you're sitting there, the lights dim, the first acrobat comes out and... jumps. Just jumps up and down. Nothing too hard about it. Well, by the reaction of the people around you'd think that he had just done a triple backwards flip and landed perfectly on one hand. I didn't quite know if I should be amused by that at first, I thought maybe I wasn't seeing something that was going on. Well no, given by the stiffled laughs of the fellows on either side of me, the reactions were rather amusing. I can't even describe what it was, it was like "ooooh!" and "woahhhhh!" non-stop for the hour the show lasted. It's true some stuff was rather impressive, I was wondering how those plates just didn't keep on falling off the spinning sticks! At the end everyone wanted to have their photos taken with the troupe. We just kind of headed out straight away and desperately tried to catch a taxi. See, the theater this was held at is pretty much in the deadest point in the central Shanghai area... so of course there were probably three taxis there and there were tons of us, we had to battle! On the before-last day I headed out to the aquarium with a buddy. We had the subway system down by then, it's on the "other" side of the river so we could have taken the little under-river tunnel cars again but I think I would have died laughing if I had gone back that way.

At one point there was a group inside joke about the "exit" characters. I can't remember what it was. I think it involved the last character and it meaning "mouse" or something of the sort. The Great A'Tuin! We caught the feeding of the sharks and tropical fish. You can see a video of the process here and here. If anyone is ever interested in going to the Shanghai Aquarium, the thing to know is that it's a one way aquarium so once you leave a floor you can't go back. It's important because they feed the sharks and tropical fish at 10am on the bottom floor but the penguins at 11am and they're on the previous floor. Basically you can't make it to both and have to choose which one you want to see. We were there at around 9:30am and there was almost no one so I think, like for almost everything else, it's better to go in the morning.