The City - The Rough Guide to Shanghai - page 50

park is host to tai ji practitioners and joggers and old folk arrive to camp out all

day playing cards.
Bearing left brings you to a small square. On weekends, this is the venue for
an extraordinary marriage market . Hundreds of middle-aged parents mill
round with printouts displaying the statistics of their children - height,
education, salary - and arrange dates. Interestingly, few display photos - these
people know what attributes they want for their little darling's partner, and
looks are not top of the list.
Head through bamboo groves to the lotus pond and a quintessential Shanghai
view will open out in front of you. It's a shocking architectural mash-up: from
left to right, elegant modernism (MoCA; see below), then Arabian fantasy (the
Barbarossa café; see p.113), followed by the colonial edifice that is now the Art
Museum, and looming over that the corporate brutalism of Tomorrow Square
(see below).
Crossing the zigzag bridge, a minute's walk to the south of Barbarossa brings
you to the attractive, glass-walled Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA;
10am-6pm; ¥20, students free;

www.mocashanghai.org). This privately
funded museum has no permanent collection but its shows are always inter-
esting and imaginatively curated, and its three storeys make an excellent
exhibition space. There's a lot of video and installation art, with a roughly equal
balance between Chinese and foreign artists, and the museum holds regular
talks and tours; check the website for details.

W

Tomorrow Square and around
Come out of the north entrance of Renmin Park, turn left and cross back over
Huangpi Bei Lu and that scary, claw-roofed monolith towering over you, with
a striking resemblance to Saruman's castle out of the Lord of the Rings films, is
Tomorrow Square . The top floors house the JW Marriott hotel; head to the t

lobby on the 38th floor for great views over People's Square - you can see how
much prettier it would be without City Hall in the middle. If you want to linger
here you'll have to buy a drink (the cheapest cocktails are around ¥50).
Just behind the castle, and in stark contrast to its corporate slickness, is an area
of ramshackle low rise, Jiangyin Lu . Heading west along here for a hundred
metres or so, past the Mingtown Hostel (see l p.105), brings you to a little pet
market , where you can buy a cricket in a bamboo cage for ¥5 or a snake for a
little more. Pot-bellied pigs are all the rage at the moment. You're not far now
from the fake market (see p.138) and the food street, Wujiang Lu (see p.82).

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