On the penultimate day of my 2-week vacation, the girlfriend and I decided to go on a final day out. As some other things were going on that have been eating away at my joy of life, it was important that I distracted myself with some fresh greenery.
This is hard to find in Shanghai, but there is in fact a pretty huge Botanical Garden in the same general location as my last post.
However, at the last minute we decided to save that for springtime, and do something else during this dry, brown and grey winter...
Yes, there is another, smaller botanical garden seemingly very few people really know about online. It was much closer to home, and really we just wanted a day to walk about, so we needed nothing special.
We started with a metro ride as always, and grabbed bicycles for the rest. It was quite hard to find, hidden behind some dirty looking car manufacturing warehouses, and across a highway which required us to cycle half the city down one way before we could cross and head back up. BUT we got there easily enough in the end.
It was free to enter the whole area, but a small fee of about $5 to get access to the actual conservatories. The one above was called the 'Tropicarium', and inside was just as amazing as the big botanical gardens:
Now, I didn't take many photos of individual Plants of Interest, as that kind of ruins the experience for others to go to similar places and see for themselves, but it was close to 27C in there year-round, and was a pleasure to walk around with barely any people (when you consider it being in Shanghai, where every public spot requires 800,000 people shoved into it at any given time).
Even better than the other gardens, this one allowed you to go up several stories onto glass-roof-high walkways to peer down on everything like a god.
For the first time in my life, I actually saw a pineapple - actually growing in its plant form!
Apparently you can grab these weird orange things below, and suck out the nectar like a... well, you know.
And here's a picture of maybe the weirdest cactus I've ever seen:
Outside of the conservatory itself was no joke, either. Although relatively lame given the winter time - everything was dead, without flower or leaves - it was still a pleasure to walk around, and the deeper you got into the park, the nicer it became.
At the entrance, hundreds of people had taken up all the green space with tents, just sitting in their tents on a patch of grass, looking at their phones.
Beyond that, the people thin out and only those who actually want to see things can be found.
The place is maintained very well indeed, with towering trees lining many of the walkways, and countless stray cats living a seriously luxury life, where they get to hunt and play as they see fit, and failing that, be given endless amounts of food anyway.
In fact, one cat we thought sneaked into the conservatory turned out to be a local who the people at the gate said he just enjoyed having an entire jungle to himself in tropical conditions year-round. Well, good for him.
Anyway, after heading back to the entrance, counting 25 very chonky and relaxed cats often with crowds around them much more interested than the garden itself, we taxi'd home and that was that.
The garden is really not that far, so it's a place I think we'll be more willing to go to frequently for a bit of space away from the disgusting life that is city life.
Well, I've been writing this at work. I guess I better go and remind myself what my job actually is again.
