Tell me why the world is weird: Fuxing Park, Shanghai (photos)

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Fuxing Park, Shanghai (photos)

Here are my photos from Fuxing Park (pronounced "foo shing park") (复兴公园) in Shanghai. It's a cute little park, and the day we were there, the weather was really nice.

Here's the entrance to the park, which has the park name in Chinese, English, and French. The Chinese characters here are traditional characters, to be fancy, but the simplified characters are 复兴公园. (Mainland China uses simplified Chinese characters for everyday life.)

The sign says "禁止飞行器 No aircraft" but what they actually mean is "No drones."

There were lots of people hanging out in the park (but I didn't really take photos of people). Some people were playing badminton, some were practicing musical instruments, and I even saw some Chinese characters written on the ground with water. This is a thing in China- some people will bring a bucket of water and a big brush to a park, and just write some pretty characters on the ground, for fun.

Statue of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Lamppost, with signs in Chinese, English, and French. I don't usually see French signs in China- I wonder if this area historically had a lot of French people living here.

Shanghai started this trash sorting system around 2019, where there are 4 types of trash: recyclable, hazardous waste, residual waste, and food waste. When you throw something away, you have to sort it right.

There was an area with some rides for kids. You have to pay to ride them. Getting into the park was free though.

This seems to be a bar that people can hang hangers on, I guess. In China, I always see people's laundry hanging outside, wherever. (We don't really have dryers here.) I still don't really understand why people's laundry is hanging wherever- shouldn't it be, like, right outside of their homes? But I'm often walking down the street and there's laundry hanging on hangers on whatever horizontal-ish thing people can find- fences, telephone poles... like are people doing their laundry at home, and then they walk all the way out to a very public sidewalk and hang it there? I don't really get it? Anyway, here's a place you could hang your laundry in Fuxing Park.

Here's a big field. I saw some kids kicking a soccer ball around.

There were some little ponds, and there were signs that said, "请勿放生 No Free." The English translation is like, ???? but from reading the Chinese, I see that what they meant was, don't release animals into the pond.