So I’d read about this cool sculpture park on an expat website and thought it would make a nice day trip. It’s still in Shanghai, but on the outskirts and definitely far from downtown. So we braved the subway for the first time (was easy; no problems at all and Max was excited to ride the train) and went down there.

We should perhaps have been warned that this wasn’t going to be easy by the fact that none of the three guidebooks we have mentions this place (which is a shame, since it’s really cool). We disembarked from the Metra station with high hopes and no idea where exactly the park was (okay, we had an address…but we only had it in English, not Chinese). But we saw a billboard for the Sculpture Park (along with — and here’s the key thing — a bunch of other resort-ish park-ish types of things). We at first walked a bit and found someone who told us to take a bus. 92, he said. We couldn’t find such a bus, but we found a taxi and told him we wanted to go to the Sculpture Park. He didn’t understand us at all and wound up taking us to Happy Valley, which was apparently where everyone else who had gotten off the train was going. It’s some kind of amusement park with roller coasters, etc. Looks like fun, but not what we were going for.

After five tries, we found someone who spoke some English and/or could understand our little bit of Chinese. She helpfully wrote down the name (we thought) of the Sculpture Park for us. We found another taxi and showed him what she had given us. He took us to the Forest Park. We thought we were perhaps at the Sculpture Park since there’s no way to tell from the entrance gate, but we figured it out after we got in. We did wander there for a little while (it was nice and Max had fun walking the stairs and trails) and we even saw a dinosaur exhibit with friendly people. One fellow there did speak some English and he told us that the Sculpture Park was too far to walk and was to the left and we should get another taxi.

We wound up walking down one path until we came to the edge of the park and found ourselves in a town type of area. So we exited there since it looked like we were more likely to find a taxi there than where we’d come in. There were some hotel people standing outside (like fancy hotel people) so we figured they might speak a little English. Not sure if they did or not, but they seemed to understand what we were looking for and even gave us a little map, which was all in Chinese. We hopped on a rickshaw-ish motorized bike with a guy and he took us on our way.

And Woot! We were at the Sculpture Park! Then he charged us entirely too much, but at that point we didn’t really care. We were happy to be there. The park was really very cool and quite large. It’s around lake Yue Hu (Moon Lake) and there are over 30 large sculpture installations. What we didn’t expect and worked out really well for us is that some of the park is perfect for kids. Besides a beach (which The Max LOVED…he went right for the sand and kept saying “I walk on beach!”), there was a water play area (too cold to go in, sadly, but it looked really cool), a giant tree house, and the Fuwa Fuwa Dome which is the coolest thing ever. Really. Max would probably faint from joy if we could put one in the backyard.

It’s kind of a bouncy jumpy dome-ish thing that’s filled with air. Think moon walk, but much cooler. You can bounce and slide on it, roll around, whatever you want. All the adults loved it too. And The Max? He was in heaven. Fuwa Fuwa is from Japanese and means “fluffy” and the sculpture was apparently designed by a Japanese guy. From the quick web search I did, it looks like there are other ones. We need one in the States because it is the coolest thing ever.

The Max on the Fuwa Fuwa Dome

We also ate at the park at a really nice place (had some yummy dim sum and they even had fries for Max). Oh, and they had the coolest, nicest bathrooms at the Sculpture Park. The best we’ve seen in China. Or just about anywhere, actually. And if you’ve seen bathrooms in China, you’d know why this is exciting. They even had a baby changer!

We grabbed a taxi back to the train station (after a false start — even after we said train and showed him the word train in Chinese in our guidebook and he took us to the forest park…but then he called someone who spoke English and they translated for us…I’m not sure what more we could have done, but he was friendly about it) and made our way back to the hotel. It was about 5 PM by that time, so we skipped the rest of our plans for the day (a temple festival) and collapsed with one very tired Max.

It’s 10:50 PM here now (I woke up about an hour ago and am going to go back to sleep after I finish typing this up) and I’m pretty sure Max is going to wake up sometime between 2:30 and 4:30. He’s been waking up around then every night, poor guy. The time change thing isn’t working out that well for him, but he’s been a big trooper. And that Fuwa Fuwa Dome might have made this the best day ever for him.

I uploaded some of the pictures from today over at Flickr.