Day 4-5: On to Shanghai

Well, we are sitting in the Hong Kong airport getting ready to board. This post was done several days ago but Iwas unable to upload it. The connection at the hotel was very slow. I have also discovered that the Chinese filters have been blocking access to all blogspot blogs from mainland China. Interesting.
We arrived in Shanghai Thursday afternoon and made our way to our hotel through the enormous traffic. On Friday I made my way over to the Shanghai Library for a tour. The library is one of the 10 largest in the world boastings a 42+ million item collection and over 8,000 visits per day. It was indeed busy with people all over the library. One thing I did not see many of were young children and really did not see a children's department. This may be due to the fact that China's children are in school from a very early age and are not making library visits. I was able to obtain a library card which gave me entry to the reading rooms of the various library departments such as, science/technology; business; foreign books and periodicals. The librarians' code of ethics was posted at the entrance. It does somewhat resemble the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights. After my tour I was met by Yiping Shen, Kimi Hasegawa's friend, and we took a cab to Shanghai Normal University's library. I was fortunate to be given aa tour by the library's director. Yiping was there to translate. After seeing this very nice academic library of approximately 100,000 volumes we walked over to Yiping's secondary school where she teaches, Shanghai High School. The library was well stocked with books and magazines and the librarian seemed to be very proud of his collection. There was a small space and collection dedicated to teacher education. My cab ride back to the hotel was interesting. The driver seemed to be listening to Peking Opera on the radio. Here are photos of the day.