Cars are more than just a mode of transport, although many people don’t see them that way. They just think it’s a car and it gets me from A to B, I don’t think that way at all. Cars can be beautiful and cars can be like a working breathing piece of art, especially the old ones. Cars can have a soul. Cars today are boring, stale and really only practical. Design is ruled by the puruit of being frugal and of course safety. There are so many legal specifications for a car now that beauty is hard to achieve, on the other hand praacticality and inovation have advanced. Most cars have the same shape and they all came out of the same wind tunnel. Cars of old were designed on a piece of paper with a totally different set of parameters and I wish they would bring that back.
The Shanghai car Museum is a huge building which is near Anting North and it seems to be in the middle of car country. When you get out of the train station it seems miles from civilisation. I had no money on me for the bus, because I forgot to take any and so my only option was to walk the 5 km to the museum. By the way I use my phone to pay for everything, you don’t need to carry money in China, but then again it seems like you do. I left the industrial area and as I headed to the museum and came into a more residential area where I had lunch.
It’s so well laid out and all you have to do is follow the road and the arrows and you wil eventually end up on the top floor. The entry fee is 60 RMB, but they asked me if I was 60 years old and I said yes and so I got a discount of 20 RMB. I know Karma will get me, but I think she knew I was telling a wee lie. Luckily enough this also covered my coffee and cake that I got later. The museum starts off at the beginning of the cars’ history and as you proceed through the museum the times change and the music and the backdrops that accompany each era. There is also some wonderful photographs of old Shanghai. There is one picture that shows a guy moving the traffic lights, apparently China used to drive on the correct side of the road, which we all know is the left and not the right.
I could have stayed for many hours just looking at some of these old cars and it would have been even better if you had the opportunity to sit in them and imagine just for a short time what it must be like to own and drive one of these icons. For me the car that stood out was the Green Aston Martin which was just exquisite. It was sitting alongside some good company too. There was a Ferrari, but I can’t remember the model and then there was the Jaguar XK 120 and the Gullwing Mercedes SL300. To sit and be surrounded by such beauty and better still I was there myself so soak up the atmosphere. In fact as I was leaving there was a school tour coming in and so I was very lucky not have to compete with them.
I had a great day wandering around this museum which I nearly had all to myself. There are so many great cars on show and if I had money then this is what I would love to do, collect cars. I can’t begin to imagine just how much money is tied up here, but the quality and the selection of the cars is very good. Of course there are many old cars that maybe should be in the museum but then it’s all a matter of personal taste. For me I thoroughly enjoyed the Shanghai collection and would urge anyone that enjoys cars to make the effort to go here. If you are visiting Shanghai then I think you can take metro line 11 to get there but I’m not sure of which station to alight from.
