20250825; Monday, August 25, 2025 Shenyang Subway, Shopping, Korea Town, Karaoke

20250825; Monday, August 25, 2025 Shenyang Subway, Shopping, Korea Town, Karaoke

There was a planned 6:30 a.m. excursion to a morning market which normally closes at 9 a.m.  We had planned on skipping it so we could enjoy the hotel’s included breakfast which runs from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m.  When we got up at 6:30 a.m., we saw that it was raining hard, and most of the group had slept in.  After confirming that the morning market was in fact still open, a group of Ciara and Tom’s hardcore college friends hit the subway and managed to get to the market before it shut down and had a second breakfast there.  

Our family, including DaQing and his children, Franklin, and Amber, headed out and took the subway to the Nine Clouds Shopping Mall.  This took about 45 minutes between walking and riding the subway trains.  The rain was still heavy, and there were huge puddles on the streets and sidewalks.  John was smart enough to wear his Keene water sandals so he could walk through the puddles with impunity. Everyone else ended up with wet socks to at least some degree. 

The Shenyang subways were clean, well-lit, and relatively quiet with a smooth ride.  America’s subways in Chicago, New York, and Boston are all put to shame by the Chinese, who have invested heavily in civil infrastructure.  This may be one thing that the communists do better than the capitalists.  

The shopping mall was a huge complex with several large buildings all connected by sky bridges, but unfortunately, many of the buildings aren’t occupied above the first floor, so all the sky bridges were closed.  This meant we had to wade through the puddles and dash through the heavy rain to go from one building to another.

 

A couple of the buildings are filled with thousands of stalls or mini-stores carrying various items, which tended to be clustered in certain parts of the buildings based upon what merchandise they were selling.  For example, one building was filled with small household goods like toothbrushes, cleaning supplies, bathroom and kitchen nick-nacks.  A different area had office supplies, while others had things like shoes and clothing items.  We were on the hunt for a few items and, with some guidance, browsed through fountain pens, Pokémon cards, CCC marked power banks, and clothes. 

Other buildings contained modern high-end mall stores in a more conventional American-styled mega mall.  But the prices of items in these stores were shockingly less than the same items in the same stores in the US.  

There were several food courts, and there was even a complex of museums at one end of the complex. 

Ben, Franklin, John, DaQing, and his children all headed to the museum complex. This was largely a tech theme park with robots doing various things and activities for children. For example, there is what looks like a sushi bar with a robotic sushi chef who speaks and waves his hands about, but doesn’t really make sushi.  Instead, on the conveyor belt going around the sushi bar are what look like take-out boxes with toys like Legos that let kids build fake food items for a small extra fee.  

There were also a couple of rooms with virtual reality experiences like trying to catch fish swimming around the room and driving bumper cars in a VR course.

There are two actual science museums in the complex.  One is called “The Miracle of Life”, which is a biology exhibit featuring plasticized and dissected creatures, including actual humans.  These sorts of bodies had toured the US as “The Body’s” exhibit, which had caused a bit of controversy.  Apparently, many of the bodies in the exhibit were used without explicit permission of next of kin, and some may have been homeless people and prisoners.   

In addition to the humans, there were quite a broad spectrum of animals from penguins to a tiger shark and bear that were dissected in various ways.  We’re not sure how DaQing’s children responded to being faced with actual human genitalia on display.  His two younger children are 11 and 14 years old.

  
There was a small Natural History museum with fossils, animatronic dinosaurs, fossils, and gems.  They had nice specimens, and it didn’t take very long to walk through it. 

 

They had a large gallery of “geniuses”, which were animatronic figures through history from Plato to Stephen Hawking, most of whom were expounding their works in Mandarin.  Steve Jobs actually spoke in English though.  He was replaying his introduction of the original iPhone, and they probably used the actual audio from that event.  

There was a large area on a separate floor that looked like a recreation of the West World robot factory that was mostly

just a static display.  They did have a couple of robots with special skills.  One had particularly advanced facial and mouth articulations that could accurately reproduce lifelike lip movements, while they had one exhibit where a camera captured people’s facial expressions and movements, and a robot would mimic them in real time.

  
There was a large robot restaurant and arcade with coin-operated attractions like at a carnival.

  
It was no Smithsonian, but it was easy to get through the entire museum in under 2 hours. 

Everyone rendezvoused in the food court with most people sampling the unique Chinese cuisine at KFC.  Surprisingly, they didn’t offer Shenyang’s famous chicken carcasses at KFC.

  
We took another subway ride to get to Shenyang’s Korea Town, which is a large and vibrant community, being so close to North Korea.  We had Korean foot and body massages, which was quite the experience.  We did get to keep our clothes on for those, but the massage therapists certainly know how to get the kinks worked out of any muscles and joints.  

We had another amazing feast at the restaurant with Korean food.  Then we wrapped up and walked through Korea Town and went into a karaoke place where they have lots of soundproof private rooms they rent by the hour.  Some of these places have a seedy reputation because you can hire escort women to pretend to enjoy your singing, but since we had children with us, there were no escorts, much to Franklin’s disappointment.  It was fun to see our kids and their friends sing.  Even DaQing and his family got very involved in the karaoke as they alternated Western songs with Chinese songs.

By the time karaoke was shut down, the rain had actually stopped and it was very pleasant outside with a temperature in the 70s.  We walked back to the hotel, which was a 25-minute leisurely walk.  It was interesting to walk through Korea Town, which was still very lively at night.  Ciara and Tom stopped at an outdoor food court to get some of Shenyang’s famous chicken carcasses.  We watched as they took pressed carcasses, deep-fried them, cut them into bits, and seasoned them before loading the processed carcasses into a bag.  John and DaQing’s family had ordered a chicken carcass in the mall food court at lunchtime.  There is actually very little meat, and mostly bones, but they are tasty.  Chinese don’t mind chewing up and spitting out bones, whether it be fish or chicken carcass.

  

Tomorrow we’ll have a rented bus again and tour some of the historical sites of Shenyang, including their own Forbidden City.