Super(marche)

Did I mention Shanghai was once known as the Paris of the Orient? The occasional strong-urine wafts are not the only thing which put me in a French frame of mind here:

This is a supermarket ten minutes' walk from my hostel in Wuning Road, it's painted as Paris on the front, the Cote d'Azur on the other. Check out the teeny-tiny people and motos below the Eiffel Tower to get an idea of the scale - it's five stories high.

To get to the supermarket you cross a Chinese version of Paris' Pont Alexandre III bridge, lanterns, white columns, gold statuary and all.

Inside the supermarket was a whole bunch of fun stuff:

Meat!

Meat jenga!

There were also live fish in tanks, but I got told off for trying to take a photo of them.

Pretty dried stuff in baskets

Big vats of dried rice with interesting bits and pieces mixed in

50% mysterious generic alcohol for $2

A whole aisle of different types of dried mushroom

I also ordered and ate my first Chinese meal in a restaurant in the supermarket complex - milestone! It involved a phrase book, some pointing, and the result was a rather spicy Chinese interpretation of Vietnamese pho. Yum! Also, a man smiled at said "ni hao" to me, made a nice change from the usual furtive-glance-then-ignore.

It's so hot tonight, which makes walking outside pleasant, at dinnertime the streets were just as bustling and noisy as daytime, but the lights made everything quite pretty.

Barbershop poles, Shanghai-style! Almost tempting to get a haircut, until you read this: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=483718&type=Metro#

That's a story from the paper I start work at tomorrow morning. Will be nice to be in a newsroom again, it's kind of odd not knowing what's happening in the city/country - the hostel has no TV.

All right, this uploading photos malarkey takes a fair amount of time on hostel wifi, better go now and figure out where my office is and what I'm going to report on.

Oh all right, one more.

Grafitti outside my hostel