To market

I had planned a trip yesterday to Suzhou, a garden city half an hour from Shanghai, but arrived to a packed railway station and every train booked until 4pm. Golden Week - almost everybody (except shopkeepers) are on holiday all week to mark national day, and to spend lots of money and boost the economy. So Lydia helped Rosemary and I book train tickets for Wednesday, and we headed off to Pudong, the financial district west of the river. It was intensely crowded there too, with tens of thousands of Chinese milling about seemingly aimlessly, so we made our trip a short one.

The Bund as viewed from Pudong - basically the opposite view from this.

Rosemary and I got asked to have our picture taken with a Chinese man, and lots of people were taking our picture surreptitiously - Lydia was really embarrassed and said they were rural folk who don't see many Westerners, but we both thought it was quite funny.

McDonalds comes in so many more exciting forms here - I've seen it delivered by moto, and here's a soft-serve ice cream kiosk.

That night Rosemary invited me out to dinner with her uni classmate Sophie and Sophie's diplomat boyfriend Ali. We went to a pretty posh Taiwanese restaurant (side note - it seems Taiwanese cuisine is a mix of all the best parts of Chinese cuisine, as so many Chinese have fled/emigrated there over the years. Yummo!) and ordered an epic banquet - Sichuan tofu with cashew nuts, Beijing-style pork wraps, mountainous mango and chocolate mudslide sorbets, pineapple bubble (black tapioca) milkshakes, and the bill came to $17 each. Choice! Must eat like a king more often, it's so easy to think spending even $5 on food here is an extravagance, as you can eat for $1 quite easily at semi-grotty family restaurants.

Sorry I don't have any photos of the meal - rest assured, food and company were both excellent. Sophie and Rosemary have both travelled through all the "Stans" - Kazakh, Tajik, Uzbek, Kyrgyz. In fact, Sophie's just spent three months travelling to China from Europe, overland. Makes a girl feel quite unadventurous in comparison.

We went for a drink afterwards at the Xintiandi neighbourhood in French Concession (restored old Chinese neighbourhood now filled with boutique shops and fancy bars) but it was too expensive so we ended up at one of said semi-grotty restaurants drinking $2 beer and watching a ballroom dancing reality show on CCTV (Actual unfortunate name of Chinese state TV).

 An incredible pair of buildings near Xintiandi -covered in blue lights making wavy patterns

 Also saw some pretty tea at a small shop in the area.

Today I'm not feeling well - a combination of too much rushing around this week and maybe a cold coming on. I've mostly stayed in the hostel listening to BBC Radio 4 online, not wanting to deal with China's crowds and smells for a day. I did have a stroll in the surrounding streets after lunch, however, and discovered an indoor/outdoor produce where Chinese ladies were buying their fresh vegetables and meat for dinner.

Not the best photo - I told you, I'm feeling rotten. But the market's set up in a sort of run-down alleyway with tarps hung over the stalls.

Beautiful brown chicken eggs and blue duck eggs for sale

Rosebuds, I'm assuming to put into a tea mixture

Purple corn and beans

Different types of noodle

(Peking?) duck. Full disclosure: I also saw a live duck sitting on the footpath at a stall, ready to be sold for a meal. Also lots of live fish and crabs in paddling pools. But after the pigeon incident I'm kind of nervous about offending people by taking photos of animals for slaughter. Must learn to ask to take a photo politely in Chinese.

 A man spreading sauce on a big pancake or omelette at the market

A man gets his jacket tailored on the footpath. I might do a lengthier post about this in the future, but I've had to redefine my notion of "a shop" in China - there's millions of fancy shops here in malls that we'd recognise in New Zealand, but a shop is often just a tiny alcove room off the footpath jammed with electrical cables or rice, for example, or a mobile stall like this tailor lady has set up.

Keycutters playing cards at the exit to the market.

This is for dad: Zespri kiwifruit at my local supermarket:

Pricey - $13 for a small box. In comparison, a kilo of grapes is about $2.

Individually cosseted Zespri kiwifruit in a gift box. Urg.