Babies grow up, luckily

Yesterday I explored a part of Shanghai I hadn't seen before - Hongkou, the old American settlement. It's just north of the ritzy Bund but feels a world away - run down, not many tourists, lots of poverty here. The area has an interesting history - it was originally the American concession, then it became "Little Tokyo", then in World War II lots of Jews settled here and it became "Little Vienna". Today it's home to lots of Shanghai's poor migrants. The Lonely Planet suggested we check out a local "lilong", or alleyway off a main street, but I wasn't expecting how slummy and depressing it was going to be:

It was a smelly warren of alleyways with rubbish, standing water and poo on the ground. Some alleyways were nicer, had small restaurants and plants, but a lot were like this.

Maybe the upstairs rooms were nicer but most downstairs rooms looked like this. Although, on the nicer alleyway we saw into a lounge/bedroom with maybe 10 cats and two dogs, both dressed in hello kitty t-shirts and tutus. Oy.

You'd never even know this lilong was here from the street - in fact across the road was a brand new huge office tower.

Anyway, just one street over was a great foodie street, full of street stands and restaurants.

This was our lunch - you get a basket and fill it with a range of the above - each item is one yuan (20 cents). Then they cook it with some noodles and make it spicy to your taste.

I'd never come across this but apparently it's normal - they put the meal in a plastic bag then into a bowl. Regarding the meal, I can advise that both lotus root and winter melon are fairly tasteless and dull. The seaweed ribbons were nice though, tasted of a New Zealand summer.

This was the restaurant manager Lucy, who extremely unusually spoke good English. She studied it at uni. She insisted on taking a photo of us in front of the restaurant as we were the first Westerners to eat there (it's a fairly new place). I get the feeling we'll be on the restaurant's advertising soon..

Dessert was Portuguese-style egg custard tarts. YUM!

Chinese KFC ripoff

 I hadn't seen this before - I think they're feeding sugar cane through a juicer thing, to make a drink.

We then went to a fairly horrific indoor clothes market, where everyone was loud and pushy, and we're pretty sure a Chinese woman called Rosemary a bitch for trying to bargain down an outrageously overpriced crappy singlet. We were also hounded by this awful tout, who shouted "fuck you" when we weren't interested, ugh.

But then was quite chuffed when I took his photo.

I saw these bum-sculpting knickers

And this great Chinglish t-shirt: the periodic table spells out "Calvin Klein fashion younger popular ince [nice?]"

Oh yes and later I saw the best Chinglish shop name:

Babies grow up, thank Christ!

Oh yes it was also my birthday, we had quite a feast for dinner:

Soup dumplings, spicy tofu, beef noodles, pork schnitzel and potato fritters. Come to think of it, I'm hardly eating any vegetables here, or fruit. Hm. Off to buy grapes.