This morning when our friend Patrick met us to give us a quick tour, the first thing he did was hand us an umbrella and said, “it is definitely going to rain today.” I asked if he had seen a forecast on the news or the Internet, and he said while wiping his brow with a handkerchief, “no, I just know it from the feel — it’s warm and very humid, which means it is getting ready to rain.” And he was right.
We had planned to walk to The Bund — the famous landmark of Shanghai, a strip of colonial era buildings along the Huangpu River that separates Puxi (the west bank where we are) from Pudong (the east bank) — but the wet weather discouraged us from going further than the People’s Park in the center of what would be considered downtown.
We started walking east on Fuxing Rd., a major avenue through the French Concession but still lined with plane trees (a legacy of the French, obviously) and less manic than Huaihai Rd., which is chock-a-block with fancy retail stores and honking traffic. Instead we enjoyed seeing stores focused a little more on the local population, as well as alleys leading into the building blocks that are where many of the residents live and spend much of their time (similar to Hutongs in Beijing) but are fast disappearing as they are replaced with huge apartment hi-rises and office buildings. Earlier in the morning Patrick took us into one of them to show us how they work: outdoor kitchen prep areas with a spigot, basin, and cutting board/counter; chamber pots that are set out in the morning to be emptied at the communal toilet at one end of the alley; clothes hanging everywhere above the alley on bamboo poles suspended about 15 feet above.
Patrick pointed out that for most of the day we would see only very young or very old people in the alleys because everyone else was out working. He also pointed to a bulletin board at the entrance of the alley common to almost all alleys that contained news important to the residents of the alley, but also contained a list of the “Seven No’s”, or the seven important rules for everyone to follow. One of the rules is “No Jaywalking” but it’s been clear that either everyone on the street must live somewhere without access to a list of the Seven No’s, or it’s pretty widely ignored.
Continue reading “Wet Afternoon”
First he showed us the bao (pronounced “bow” as in the front of a ship) vendor who had four kinds of bao (sesame paste, meat, bitter greens, and radish) plus sticky rice shumei (a kind of dumpling). We got one of each of those, although they were out of the radish bao for 4.50 yuan. Next door they were selling one of Patrick’s favorite morning dishes: tofu in hot sauce. We got a bowl of that for 1.50 yuan. 
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