Today I went on a walking tour around the Old Town of Shanghai with some work colleagues and a couple I met at an Australian Chamber of Commerce event last weekend. We started out at the Yuyuan Gardens, next to the Yuyuan Bazaar, where you can buy all sorts of Chinese souvenirs, like chopsticks and chops (a stamp with your signature on it) and heaps of other stuff. We had lunch at the Green Wave Gallery, which is quite a famous Chinese restaurant in Shanghai.
We stopped by a street which the guide said was a bustling market, but the road had been pulled up for construction. Shanghai is changing so quickly the guidebooks can't keep up. In parts of the old town you could really see all the modern buildings just creeping up the street, while the locals just sit there everyday watching it happen.
The Dongtai Antique market was pretty cool. One of my work colleagues ran into her uncle while we were there. Apparently he's a bit of an antiques collector, and can help us out with buying antiques if we want (and distinguishing real from fake).
The Flower, Bird, Fish and Insect market was a highlight. It's basically a market where you can buy pets. They had the cutest kittens and puppies there, but they all looked so hot and dehydrated, we felt so bad for them. They were breathing really fast to try to cool down. We asked how much a kitten cost and they are 10 yuan, which is about $2 aussie. You could also buy cicadas there for 2 yuan - they stay alive for about 3 months over the summer and then die, then you buy another one the next summer. There were also heaps of people selling crickets there, which you buy for fighting each other - you bet on which one will win.
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