As I am gearing up for the improbably overambitious NaNoWriMo, I’ve had to scale back on actual thoughts about reality in Shanghai. This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped being horribly invasive with my mobile phone camera. I’m now up to 601 poorly focused pictures in my barely year-old phone. I intend to keep going until I max out the memory or until my neighbours finally snap and tell me to stop taking pictures of every bloody thing that happens on our street.
Can I show you some things?
Our street is part road, part unofficial pedestrian zone, part live-animal/vegetable/fresh noodle market.
Got eel?
These days, it’s hairy crab season so there are baby-bathtubs filled with live crabs everywhere. In the evenings, there are random crunchy crab parts underfoot and the occasional escaped crab scuttling to their freedom. I point them toward the river (which is far, but closer than the sea) and wish them fare-thee-well. Go crabs!
These days, every shop doubles as a crab shop
Things I hope to never see in my bath tub
Technicolour hairy crabs
Last month was river shrimp/crawfish/giant bug season- xiao long xia in Chinese- and the baby bathtubs were filled with grey shrimp-shaped creatures, writhing away with hoses steadily pouring fresh water into their antechambers of death. In the evenings, the road was littered with tails and crunchy peelings with legs attached.
Fresh!
Lately, in addition to the fish and eels in the bath tubs, and the doomed chickens in cages next to metal trays covered in their unlucky brethren’s bloody feathers and entrails, and the frogs and turtles in netted buckets, there have been ducklings wandering around, loose. I don’t know if they are intended for a long-term dinner project or as pets, but they are available for purchase near the Jiadeli Supermarket on Jiashan, near Fuxing Lu.
Chickens (and other doomed birds) in the death cart
Free bird
Duck!
You can also buy turtles a la carte rather than in bulk from the buckets.
Get yer fresh turtle here!
And finally, because just as one ought to know where one’s meat comes from, one also ought to know where one’s mops come from.
I buy mine in bulk
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Aww, man, I miss my camera phone! I loved taking pictures of stuff in shops in Japan (where you’re technically not allowed to take pictures of stuff usually… but, hey, I’m just, umm, checking my email). I feel like I can’t get away with that with my regular camera. Especially if the “stuff” I’m taking a picture of is actually a person.
Exactly! Pretending to send a text message is my excuse for essentially spying on people (and on crabs and ducks and mops)
Oh hey – I’m doing Nano, too!
How’s it going so far?
Mine’s going reasonably well… not so well that it makes me wary, but as of Day 2 I’m keeping up and I think I’ve got a handle on what I’m doing (ha, ask me in a week, right?)
Am up to 3668 words as of last night, after an over enthusiastic Monday then a not-so-keen Tuesday. I had started with a vague idea of what I was going to do but that’s all– and I only had a week to think about it as I only signed up last week on a dare. I’m not exactly a fiction writer by nature. I’m doing it, I suppose, to totally annihilate my comfort zone.
What’s your id on NaNo? I’m koangirl. Shall I add you to my buddy list for moral support?
Yes, I am currently buddyless – the horror! My id is: swimsquidswim
Love your obsession with the Chinese obsession with mops!
Aren’t they just so cool?
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