So we went to Qibao yesterday, our first grand excursion in a week or so, as I’d been busy with stupid school stuff and having my jaw sledge-hammered, and my mother was battling her semi-inevitable post-flight cold.
Doug and I had gone there about two years ago when we first moved to Shanghai, back when we used to go out and explore on weekends. Now we mostly base our weekend schedules around eating, drinking and being horizontal. Of course, we tend to walk great distances to get to the food and drink (and thus are not 100kg each) but the wandering is a bit less compulsively curious. It was good to get out and see the city through unjaded eyes.
The last time we went, line 9 hadn’t opened yet so we took a taxi there. This time, we just walked down to the Jiashan lu metro stop at the bottom of our street and emerged a half dozen stops later opposite the giant billboard advertising the Ancient Water Town ™. I appreciated not having to go anywhere near a freeway in a taxi.
It was slightly less crowded this time, though not by much. The previous visit had been on a weekend in springtime and the hordes, oh the hordes were brutal. Here are the photos from that visit that I had uploaded to a Facebook album. The narrow lane ways were still packed but at least there was some leeway this time. My parents were brave and happily ate all sorts of unidentifiable street food I thrust at them. I took a lot of photos. Mops predominated. Let me show you some.
First of all, here are the brave little soldiers standing on the bridge over the canal, having just braved the insanely crowded, narrow entry lane.
And here are the mops I promised you, with just a hint of drying fish and laundry.
And there was the inevitable public display of laundry.
And there were children, practising their lone English vocabulary word.
If you go far to the back of the neighbourhood, away from the crowded, touristy food streets, it gets quieter.
We ate a lot of things, from the inevitable soup-filled xiao long bao in a styrofoam container (10 rmb) to a spicy stuffed fried bread that was hacked into bits and thrown into a baggie (3rmb) to those odd jus filled meatballs in paper tubs of spicy red-oil-dotted broth (6 for 10rmb) to skewers of mystery meat brushed with cumin and chili (3 big ones for 10rmb, possibly something seafoody but I didn’t recognize the name the grill dude told me). I mostly enjoyed the sausages in natural sausage casings from DCW Casing.
These are the grill dudes.
I don’t have any photos of the other things we ate because I was too busy eating them. At least here, I had to wait 5 minutes for the mystery meat to cook.
And there was some lovely light. The sun was shining quite nicely. The snow was nearly melted.
And I saw some rope that looked cool.
Oh, and I met a relative of Gerald’s! Very exciting.
And after a few hours of wandering around, battling hordes, stuffing our faces and stalking mops, we walked back to the metro and went home (via a not-too-quick detour to Metro hypermarket in Pudong for cheap coffee which was sadly out of stock), tired but happy. It was just like an Enid Blyton novel, except without the dog.
Leave a Reply