Shanghai life and one puzzle of the city jigsaw – Feb 13, 2016

It’ll be hard for me to write about my hometown. For one thing, I was born there and live more than 20 years there, so that I’m way too used to all. Another is, it has so many different styles in different places and I never got all of them photographed. Hence, in this post, I’ll just cover a corner of it, which is Yu Garden and Nanjing Road where I visited this time home, nothing modern or fancy; and also my neighborhood which only has intimacy and with the scent of familiarity.

My neighborhood:

Shanghai residential are mostly apartments. Old ones are around 6-story high whereas the new ones can be around 20.

And this clothes drying frame, lol, I didn’t know it’s so unique in SH that my husband told me he never saw anything alike in his home town or in Zhejiang. Basically, we have strong steel made frame, where you can stick out poles and fix them on the slots on both ends. And in this way you can utilize the air space outside your home and dry your clothes with a more spacious layout and better ventilation and getting more suns for each of them.

And here’s the farmer’s market where is there everyday from early morning till after noon, where you can get meat, seafood, fresh vegetables and also preserved food.

And this is one of the typical breakfasts in SH, which is a big bread which you stick it to the inside of a bucket who has coals burning down inside.

And we also happened to see this machine drying all the seeds while baking them. After done, they lay it out for more dry-ups in the sun.

Cheng Huang Temple & Nanjing Road – two landmarks in SH:

And for the day of Feb 13th we decided to go to Cheng Huang Temple, which turned into a small goodies and delicacy’s shopping place 😀

Well, first of all, we have this sign in public places including this subway seat to show reserved seat for handicapped.

Yu Garden preserves old Chinese temple ish architecture style which you can tell from the eaves and the window.

And this specifically is the entrance of Yu Garden and since it’s always expensive with the fees, I, as a Shanghainese, have never or never bothered to be in there :p

Also, as I said, the whole place has buildings in similar style and got mostly turned into a souvenir and themed shopping and entertaining place.

Here you see they have police patrolling around bc there’re simply too many tourists. And behind them is an old Shanghai photography studio for portraits.

Looking up you have all the red lanterns for the festival.

These are bunny lanterns which you can drag around and they’ll roll after you. Now these are all inflated with LED light in it. When I was kid, my grandpa hand made them for me. They were made of wood stick frame with paper sticked onto it, and a candle placed in the middle of it. So if it tilted and failed, it’ll catch on fire, which is the destiny of most of my lanterns :p Oh I miss my grandpa, he made pretty and big ones and I showed them off and kindergarten.

This is some hmm.. little slides show I believe with fancy glass effect where you look in to a little hole and there’s a big world inside. And the guy who was directing and playing it was wearing the costume from Qing Dynasty, narrating the story and enjoying himself too. 😀

This is the famous gold shopping center where you get all the pretty gold jewelry or other type of metal or stones.

See the typical statue of “dragons playing with a pearl” and this is the shopping center.

Now they believe Shanghai ladies have special charisma when in Qi Pao dress. I admit, it is pretty.

This little deco is funny by saying “I feel proud to compliment my wife and shamed to criticize my wife”. Should have bought it. // chuckle

On the way out we saw they have this simple machine to crush and make pomegranate juice now~!

Took a taxi and we went to Nanjing Road, which is a walking only street, with all the famous malls that have been there for generations, tho I doubt if young people still shop there… Besides the most common clothes shopping Shanghai No.1 Department Store, it also has watch shop, beddings shop, Shanghai No.1 Food Store. Yup, these old-school stores love to have No.1 in the name to indicate the history, fame and quality.