Last Weekend's Walk

Last Saturday I went to the Puxi side of Shanghai by myself. I was feeling like I needed to get out of Jinqiao, which although it has a thoroughly Chinese influence, it is a bit suburban. I was feeling like I needed a dose of "real" China, or at least a change of scenery. The rest of my family was happy with the suburban activities of the day, so I headed out with Mr. Wu with no real direction. I did have a couple of pictures with me that I wanted to have framed, so we made a frame shop I had been to before our destination.

Now this "shop" is actually just sort of a booth. It probably has a garage style door that pulls down. It is on the end of a row of a couple of shops. There's not really any parking area, just a place to pull off the road, with tons of congestion and construction all around. But this guy does an amazing job of framing, and his prices are amazingly low. I popped into his shop and pantomimed what I wanted him to do with the pictures. He wrote down some measurements, and held up his ruler around the pictures to see how wide I wanted the mat. Once I was sort of certain we understood each other, I motioned for Mr Wu to come in because I wasn't sure when the frame guy was going to have my pictures ready. We realized that he was doing it right away and it would be ready in 30 minutes!

Here is the shop... that's Mr. Wu in the aqua shirt.

While I waited, I decided to go for a walk in the old style housing in the area. I ducked down a little alleyway outside the frame shop, and I was just steps away from a section of housing full of tiny shops and tiny restaurants, narrow passageways, outdoor kitchen sinks, lots of laundry hanging out to dry, and fresh food for sale all over. This was the step outside of suburbia I had been hoping for! I spent the next half an hour poking around, taking pictures, peeking down alleyways and into doorways. Here are a few of the things I saw!

People gathered on the sidewalk for card games, people watching, and selling food.
Just your local recycling pick-up bicycle cart. Now this we do see plenty of in Jinqiao.
I love this photo... it's so very typical of an old style housing area.
This guy was in a market area. His job appeared to be slitting open small eels. I saw one eel that had escaped and was slithering through the small amount of water by the curb...
Laundry everywhere! Can you spot the pink bra?
A kitchen window? I think so... can you see the wok, egg shells, and chopsticks?
It was a great walk. I don't mean to gawk, and I don't think I am anymore because I've seen a lot of this kind of thing in the past two years. But I like to go out and be a part of it. I know I'm not really a part of it, I look too different. But I'm not afraid like I was at first. I feel comfortable poking around in "real" China.

When I made it back around to the frame shop, I found my pictures ready. A beautiful framing job, with a precisely cut mat openings, the back all sealed and a hanging wire in place. Want to guess the price? I had Scott try to guess when I got home and showed it to him. His guess was nearly ten times the actual price that I paid. Any guesses?
It was 25 RMB, equivalent to around $3.50 USD. Really, you can't beat it!

Now Scott has new pictures of our girls hanging in his office. Last weekend's walk was great in more than one way!