ISpyShanghai

Although Shanghai has plenty of antique shops (which all seem to sell suspiciously similar items), I’d never seen a proper junk shop until Saturday.

Right next to Cotton’s on 604-608 Jianguo Xi Lu (near enough An Ting Lu as makes no difference), there’s a place full of office furniture, desks, chairs, old PCs, rubber jumpsuits, and all sorts of cool bric-a-brac.

The anitquey type stuff was reasonably priced (that saxophone was a little over 1,000RMB) and the furniture was cheap. They’ve got a website at Sh2buy.com

I had a look at an old Leica camera and still fail to see why they cost so much, toyed with the idea of getting an Accordion, then walked out with nothing.

You might have better luck than me- especially if you’re in the market for a second hand pipe.

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At Ikea last night, buying a mattress so that Emma’s ex-boyfriend can come and stay at our place (how did this happen again?).

We get a taxi home and the guy starts up asking where we’re from.

Me [in Chinese]: England
Taxi [in Chinese]: Ah, England is a (something or other)
Me [in Chinese]: England is what?
Taxi [in Chinese]: A (something or other)!- China is also a (something or other) Germany is a (something or other else).
Me: ?
Emma [in English]: I think he’s saying that England and China have a free trade agreement, but Germany is a protectionist state.

Now, see, this is why I prefer to sit in the back of taxis.

This guy was a student of Philosophy so we spent the rest of the journey playing a bizarre game of charades, with a twist. Instead of acting out the name of a film, he would sound out the Chinese name of a famous western thinker and we would try to guess who it was:

Taxi: A To Ma, Ah Kwi Na
Emma: Errr err, Aristotle?
Me: No we’ve had him. Umm, Thomas A Becket?
Emma: Thomas Aquinas! Thomas Aquinas!

What I learned from the journey was thus:

• Francis Bacon was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays
• Napoleon is “the same” as Descartes (somehow) 
• You can fit an Ikea double mattress in the back of a Volkswagen Santana (but one of you has to sit in the front)

A recap on “Made in Shanghai” stuff I have bought:

• a Seagull camera

Crap, I don’t use it any more.

• Seagull wide-angle lens

Which I do like and still use occasionally.

• FeiYue shoes
   

Top thrift fashion. If only it would stop raining

• and now, a Shanghai watch

Apparently in the 60s and 70s in Shanghai, no girl would marry you unless you had one of these watches (as worn by Zho En Lai, Deng Xiao Ping and some guy called Mao).

And let me tell you fellas, the magic has not worn off.

Since I’ve started parading my wrist around town wearing this bad boy, I have had no fewer than 8 proposals of marriage. That’s more than double my weekly average!

Shanghai Brand Watch- 220RMB
From a small covered stall on the corner of JiaoZhou Lu, near WuDing Lu 

Recently I was on my way to the Library to return a book about Wittgenstein when I happened upon an exhibition of Adult toys. 

Being a naturally curious sort I had a quick look inside to see what adults were playing with these days, but it seems that Monopoly and Scrabble are out of fashion.

This is what people are into now:

A rubber loofah

a Mick Hucknall doll

I couldn’t make head nor tail of the whole business.

Presumably most of the people who attended had stumbled in from the Pet Carnival next door. It’s an easy mistake to make:

I apologise in advance for the smutty puns that WoAi is about to make

P.S. On the photo above I’ve blurred out that chap’s face.

It turned out his Siamese Blue wasn’t a pedigree cat and I’m sure he doesn’t want every Tom, Dick or Harry finding out.

P.P.S Dingle also went- here’s what he thought

Way back in the midsts or 2008 I bought a pair of shoes from a street vendor outside the fabric market.

They looked good and were kind of, almost my size if I didn’t wear laces and curled up my toes a bit. For 20RMB I wasn’t too fussy.

Fei Yue

Now I realise that what I’d bought was a fake pair of a great and glorious part of Shanghai’s past: Fei Yue shoes. 

FeiYue is what you would have worn to play out in the street if you were born in Shanghai in the 70s, and at least amongst kitschy type westerners and the odd cool Chinese they’re making a comeback.

When my workmate saw the photo of these shoes he said that he heard they were big amongst the type of people who wear Che Guevera t-shirts. Not something I would do, but it’s definitely in the right ballpark.

At the shop on 585 Zun Yi Lu they’ve got your Fei Yue, they’ve got your Warriors (another old Chinese brand) and they’ve got some Converse and miscellaneous tat too.

Other tat in the bargain bin

I was almost tempted by what seemed to be an officially endorsed Beatles. 

Branded up Beatles shoes

I asked the lady if she had any colour other than fricking horrible, but sadly she did not. 

Dingle has already written about this store at great length- with maps and the full 9 yards. More information and more of the shoes on offer can be seen there.

Dingle and lady friend

It was he and his lady friend (wearing matching red Warriors I might add) that gave me the directions to the shop.

Fei Yue factory shop, 585 Zun Yi Lu (near Tian Shan Lu)
Fei Yue classics- around 30RMB per pair 

Emma and I are currently trying to pick a phone to go in our new home- we’re down to one of these two:

The second one is currently in the lead as the colour matches the ruffles on my collection of antique porcelain dolls.

Honestly though, how does a shop like this stay open? I can’t imagine it’s every day that Snoop Dogg and the ghost of Liberace go on a homeware shopping spree down by the Bund. 

Monstruous phones- 560RMB, a shop on East Fuzhou Lu. 

Always in search of new horizons, Emma and I went to a fish market in the north of Shanghai this Sunday.

Only a 20RMB taxi ride away from my home in Jing-An, Tong Chuan Fish Market is a collection of stalls that sell everything you want from the sea, and a lot of stuff you don’t.

I guess if you go early enough, the place is crawling with Chefs; the all-you-can-eat Japanese sushi places around town alone would probably keep quite a few stalls ticking over.

By the time we arrived at 3pm there weren’t many punters around and the stallholders seemed to be amusing themselves by trying to come up with the highest prices they could name.  

Rock Lobsters!

One (giant) Tiger Prawn = 70RMB?
One fairly ordinary looking fish for 140RMB?

(”It’s recently dead!” the woman said, I didn’t care if she could bring it back to life on the third day- I ain’t paying that for a fish.)

In the end we took a few photos, watched a bit of illegal gambling, then got a taxi to Carrefour and bought fish from there.

Tong Chuan Seafood Market
800 TongChuan Lu, near CaoYang Lu

Check this out then:

It’s a jigsaw puzzle of China where each province is a different piece. Me and her bought it on Fuzhou Lu and put it together back at home.

Was a pretty good test of how well we know the geography of China (of course the names help, Hebei is further north than Henan you know…) and we finished the thing in about 10 minutes.

If there was a similar map of English counties I’d still be trying to finish the thing- everywhere below Nottingham is just “down South” to me.

Chinese provnices jigsaw
5RMB from a bookstore on Fuzhou Lu