The Fabric Market

There are a couple very popular (and huge) fabric markets where you can get anything made that you can imagine. We've had some nice things made there, so we took Mom & Dad there, where they had a couple of winter jackets made, as well as a couple of suits for Dad. Here are some pics...

Mom picking out the material for her coat:

A couple of days later as Dad tried on his new suit pants... like the changing room?! See all those finished suits? All custom-made...The fabric market is in a fun part of town... what you can still call "old Shanghai." Many of the buildings of what is "old Shanghai" are being leveled, making room for the new pretty skyscrapers.

So after having our measurements taken for various pieces of clothing, we strolled through the streets and alleyways of the area. It's a shame that this is all disappearing (or at least being "relocated" out of the city). I guess that's what we call progress, right? At any rate, we always enjoy walking through this area when we're in this part of Shanghai.

Here's a zoom in of the above picture for a closer look. Just look how busy everybody is. Two ladies with kids on their bikes, a guy with four 5-gallon jugs of water on his scooter, another guy pushing a bunch of boards. Add cars and pedestrians to the mix and you have a controlled chaos that just works.I love this view. You have the uniqueness of the old streets of Shanghai, and then you have the world's second tallest building (the World Finance Center) in the background on the other side of the river.
Friendly people, friendly faces...
I just bought a "zongzi" to show Mom & Dad. It's sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves and some type of filling that are then steamed in the the bamboo racks. The guy above is checking some steamed dumplings. I got the dessert zongzi with sweet red bean paste in the middle.
Fresh old-fashioned popcorn anyone?


See this couple below wearing their pajamas? This is a fairly common sight throughout China that people where their pajamas out and about. And high school girls in the U.S. thought they were trendy? Only as trendy as old Chinese people!
You may have noticed that most of the shops in these pictures have bamboo frames with fabric or plastic sheets attached to the frame. Bamboo is used everywhere here... much of the scaffolding on construction projects is out of bamboo, many ladders are bamboo ladders, the list goes on and on.

Well, here's a bamboo salesman going through the streets calling out if anybody needs to buy some bamboo...

Bamboo isn't only used for constructing things, it's used for constructing people... by eating it! I knew pandas love eating bamboo, and I've eaten bamboo shoots in my Asian food, but I didn't know you could eat a bamboo tree.

As we were walking along, we watched a couple of people selling fresh bamboo. The salesman shaved off the outer layer and chopped it up into 8-10 inch pieces. We saw a couple of people sampling the bamboo before they bought it.

Well we got caught in our fascination of watching them and they invited us over to try. How could we say no? So Dad took a video of Mom and me getting our free sample of bamboo!

And one more picture. I was surprised with how sweet the bamboo was. I knew it would be very watery/juicy, but I wasn't expecting sweet. No wonder why pandas loves this stuff!

A word of caution if you ever get the thought of trying this at home... they told me that I needed to spit out the fiber after chewing all the juice out. Apparently this high-fiber food will do wonders out the other end if you swallow everything! ;-)

Bamboo... it's not just for pandas anymore...