7 May 2018
The subway to the ancient water town
Getting to Zhujiajiao on the subway
The subway system in Shanghai is extensive, todays journey was over 50km away from the city centre, and nearly all underground. The destination, one of Shanghai's numerous ancient tourist water towns for the cultural re-appropriation of traditional culture in the form of peppa pig, minions and fake disney lego. My chosen version of this setup? ZhuJiaJiao.
Despite my pessimistic introduction, it was actually quite good. People still actually live here in between the shops and activities for tourists. There is a nearby high end shopping mall due to open with a starbucks, but it was not yet quite open.
The subway to get to this location is also brand new, and drops you about a kilometre away, just far enough to discourage most people from braving such a great terrible unwielding relentless 10 minute walk to their destination. What this means of course is there are already about 100 old men wanting to pull you there in a rickshaw, and indeed, lots of people were taking them up on their offer.
The weather today as you will see, very very grey, also cold, I was surprised at just how cold it was, cold enough for locals to have on full size puffer jackets and balaclavas, possibly as cold as 20 degrees.
The short walk from the subway station to the ancient water town took me through a wet market. I bought some reconstituted powdered sea urchin flavour to go with my fake eggs.
And here we are, water town, no entry fee!
There are lots of little sewers like this one to wander around and over.
Many places are cafes or bars, but also boutiques, and occasionally an art gallery, just as you might expect.
I found my cafe.
Here we have the main river running through the area, you can see a bridge going over it, guess where the next photo will be from?
Here is the photo from the bridge.
You can pay a small fortune to go on a gondola, imported directly from the factory that exports them to Venice.
Many shops have a resident bird on a chain. The chain is to protect me from the bird, because I was insulting it in Chinese and it was getting angry and trying to attack. As long as I hurled insults from just beyond the reach of the chain I was safe.
They have recently built a few temples in the area to further ancient the ancient town. The temples looked brand new to me.
One last street in tourist zone.
I walked away a bit from the tourist area and took some photos of the normal streets of a water town where people actually live. Probably fairly wealthy people judging by how well maintained the place is.
Last photo of water town, I would imagine it would be much nicer on a sunny day.
I mentioned the subway journey in my intro for today, the last bit is above ground, and goes through miles and miles of bleak nothingness to get here. They still however have built a huge station, ready to handle massive volumes of people that dont exist yet. The subway comes every 5 minutes.
Back in town now, and this is the area near my hotel which has an old neighbourhood. It is very central to Peoples Square and the bund, so its hardly going to be for poor people. Very colorful even on a grey day.
The alleyways off the alleyways get narrower and chaotic, but still quite clean.
OK, one more photo of the old streets of central Shanghai.
I am not sure what is going on here, someone has hung various pieces of polystyrene off their window where underpants would normally hang. Art / Rubbish / Both?
Last photo for today, my lunch. I went to a bakery, where I would normally browse for 5 minutes, but I was pressured into a fast decision. They had run out of tongs so a bakery girl with plastic gloves followed me around to place things on my tray. I selected charcoal walnut loaf. Not bad!