A Street Vegetable Market

Vegetable markets are very interesting, and yes my standards of excitement have been lowered by living in Shanghai for more than two years! But this market is more than that: who wouldn't be interested in markets selling live ducks, chickens, and pigeons! If nothing else, being in Asia and in close contact with poultry violates several US Government recommendations for citizens abroad - I like to live life on the edge.



The particularly keen-minded of my readers may note that ducks, chickens, and pigeons are not actually vegetables. However I still call it a vegetable market because it was about 95% vegetables for sale, aside from a couple places with poultry and one with the local crab (it's basically all shell). Most places just had the basic vegetables, however some of the vegetables were rather exotic, at least for the time of the year.



Most of the vendors were selling right off the street, actually "on" the street would be more accurate. Often the vegetables were in bags, although sometimes they were just laying on the ground. This goes a long way in explaining the Shanghai taboo against salads and raw vegetables - you'd want to wash the vegetables thoroughly and then cook them thoroughly, before eating them.



The vegetables sellers are side to side with each other, the streets are narrow and winding, second stories look like they're about to tip over the first story, and laundry is hanging everywhere. It gives the area a very cool, somewhat hectic feel to it. This is made even more so by the area it's in, the neighborhood is a very scenic collection of old style brick houses and winding alleys - the picture on the right is a of a nearby brick house of about the same era and style. For me it's a good opportunity to look around such a neighborhood without feeling like I'm trespassing private property! This picture is near the entrance where there's a little more room to maneuver. It all gets a lot tighter, farther into the market.



This vegetable market is behind Zhongshan Park south of Suzhou River, a little off Wanhangdu Lu, and I'm guessing only operates on Weekends.

Scenes of City Life, Redux

Half a year ago, I wrote on this blog about "Scenes of City Life", a 1935 Shanghai movie. As a huge film enthusiast, I thought it was a very enjoyable movie, with an interesting look at a pre-war, pre-Communist Shanghai, and a bizarre madhouse take on some of the conventions of older movies, to show the tragicomic lives of its main characters.

Since then I've subtitled the movie, and I've made the movie and subtitles freely available online - Chinese movies become public domain after 50 years. I'm using archive.org to host both the movie, and the subtitles - the subtitles are separate, and stored as a normal text file, with time sync codes included.

The movie is in xvid format, it can be opened with lots of players, including bsplayer 1.37 at filehippo (newer versions of the player aren't freeware and I don't recommend). While playing the movie, right clicking takes you to the menu, where you can choose a subtitle file to display.

I thought it was kind of fun - I've never translated anything similar before! The principle translation just took a couple days, but refining and checking the subtitles was a huge process, and there's inevitable compromises between natural speech and sticking to the Chinese text as much as possible.


Anyone with enough interest in Shanghai to browse this blog should enjoy the movie, and I'd really appreciate comments, either as responses on the blog or as an e-mail.

Click Here to Download ScenesofCityLife.avi (734 MB)

Click Here to Download ScenesOfCityLife-EnglishSubtitles.txt (44K)

A Chinese Zagat's, Decent California-Mexican

Feeling guilty about not updating my blog more regularly is pretty low, maybe a little pathetic even. But that's exactly how it is. So now that I've got my SLR set up, a mental list of what I want to talk about, and a stockpile of photos, I hope to come back with a vengeance!

But not quite yet. In this update I'm just passing on two recommendations - first is a Zagat's type site, dianping.com. It's a review of many of the restaurants of Shanghai, and while it mostly concentrates on restaurants on the expensive side (whereas I mostly eat just normal street-side restaurants), it's introduced me to a number of great places and I recommend giving it a try. Like Zagat's, it rates restaurants from one to thirty in three categories, first on taste, then environment, then on service. The listings divide into sub-sections, by type of food or district of the city.

The site is Chinese only, but is usable (if a little weird) run through machine translation into English, from Babelfish or Google Translate.

Here's what they had to say about Thai House, Lao Kele, City Diner, and, uhh, Burger King.

Also, I've resolved to not write anything more about Western Food, at least not for a while. But I very much enjoyed Cal Kitchen, the Cal is for California. So, I'll mention it in passing, and maybe I'll talk about it in the far future if it's still around. Here's a menu:



There's only four things on the menu: Burritos, Quesadillas, Chili, and (oddly enough) Corn Dogs. But the Burrito is in the San Francisco style and actually they do a pretty good job of it - you choose the type of meat, the type of beans, and it all gets wrapped up in tin-foil.

The menu mentions that it's based off instructions and recipes from Los Hermanos, a restaurant in San Francisco. I looked it up, and it's in the yuppie-ish Marina. Cal Kitchen's burrito tastes almost exactly like what you'd expect a burrito purchased in the Marina to taste like, for both better and worse. The chili is decent, and I'll say this is my favorite casual Western restaurant in Shanghai - with the caveat that Western food here is terrible.

It's on 376 Dagu Lu, a street of high-end bars, restaurants, and wine shops, a little South-East of the Nanjing Xi Lu station.

Update 4/28/09 - It moved to Jing'an District, right upstairs from exit #7 of line #2 of the Zhongshan Park Subway station - kind of off to the side as you go up the escalator. It's a small mall-court location that seems to specialize in doing deliveries, and they now also serve Japanese-style dessert crepes. But despite a recent influx of Mexican restaurants to Shanghai, it pains me to say that Cal Kitchen is still the only place in town to get a burrito anywhere near authentic.

Oh, and by a wild coincidince, some friends and I found ourselves by the Marina in San Francisco, and we stopped by Los Hermanos for a burrito. Not very yuppie, but not very good and not very similar. It didn't look like the sort of place to branch out to Shanghai. I didn't ask about it, but I should have.

Xinjiang Rather Go On Expedition A Restaurant

This review covers a restaurant with a rather unlikely name, Xinjiang Rather Go on Expedition A Restaurant. I almost apologize for trotting out Engrish to be laughed at, but it's an accurate translation of the Chinese Name. I assume the restaurant's name makes more sense in Turkish, represented with Arabic characters. Xinjiang is a region in the Northwest of China, with a history and culture more related to Turkey and Central Asia than to China. It's tragic that in more than two years I've only mentioned Xinjiang in the context of the delicious food I get from Xinjiang restaurants.

But I don't really see any reason to stop talking about Xinjiang food, either. Xinjiang food is simple, but makes an excellent alternative to the normal dining scene in Shanghai, where the main alternative to Chinese food is overpriced, poorly-interpreted renditions of Western food. This particular Xinjiang restaurant is very popular with foreigners, who at night will invariably take up a table or two out front - pole position for seeing the restaurant's worker's kids, who turn the sidewalks into a sort of impromptu playground.

Most of the dishes I've tried at the restaurant are decent, but not extraordinary. These noodles are a little on meat and vegetables, and only a very light eater would make an entire meal of it.



But in a way that's fine with me, as the raison d'etre for the restaurant is the Lamb shish kebab, and ordering a few is a must. They're covered in hot pepper, enough to make it spicy rather than hot. They're large and go for a locally expensive thirty five cents apiece. While I'm no shish kebab expert, I consider these the best in town:



They're grilled outside, over a flame. A lot of them are sold to people walking by, rather than restaurant customers.



They also serve Sinkiang/Xinjiang Black Beer, which I've heard mentioned as the best Chinese beer. Personally I have to disagree. But it's definitely drinkable, and makes a nice alternative to the super-light lagers that dominate in China. I've only seen it in Xinjiang Restaurants, never in a store. There's also Sinkiang lager beers, they aren't as good though.



The restaurant is very near Jing'an Si, on Yuyuan Feeder road (a short street parallel and south of Yuyuan Road), and the corner of Wulumuqi Road. It has English menus. And, my pictures on this one were a little sparse, but this Japanese-language review has a bunch of very nice pictures.

Shanghai Concert Hall

The Shanghai Concert Hall is located in a park between People's Square and the shopping street of Huaihai Lu - when I first came to Shanghai, I lived just around the corner. It's in the center of town, and is lit up to match. Most notably, there's a large television jumbotron on a nearby building. It plays commercials, and there's speakers lying about to play the commercial's sound at night. Kind of annoying, really.

The concert hall looks the part of a concert hall - a big stately building with arches and pseudo-Grecian pillars scattered about.



But it started out in the 30s as a movie hall. It was the setting of a big scene from the old pre-war movie "Scenes of City Life," which by the way I've subtitled - I'm getting the subtitles looked over and working on a good method of hosting the movie, and then I'll put it on the web. Here's a look at the same spot, but from the movie. This shot is from a different angle, but I wasn't about to go climbing any trees:



The more detail-oriented of my gentle readers that the old picture has cars right in front of the theater, as opposed to being in a park - the road (Yan'an Lu) was turned into a highway, and there's also a subway nearby. To lessen the noise, the hall was moved half a block, even though it was more expensive than making a new building. The surroundings park is mostly empty, despite the location - at night there's a bunch of couples making out on benches, and occasional homeless people wandering around.



I went a few days ago, the Chinesey prog-rock band Cold Fairyland was playing - a little surprising, as it's the only time I've ever heard of the concert hall holding rock concerts. I think the band has a cool sound, but their actual music isn't interesting - I was mostly there to check out the insides of the theater. Unfortunately, the show took place in a smallish basement theater, not the main hall. It was a good match, though, the acoustics were really great and let the band's sound come out well.

The Specter of Food Inflation

Inflation in China is a complex subject that's outside the typical range of this blog, however at a 6.5% inflation rate last month, the subject's become difficult to ignore. Inflation is being led by rising food prices, which hurts more in a poor country like China, where food tends to be a larger percentage of people's daily spending.

I'm going to reveal my personal biases in this one, as I don't much shop at grocery stores, mostly I go out to the high-quality restaurants like this corner manapua/baozi shack:



The most commonly consumed (by me) manapua, with plain pork, goes for a whopping 13 US cents, up from a reasonable-ish 9 cents just a few months ago! It's outrageous, obviously, but it's also to be expected. Pork prices have climbed 50% from what they were last year. It's the default meat of China - the sign doesn't actually specify that it's pork, but when they say "meat" it's a given. Most other staples have also gotten more expensive, generally around 25%.

That's a big price jump for manapua, and most shacks opt not to raise prices, and instead have ever-decreasing amounts of meat in the middle. The profit margin on these is incredibly small, so I'm sure the amount of meat used closely follows the daily price of pork.

Anyway this idea of just lessening how much pork is used has had a broad influence on Shanghai dining, at least with the cheap eats. Here's a Tofu and Shepherd's Purse Soup, from a favorite Shanghai-style restaurant. Obviously pork isn't one of the two main ingredients, but on a recent visit the meat was looking a little sparse:



Western restaurants haven't adjusted prices or portions, though - they're already much more expensive than Chinese restaurants, so in the short term that's to be expected- I wouldn't be surprised to see changes coming soon, though.

In the meantime, a lot of local restaurants paste new prices over their old ones, or are constantly updating their signs: check out the bright fresh "5", to go along with the old dull .00 beside it. It's something like how prices are done at the local gas station! At this shop, the price of xiaolongbao has gone from three to four to five kuai, in just the past half year.