Day 3 - Shanghai

Colette had an appointment in the morning, so I headed off on my own with a plan to see Nanjing pedestrian street again, this time during the day, and then head over to the Shanghai Museum. It was trying to rain, so I stopped at a small booth in the underground mall at People's Square metro station to buy a hat from a cute old Chinese lady. It was still early when I got to street level, so many of the watch/handbag sellers hadn't arrived yet, which was nice. I popped into Starbucks to grab a coffee and a requested Shanghai souvenir. Just like in Seoul, there are only a handful of Starbucks that have bothered to translate their signs into the local language, so I had to take a shot of their sign. But Starbucks are everywhere, almost as bad as Vancouver...well not quite. There is definitely a substantial western influence here with McDonalds, Papa John's, Pizza Hut, etc. well represented as well as retail shops like Esprit, Zara, H&M, you name it.
After reaching the end of the long Nanjing Lu pedestrian mall, I headed over the Fuzhou Lu which is a street known for it's paper and stationary shops...which I love! I had promised myself not to buy any stationary while I was here, since I still have so much from my time in Korea...but I couldn't resist...it's sooooo cheap!

I didn't make it to the Shanghai Museum as I had planned, I'll have to go another day. Colette's appointment ended early, and she called me to see where we could met and head off to do something else. We decided that it would be a good day to go to the tea market. Colette is a huge tea connoisseur and has been doing a tea of the month since she arrived here, so she definitely knows where to get the good stuff! The market is quite large with hundreds of sellers. The main part of the market is in a large two story building. The street level vendors sell tea and the second floor vendors sell tea pots, canisters, utensils...if you need it for making tea, they've got it. Many of the shops here also display beautiful Pu'er tea done up in their lovely wrappers (photo below). Colette has a great blog post on Pu'er. I'm on the hunt for some to buy and bring home to hang on my wall!


We stopped at a little shop where the girls made us several different kinds of tea. I had a request from a friend at home for some White Tea, so that is the first one we tried. It's lovely tea, very smooth and light. We then tried some Oolong Tea, which was really lovely and fragrant. I bought some of each. We then headed upstairs to check out the tea stuff. I bought several beautiful canisters, a tea scoop and a little clay pot.

Before leaving the market, we stopped into another shop to pick up some tea that Colette wanted to stock up on. I bought some more tea, this one known as Lizihong Cha (red tea). Delicious and fragrant!

We then headed off down the street to grab some lunch at a favourite little noodle shop. The soup was topped with pickled beans, peanuts and small bits of pork and broth was a bit spicy. It was delicious...Yum!