Our blessed a-yi! For the past month James and I have been enjoying Saturday afternoons out while our a-yi (housekeeper) stays home with sleeping kids. It has been such a sanity-saver for us to be able to get out together just the two of us and explore the city. A couple of weeks ago we traversed two uncharted (for us) areas of our new hometown. The first, Xintiandi, is famous for being the location of the first congress of the Chinese Community Party as well as its traditional
shikumen ("stone gate") houses on narrow alleyways. The beauty and the poetry of it is, this significant historical site for Chinese Communism is now a thriving shopping area (long live Chinese capitalism!).
The next stop was an antiques market. Take "antiques" with a grain of salt. Shop and stall owners will swear up and down that this vase or that statue is 700 years old, but if you look closely, you'll find workers in the back room taking spanking new merchandise and aging it with sandpaper and dirt (or so it is told on the grapevine). But, if you are looking for antiques from a more recent era, there is a cornucopia of relics from the last century: radios, fans, lamps, microphones, typewriters, record players, telephones, iron stoves, propaganda and silver screen movie posters, ancient suitcases, medium-format cameras abound...you name it, it's here, crammed in some shop or laying in a heap on the sidewalk.
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| Whatever you do, don't say cheese--large-format cameras and cannons don't combine well. |
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| The scrum of treasures |
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| Zhqt do you notice? |
The next stop was an antiques market. Take "antiques" with a grain of salt. Shop and stall owners will swear up and down that this vase or that statue is 700 years old, but if you look closely, you'll find workers in the back room taking spanking new merchandise and aging it with sandpaper and dirt (or so it is told on the grapevine). But, if you are looking for antiques from a more recent era, there is a cornucopia of relics from the last century: radios, fans, lamps, microphones, typewriters, record players, telephones, iron stoves, propaganda and silver screen movie posters, ancient suitcases, medium-format cameras abound...you name it, it's here, crammed in some shop or laying in a heap on the sidewalk. 
1 comment:
Wow, for people who are looking for junk, it abounds, doesn't it!
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