Markets galore!

This morning I woke up at 6:45am to meet up with some of the other teachers to go to the Flower market which is near the subway station. I still have not yet taken the subway, but I'm beginning to get the lay of the land in the neighborhood that I live in.

The flower market is made of two halves- on one side of the main street they sell very large plants, and the other side consists of smaller plants. Many teachers wanted to buy large plants to decorate their classrooms, but I thought it was a bit difficult to get large plants tranferred to the school. Plus I teach technology, and my room is already decorated.

I bought a variety of plants-- one rubber tree, bright pink flowers, light pink flowers, a pot with different colors, a hanging plant, a pepper plant, a white lily, and three more random green plants. I think I paid 20+3+3+2+6+5+10+3+3+7 = 62kuai, which is a little less than ten dollars.

Following that I relaxed a bit in my room, and then around 11am my friend Simon and I decided to go exploring on our bikes. He knew of one market, and I knew of two more, but I had never been them. I was just told the general direction. The first market we found was a fruit, veggie, fish and meat market. It wasn't very busy because we were there at an awkward hot midday time, but some of these veggies are so beautifully fresh. We tried speaking to one of the ladies at a fruit stand, and I tried a loganberry, and found out the word for Mango is mang guo, an almost literal translation of the English word.

Following the fruit market we found yet /another/ fruit, veggie, and meat market which wasn't nearly as cool. Following that, Simon and I came across yet another market, but this one was more of a street market with many stores, bakeries, etc. almong the lines of the street. Next to the third market was a large shopping mall complex (complete with a grocery store). It started to rain so we went inside. There we found a tea store and the man there speaks excellent English. We spent almost an hour with him drinking tea. He let us try a jasmine flower tea which had a closed flower that bloomed once the tea was ready in the hot water-- it was beautiful and the tea tasted very good. Simon also bought some wall decorations of "painted bamboo" for the walls of his apartment.

After that I heard about another (very local) market. We had to bike about 20 minutes to find it and there wasn't a single foreigner there. They had this HUGE pagoda style building that was clearly built in the past 15 years, and along with the "old" architecture were all of these random stores with hundreds and hundreds of Chinese people walking all around the area! There were also local food vendor carts, one that sold jiaozi (dumplings) and another that sold xiaolongbao (Shanghai style small steamed buns). SO GOOD. Then we found a carousel (??!), and finally we decided to eat more xiaolongbao. When we got our second helping (10 of them for 2 kuai, which is like 16 cents), there were these people dressed in dragon costumes dancing around while fire-crackers were going off around them as a band played. As we walked back to where we parked our bikes, there was a random open truck driving around with a band inside playing authentic Chinese music. What was the occasion? Only God knows.

Seriously though, this has been by far one of my favorite days in China ever. Just biking around, seeing, speaking and exploring this area has been incrediably worthwhile thus far. I can't wait to bike out to other areas!