China - Day 6 - Market Madness!! Plus Chinese Acrobats!!

Day six was truly a day of market madness!! There was a chap at our hostel who was an ex pat who was currently an airline pilot in China who offered to take us to a fabric market in old Shanghai which we seemed to have missed up until that point.

So it was over the Bund to old Shanghai again - we headed towards the fabric market via a back street which was a lively market in itself.

However, after these photo's things got a bit nasty as we encountered some animal markets as I feared. All sort of poor creatures in cages - including turtles and frogs - which was very upsetting all round:(

Once we had been shown where the fabric market was, we picked up some more cash (as we were running a bit short and ATM's were few and far between) and had some lunch with the intention of returning to the fabric markets in a while.

It was now time to go and visit the "antique" markets in Shanghai - this area was full of fakes but it was all interesting old Chinese communist party items. Basically - you can get whatever you want with a image of Chairman Mao or some other communist party leader or ideal on it. I found this stuff really interesting but also fairly disturbing....a small insight of China at the height of Mao's power I guess. But to be honest - I just couldn't believe that tourists could buy some of this stuff without thinking that it was just...wrong....

After looking about the antique markets (in the super hot weather!) it was time for the fabric markets. The fabric markets were in a two story building and was mainly the kind of market where you get clothing made at super cheap prices. We thought we were going to miss out on the chance to have this done as we only had a small amount of time left in Shanghai when we found the markets - but the shopkeepers we able to produce garments over night and I made arrangements to have a stunning blue silk dress made for about $50 NZ. AWESOME!

Whilst we did other things during the rest of the day - nothing else was too exciting - apart from the Chinese Acrobats that is!! I only have a photo of the theatre the performance was held in - not photo's of the show itself. But even if I did the photo's just wouldn't be able to display how amazing these people were - if anyone reading goes to China - they MUST see the acrobats.