Posted on Friday, April 14, 2006 2:21 PM
for several times on weekend mornings, we met a bunch of foreigners in the nearby web market. later we know that they are tourists and visiting the web market was on their agenda of sight-seeing in shanghai.
an old wet market
while some web markets have transformed into clean and bright ones with good facilities, many of them remained crowded, dirty and noisy, so i wondered what attracted tourists, most of whom caucasians, to visit a local wet market, you know, averagely a tourist stays in shanghai for only 2 days.
shopping centers, boring buildings, metro, parks, plazas, plus a few fake "chinese" temples, what shanghai looks is not that different from another characterless foreign city. maybe a wet market is one of the few places that could be called "chinese". i don't know.
related links:
seven castles - wet market
reply to Brad: sorry i can't post comments. somebody asked me to keep on blogging for another week and my blog posts will appear in a Reuters' feature on china. it's a kind of "encore performance", so to speak. blogging will stop end of next week, but i will always remember the good time i enjoyed when blogging and gthe great pleasure my readers brought to me. thanks.
update: a reader sent me this comment:
Being European myself, I think I can understand this. People from Europe or USA who are visiting Asia are looking for Asia, and mostly for the "old"
Asia (whatever that is). A wet market (especially the smelly ones) is an
example of what represents the traditional China in the eyes of many people. Your are right, if you say that most visitors are not satisfied looking at large buildings and shopping centers allone. Everybody hopes to catch a
glimp of what is left of the China we have all seen in movies.