A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

In other words, they are the people that I meet each day.

The barber is resting

We are moving in a week or so. Our landlord is moving back into our flat because we are in a very good school district and his small daughter just reached kindergarten age.  By September, our threadbare, tired, scuffed apartment will have been torn apart and rebuilt anew, shiny and happy and clean– but not for us. For one more week, we get to deal with the mildewed bathroom tiles and the broken shower door hanging on by two screws (just barely) and kitchen cabinets with broken shelves, making our rice bag list.

We aren’t moving far, however. Although our current flat isn’t perfect, our neighbourhood is lovely. Not lovely in a sunshine and lollipops kind of way, with posh old buildings and boutiques and chic cafes (though they are encroaching and really, I ain’t complaining), but rather in a riveting old skool way, smack dab in the middle of some of Shanghai’s priciest real estate. We live in the area known as the French Concession, which is full of old low rise lane houses (see previous post) and a few newer luxury high rises jutting up awkwardly.

She sells Crocs.

Most of the businesses that line the streets could fit easily into shoeboxes and most of the side streets could readily be mistaken for low key small town China, rather than big booming impatient Shanghai and its glistening skyscrapers and metallic finishes.

We are moving up in the world, to the 16th floor of the only tall building on the block.  Our view is of lane houses below us, stretching out for some distance, then merging into some high rises in a distant neighbourhood. Many low, red roofs. Many courtyards.  Below us, the shops are owned by families and you know exactly who they are because they are out there on the sidewalk every day with their goods in full view.

He does things with wood

You can buy ten different types of egg, live eels, cat food, sheets of window glass, steamed buns, rice cooked in leaves shaped into pyramids, forty types of green leafy vegetable, plastic slippers (usually Crocs), dried beans. You can get your wooden furniture repaired, your hair cut and your beard trimmed, your clothes mended and your unwanted belongings recycled.

Siesta

On the sidewalk, people play board games and smoke and drink tea; at tables half-in, half out of shoebox cafes, people drink beer from tiny glasses and eat for hours, bottles accumulating along with the bones and detritus; people nap on lawn chairs and scooters and carts; older women sit and knit or sew endless pyjamas that are pinned onto a clothes line for sale; shopkeepers perch (or more often, slouch) on stools next to their wares and smoke and talk; babies hang out, half supervised but well attended to, with their bum cheeks bright and pink inside their split bottomed trousers.  People say hello.

This is the street where I live.