Long Weekend, Part 2
I slept in Saturday, which did nothing to alleviate the pounding headache that I had and I didn't make it out until around noon after downing some Ibuprofen, a lot of water and playing with the kittens for a while. I had read an article about a new flea market that had opened up downtown in a garden area in a courtyard behind an American bookstore on Changle Road.
I had an address for the place (325 Changle Road) but didn't have the intersection it was close to... a side note, all addresses are given here by the closest intersection and, except for major sites like People's Square and XinTianDi Mall, taxi drivers do not understand addresses, just cross streets... which taught me an important lesson about Shanghai: Never leave home without knowing the exact location of the place you are going. I took the metro to Jing An Temple, a beautiful set of building situated amid some of the largest skyscrapers in Shanghai, making for some pretty extreme architectural differences on the skyline. After touring the temple (which is directly on top of the metro station of the same name... I can't imagine the construction obstacles that created) I checked my map and found Changle Road on it, and started to wander in the direction I figured the bookstore would be... big mistake.
Checking a map in Shanghai and saying "oh, it's only 4 or 5 blocks, I'll just walk it" is kinda like saying "hmm... well, California and Maryland are only like 18 inches apart on this map, couldn't take more than a day to drive that." In other words, idiotic... there's no standardization to the block size here and street addresses are assigned seemingly at random, at one point I was standing in front of 709 Changle Road on my side and across the street the address was 914 Changle Road. So it ended up taking me about two hours to walk from JingAn temple over to the 1200 block of the street I was looking for and then all the way down to 325 Changle Road... oh and it was 96 degrees and really, really humid. I ended up getting to the flea market as it was closing so I'll have to wait for the last Saturday in August to get another look at it, but I did get a nice little workout out of the day so it wasn't a total loss. Needless to say, by the time I made it home, fed the kittens and showered I was in shape to go out for a night on the bars.
I had an address for the place (325 Changle Road) but didn't have the intersection it was close to... a side note, all addresses are given here by the closest intersection and, except for major sites like People's Square and XinTianDi Mall, taxi drivers do not understand addresses, just cross streets... which taught me an important lesson about Shanghai: Never leave home without knowing the exact location of the place you are going. I took the metro to Jing An Temple, a beautiful set of building situated amid some of the largest skyscrapers in Shanghai, making for some pretty extreme architectural differences on the skyline. After touring the temple (which is directly on top of the metro station of the same name... I can't imagine the construction obstacles that created) I checked my map and found Changle Road on it, and started to wander in the direction I figured the bookstore would be... big mistake.
Checking a map in Shanghai and saying "oh, it's only 4 or 5 blocks, I'll just walk it" is kinda like saying "hmm... well, California and Maryland are only like 18 inches apart on this map, couldn't take more than a day to drive that." In other words, idiotic... there's no standardization to the block size here and street addresses are assigned seemingly at random, at one point I was standing in front of 709 Changle Road on my side and across the street the address was 914 Changle Road. So it ended up taking me about two hours to walk from JingAn temple over to the 1200 block of the street I was looking for and then all the way down to 325 Changle Road... oh and it was 96 degrees and really, really humid. I ended up getting to the flea market as it was closing so I'll have to wait for the last Saturday in August to get another look at it, but I did get a nice little workout out of the day so it wasn't a total loss. Needless to say, by the time I made it home, fed the kittens and showered I was in shape to go out for a night on the bars.
posted by Mr. Frisky | 8:14 PM
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