Shopping Shanghai Style

Below the hazy orange sherbet shrouded sky scrapers, wide tree lined Shanghai side streets awaken with the creaking sounds of rusty post office style cycles & tricycles.
Entrepreneurs cycle by precariously balancing their massive cardboard bounty s,
While a fowl vendor s bike leans against the pavement, haphazardly strewn with ancient cages of live chickens and ducks, ruddy faced and grinning he casually slits a chicken s neck, scarlet splatters, cover a blue tarpaulin laid at the feet of his customer a tiny Chinese grandmother, still attired in her floral print pyjamas.
Other decently dressed parents & grandparents are gathering in a corner of Peoples Park.
Previously the old Racecourse, it was deemed too decadent by the Communist Party and was transformed into a park in 1949 to home two wonderful Museums.
Ironically at weekends it now parades paper fillies & colts of the two legged variety,
Hundreds of Lonely hearts are clipped to washing lines, personal details flap in the breeze while under make shift gazebos a manic murmuring of over anxious guardians seek partners for their single child.
Strangely Photographs are not a pre-requisite, The A4 sheets in mandarin state only the basics, age, height, education, annual salary and the critical selling point for males is if they have a property.
Across from the park Over 1 million recreational shoppers a day form a people mountain along the 6km of the historic shopping street East Nanjing Lu,
A Western foreigner, so noticeable here amongst the thousands of Asians is stared at with intrigue, it happens so often you can end up feeling like the Elephant mans slightly sexier sister.
It is also the general consensus here that Foreigners have money that needs abstracting, and the temptation to spend comes in many guises!
“You want handbag, watch?, Prada, Gucci, Breitling (all R`s pronounced as L`s) as a well thumbed laminated catalogue page of designer copy products is thrust at you by a local shady looking local.
“Mei you qian” (I have no Money) silences them for a moment, just long enough to hastily escape their pleas of “my shop not far, very good price for you!”
Dodging the trams into the clutches of well versed and persistent art students, who state honestly “no money, no problem only look!”, as they lure you into a side street office building.
The beauty of their traditional Chinese art sadly diminishes as you are soon surrounded by an intimidating art master and several students, who all wish sell for a good price.

The copy shopping Connoisseur leaves the madness behind and heads to the West Nanjing road to the four floors of entrepreneurial copy shops,
As you peruse the vast amount of excellent quality copies, Continuous cries of “Hey Beautiful lady, you buy suitcase, Belt, shoes, Good quality, Very Good Price for you!”
Bargaining is hard as the first price is generally ten times than the selling price.
Exhausted & broke, take the metro home and learn the pronunciations of shanghai`s wonderful streets.