In the dragon's lair: febbraio 2012

Chinese New Year is finished, and so every chinese person is 1 year older. Actually, two years older then their real age. Let's make an example: When a chinese child is born, he is alredy 1 year old (not 0 like us) and every new year he/she's 1 year older. So if a chinese child is born 1 day before new year,he is going to be 2 years old after just 2 days he/she's born.

Talking about kids, I visited a kindergarten HE used to work in. They gave me a couple of photos, HE looks happy, I would never guess HE could work with kids.

The last day of chinese new year is the lantern festival, I randomly ended up in a small park festival that day, there was a little craft market and dragon dancers

This guy was cool. He was making candies shaped like the chinese zodiac's animals with his own hands and melted caramel

Thank to the school, I managed to know his previous flat. So I went to take a look at the area, Xujiahui

At the end of the day, I went strolling around Old Town again, the heart of the Lantern Festival celebration!

This photo is a perfect metaphor for Shanghai: Pretty european stuff next to old chinese one...they match and they really don't at the same time

It has been a very long week.

It started with the medical examination for the visa.

It actually feels like they are studying you the same way we would check a strange animal.

So I has to move from a room to the other, having myself checked in every single hole of my body.

I also got a mammography. It was a relief to know I wasn't pregnant.

And here we have Tony the Pooh.
In this version of the story, Pooh is a 50 years old Italo-american bear that owns a Pizza restaurant (honey pizza is the speciality of the house)
But that just an excuse, hiding a professional drug dealing in the back of the shop.
His forest friends are his pushers.
Eeyore takes care of weed, Tigger is on amphetamin, while Piglet is clearly a paranoid cocaine addict.
Christopher Robin instead, is Pooh's bitch and works on the streets at night, he is dreaming of a night without rude, big, ugly costumers.

Then I decided to finally explore Old Town.

Near the metro I found this western looking building...

That is actually a Buddist Temple. Weird, right?
It was a totally casual, but this is were HE took one of the few pictures I have of HIM.

Here we have two cute little puppies in a too-small cage

Then, when I really started geting into Old Town, the smell and the dirt on the street started rising quickly...

But at the same time, it was so REAL you just realize that it is exactly how you want Old Town to be.

Dirty, smelly, disgusting, and REAL

This is a mosque

The walls of this temple are the oldest in all Shanghai. Few thousands years old.

Then I got in a very small, dark alley, where I found the famous animal (illegal?) market of Shanghai, where you can buy animals from all over the world for just few kuai.

The way the animals are kept in the cage is brutal, they are considered nothing more then objescts.

Here we have some cuties <3
You just want to buy and save them all.

This are crickets. they sell them in ALL sizes. This, in the photo, are the very small ones.

The biggest are as big as a human hand.

Then I just got back on the streets, destination: YuYuan.

I had a piece of this. The hygiene on Old Town streets is really...not there. You can easily spot fish or raw meet just hanging out the windows (who knows why) and the food sold on the streets is cooked in the dirtiest pans.

The place in the pictures was one of the cleanest I saw, so I decided to have a piece of this pizza/focaccia kind of thing. It was SO GOOD. Nevertheless, I probably got HIV from that thing.

Here I start getting into YuYuan, the oldest Shanghai's compound, perfectly preserved.

A place in which you can buy everything.

A old statue perhaps...

Maybe pearls?

Why not a Mammuth horn? I mean, why archaeologists spend so much time digging in the ground, when you can go to Yu Yuan and buy a "REAL" mammuth horn for just few kuai?