Food, fur and fun on Nanjing W

Shanghai is a great city for just hanging out - glad that we ended up here as one of our longer term stops! It actually works particularly well for Davy and Meg at this age, since they are not so much into museums or monuments or temples. On the other hand, street food, wet markets, street performers and the odd stroll through malls of curious shops offering little tastes of local treats and featuring giant squirrel mascots are rather more amusing!

Nanjing W is certainly an interesting spot for an afternoon wander - plenty of funky stalls, shops and demos. There was a busker trying to kickoff his vocalist-guitarist career, some folks playing saxophone karaoke, a skewer smorgasboard van, and a group of middle-aged dancers strutting their stuff in ethnic attire. Not sure actually what part of China the dances were from, as the troupe was wearing neither the usual qipaos, nor full-on opera costumes. Definitely not anything that we’d seen before - keep forgetting how much diversity there is within this country!

We could also tell that we’d gone higher end since Meg was proud to find her first green smily face for “excellent” food safety. Poppy ended up picking this Korean place for a bibimbap lunch (the rest of us were already full on street food) and the serving ladies were a bit surprised that we were ordering so little for a table of four. It looked good though and arrived quickly - in a burning hot stone bowl that apparently kept on cooking the food even at the table.Read more