a musical journey! (Part 7)

Day 4 : Xiang Yang Market. In a nut shell, this is not a good place to buy anything! We came around elevan and had our brunch at a chinese chinese food chain, yong her. Their set lunches are good value for money; but there weren't enough chairs and tables. It's semi-self-service, meaning place your order at counter & pay, get your receipts, and wait at your seats! It's always good to have a travel companion occupying table & seats for the group. Or you might run the risk of looking around for empty seats, while your food is ready!

Xiang Yang Market is totally different from Nanjing Road shopping area. You can find many stalls selling all kinds of handicrafts and european branded stuff replicas. Definitely not a safe area to walk alone. There're plenty of guys urging the tourists to buy their goods. One guy was very persistent. He followed us, asking, begging, threatening, pushing vince's shoulders, attempting to attract us to his stall. We declined his offer. After following us through twenty to thirty stalls' distance about 15 minutes, he lost his patience, and pulled vince's hand abruptly! It's very frightening! Where on earth would you get a total stranger grabbing and pulling your hand with no reasons? Scaring of robbery or snatch thief, i panic and screamed! Everyone looked at me and the fella finally let go and left us. Since i'm on the mission of buying cute souvenirs for my female friends, we braved ourselves through the rows of stalls and found a section where the shopkeepers are not so aggresive. And again, i was slashed. but we're anxious to leave this place ASAP!

Leaving Xiang Yang, we walked further down the street to look for a place called cotton club. Now we're at building number three hundred something. so that's about another seven hundred blocks. Odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other. Divide by two. ok! it's another three hundred and fifty building. Hmm... shouldn't be too far away... we walked...

And walked...

Hold on! Can anyone tell me what trees are these? i saw plenty of this in the street.

And walked... and were lost... and headed backwards... and finally found the cotton club. Not operating by day? There's another jazz club few blocks away... We walked there and found the place! Also not operating by day. We headed back to the nearby subway, stopped by Nanjing road for my favourite dessert. Then took a cab back to the motel and sleep.

At night, we took a cab to the cotton club. The best thing about taking a cab in Shanghai is that you must be able to tell your destination in mandarin, know the road name, and intersection name, and give the driver direction! The driver was making rounds within 50m radius of our destination, and finally he asked us for direction. As i was reluctant to argue with him, i asked him to drop us. "Here!". We took a 5 minute walk to the cotton club. It's still not operating. There's a tiny notice saying they're taking a day off. We walked to the JZ Club and saw an act from Beijing and another from New York. The Beijing act was more towards rock-influenced and better received by the chinese audience while the act from NY was rather calm. Both groups were very different in their musical interpretations, but equally good in their own skins. Note : lifestyle items here often comes with a hefty tag, whether it's a cup of coffee or a glass of house pouring wine, expecting anything RMB 60 - 80 onwards.