Saturday and it's time to go to the food market again. It was still fun, we just went by ourselves this time and I'm starting to be able to hear the numbers when people call them out. Still lots of good fruit and vegetables, we got about 5 mangoes for about Y12 which is just under $2!!
After the market, we rode down to Wangfujiang St, which is pretty much the equivalent of the Pitt St mall. We left our bikes and walked around the inner city near the Forbidden City. We mostly stuck to the alleys and back streets, partly because they're much nicer and partly because walking down the main streets we get attacked by people selling tours, wanting to take us to Tiananmen Square, the Great Wall.
Kind of annoying after a while (especially when we were about 5 minutes walk from Tiananmen anyway). So we walked through the hutongs, past the front of the Forbidden City and down into Tiananmen Square. It's a very big space, pretty busy but looks empty just because of how huge it is. In the middle is Mao's Mausoleum (the Maosoleum :) but we didn't go in this time.
Down through the square then back through some back streets to Wangfujiang from the south. We looked in a few of the department stores, they are really strange. They sort of have the same setup as Australian department stores except that the departments are wildly different, it's not like they have shirts with shirts. They have shirts with tea and then toy helicopters and then camera gear.
We also wandered down "Snack Street" where I had been before looking at the scorpions and silk worms. When we got back to our bikes we saw that the night market was opening so we had a look around there too. Definitely coming back here, maybe not for the sheep's penis but other stuff looked good (there's nothing quite like walking away from a stall and having a guy shout "penis" at the back of your head).
Then we went to Paddy O'Sheas which is an Irish pub pretty near our house. They had the Beldisloe on all the TVs which was nice and we got a good spot just before the place filled with Australians and New Zealanders. Great game and we even won!!! After a bunch of drinks we decided to head back to MOMA (our apartment block) to have pizza at Charlie's. The problem was that we had more people than bikes so David (different David) gave his friend a lift and I gave a lift to his girlfriend who was pretty comfortable on the back of a bike (even one ridden by a slightly drunk me!!).
More drinks and pizza (mmmmm, pepperoni pizza) and then to bed
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