There are new flashy mega palaces to consumerism all over Shanghai. They are so large, new and glitzy that they can simply take your breath away. Within these malls are Prada, Louis Vuitton and Versace as well as smaller worldwide brands. I expect that eventually I’ll get round to investigating them, but at the moment we tend to end up in them when we are on the trail of something to do with food, or trying to find the local Apple store for a bit of cabling. There are numerous branches of Starbucks and Costa all over the city: I have a branch of each just around the corner from where we live, but I’m more interested in a more personable coffee shop.
Garden Books
One particularly to my liking is Garden Books, as it not only feeds a passion of mine, namely books, but also sells good coffee AND gelato. I love books and even found the excuse a few years ago to buy a huge amount of books because I ran an online food and wine cookery book store. I started it before Amazon came to the UK and when they arrived I moved into secondhand books, and they followed me there too, at which point I jumped ship. Coming out to Shanghai for a year I have had to change my habits of a lifetime and not buy any books, well physical ones, anyway. I’ve had to convert to e-books and bought a fair few before we left the UK to read on my iPad whilst I am here. I have made the mistake, however, of not having downloaded many of them onto my iPad before we hit China and as I only have a VPN connection on my laptop I can’t download any more onto the iPad until I get out from under the great Chinese firewall. As well as not allowing me to view Facebook, or indeed this blog, without a VPN, the powers that be here don’t want me reading anything which they can’t control, so there is no easy access to ebooks without the VPN tunnellers.
On the other hand, my emails don’t reach their destination in the west unless I remember to switch off the VPN before trying to send them………..
Garden Books’ books
Anyway the day I went to Garden Books I had a lovely time browsing around the shop. They are reputed to have the biggest selection of English language books in the city and it’s lovely to look at books in the flesh from all over the english-speaking world. It’s very stimulating to look at books on all kinds of topics such as architecture or bound feet, Chinese history or the Australian outback.
Espresso and Gelato
And then to follow all that with a decent espresso accompanied by a Malaga gelato, smooth and sweet containing dried fruit and, I think, not sherry but the fortified wine Malaga made from Pedro Ximenez and Muscatel grapes.
I was very well behaved and only bought one book, another Shanghai Guide Book, rather more intelligently written than the others that I have. I was very good and didn’t buy any more, but have added those that I’m interested in to my huge Amazon wish list to buy when I’ve got the access sorted out on my iPad.
Brocade Country
From Garden Books I went onto Brocade Country a couple of streets away. This shop sells textiles, jewellery and clothing from the south-west of China, made by the ethnic minority Miao community in Guizhou Province. Now as well as books, textiles are a passion of mine and Brocade Country is very similar to Joss Graham’s fantastic shop in London’s Victoria. Joss’s shop is just around the corner from where I worked and I’d often spend my lunch break browsing through his collection of antique fabrics, clothes, furniture and jewellery to completely refresh my brain after, say, writing part of a proposal to invest in or close down some chemical plant. Brocade Country here in Shanghai is equally absorbing, well for textile nerds like me, anyway.
Garment
Bracelets
5 hooped Necklace
Antique baby carrier
Guizhou province is sandwiched between Sichuan (where the pepper and giant pandas come from) and Yunnan in the far south which borders Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar. The people are not Han Chinese, belonging to one of the 55 recognized groups of non-ethnic Chinese peoples. They wear colourful embroidered clothing on a daily basis, and for sale in the shop are samples of their everyday embroidered clothes and textiles, as well as a few antique pieces and one or two that are not for sale, such as a traditional silver headwear or hat and the highly ornamental necklace that would go with it.
Brocade Country brought about the same thrill of finding new and antique textiles and pieces for adorning the body, as I used to find in London. The modern pieces are cheaper and brighter than the antique pieces. Both have their own particular charm.
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