Shopping

My friends are being good sports when they hang out with me.  I've started to take my camera everywhere.  We stopped for lunch at a local Mexican restaurant along this boardwalk.  In the warmer weather each of these restaurants have outside seating.  This place is walking distance from our house. Often times you see a lot of cats in this area, today it was pretty empty.

Once you walk down the stairs from the boardwalk there are always people selling DVD's.  Anything you want. There are at least two different "stores" in this picture.

If you walk a little bit further around the corner there is a fruit guy.  He is there most days and we buy a lot of our fruit there.  My husband likes how consistent his quality is versus some of the stuff we might have delivered.

 After lunch, my friend needed a warm winter coat so we went to the market.  There are dozens and dozens of stores.  Purses, coats, jerseys, shoes, electronics and so many others.  For some reason it was pretty quiet this afternoon.

 At one end of the market is the pearl market.  Each stall is an individual store.  Lots and lots of selection.  This is a dangerous place for people who like jewelry!

 At the end of our trip we spied this adorable sleeping baby.  The people that work in these stores are there from the time they open until the closing, seven days a week.  It is normal to see sleeping people and babies everywhere you look.  Actually that's a whole different post on sleeping people everywhere, think couches at Ikea and such.

So different than shopping back home in the States!

Camera Date to Yuyuwan

A newer friend had been seeing some of my pictures on Facebook and asked if I wanted to go shooting with her. I've secretly been putting them there hoping to lure someone to go with me around China!!  Of course I said yes and refrained from screaming and jumping up and down.  I have been wanting to find someone to do this with since my close friend last year moved back to the States :-(.

She took me to Yuyuan and we just wandered around.  I had been there before, but not intentionally for pictures.  Chinese New Year is at the end of the month so the decorations were being put up and the stores selling red lanterns, horses (it will soon be the year of the horse), red envelopes, etc were everywhere.

First she decided I needed to try a local dumpling place.  It wasn't crowded today, but she has seen it with lines down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, with servers carrying towers of steamers in each hand.  Thankfully she is fluent in Mandarin so it made it much easier for me!  It was kind of nice to sit back and let her take care of ordering everything.  We ate dumplings, soybeans, spring rolls and a custard filled coconut flavored bun for dessert.

On our way out we saw this guy making the dumplings.

Once we were done we walked through the market area.

Gourds for sale.  I should have asked my friend what the writing on them meant!

I was fascinated over the quantity of toilet seat covers available.  Lots of variety!

Sometimes it is difficult to take people pictures in China.  We thought this lady was so cute with her red muff for her hands!  She not only let us take her picture, but gave us a bit of a smile too!  She was very interested in looking at her photo afterwards!

Once we got out of the market area we went down one of the side streets.  We saw these cardboard hauling bikes parked with the other bikes.

All over Shanghai you will see little alleyways where lots of people live.  They usually have community kitchens and I believe bathrooms too.  Most people here hang their clothes to dry.  I'm assuming because dryers are luxuries, as is the electricity to run them.

As we were finishing up we saw this adorable little boy and his Dad.  His Dad was totally good with us taking his son's picture and kept trying to get him to say hi to us.

What a fun outing and a great way to spend the day.  I'm so thankful for making a new friend and getting to practice with my camera.  I definitely learned from watching her.  She does a much better job of framing the shot when she takes the picture.  I tend to do more cropping than I should in post processing.  It gave me another item to add to the long list of things I want to improve!

This expat thing gives us such a great opportunity to meet so many different people.  It truly is a blessing to have so many wonderful people in our lives!

Light

Today I wanted to work with light and focusing.  And thanks to my new friends in a 365 group, slowing down to take the shot!  M let me take pictures yesterday and today with the promise of an M&M. I'm really glad he's been so open to the time.  He's the one that usually gets tired of it in a nanosecond.