What to do on a Holiday Weekend

This past weekend was lovely. It was a three day weekend (Monday, April 6th was Tomb Sweeping Day, a national holiday). I spent Saturday out and about visiting some very interesting shops.

The first place we went was the warehouse for an antique store. It was located outside of downtown Shanghai, and the shear volume of Chinese antiques was overwhelming. It was a warehouse for goodness sakes.

The second place was a store that makes custom furniture. You pick the fabric/materials and the style for anything from beds to tables to couches and they make it for you. Now, I'm sure there are places where you can have custom furniture made in the US as well, but can you get a full living room set (full couch, love seat, two arm chairs, cushions, pillows) made from silk for under $3000? Not that I'm aware of. There was a show room and a design center and from there you looked through windows into the place where all the furniture is made.

The third place was a jewelery store. It had some very upscale jewelery (huge, massive pearls, intricate jade necklaces) and some pretty funky stuff (purses with carved handles, porcelain necklaces). The people were very nice and very knowledgeable. And off the main showroom was a workroom where the jewelery could be altered to your liking (would you like that piece restrung? no problem). Very cool place.

What do all these places have in common? Crazy locations. The antique warehouse was part of a huge non-descript commercial development with very little sign-age. If I hadn't been with someone who knew where to go, I never would have looked twice. The furniture store was in another large industrial looking complex, around the back of a building, on the third floor up a bare, cement stair case. Again, if you didn't know, you wouldn't guess. Third, the jewelery store. This place was more centrally located, but it was behind another building, down a hall and as far as I could tell, there were no signs for it. Maybe there were very clear directions laid out in Chinese, but the names on the business cards were all in English and there was definitely no sign in English on the outside of the building.

It makes me wonder what else is out there hiding just out of view. This weekend I'm off to check out Hangzhou, a town about 2 hours south of Shanghai. It's famous for it's green tea, great silk, and West Lake, all three of which should make for a great weekend!