My grandfather and my mom's sister live in Pudong, Shanghai on Rushan Road. The place pretty much exemplifies the new face of local Shanghai - much cleaner for sure, but still down to earth and nothing like the white picket-fenced suburbs of America. You can find all sorts of xiaochi or "little eats" at amazing prices (soon to be updated), but the best part, in my opinion, is the open-air wet market.
Ah, where do I even begin? You will literally - LITERALLY - find anything you ever want to eat (and more) in a Chinese local wet market, whether it's vegetables, fruits, fish, meat, grains, you name it. And the amazing thing is that they are all fresh. As in you can still see that morning's dirt on the potatoes, and the shrimp are still jumping around in their tanks. The closest I have ever come to seeing jumping shrimp in America is the half-dead pathetic creatures struggling for air in our local 99 ranch supermarkets.
Checking out the produce section:
Even the tofu is fresh - none of that plastic air-tight packaging crap
Freshly made noodles! Yum. They have an al dente bite to them.The seafood section of the wet market:
They even sell live fowl! Mom actually bought a live chicken once. It was a little disturbing when they killed it. We just head a lot of clucking, then a ZING and then silence. But the chicken definitely was delicious. You know how people say"Tastes like chicken" when something doesn't have taste? They should try chicken in China. It is nothing like the hormone-pumped fatty flavorless white meat that we eat in the U.S.
Some of the things Mom made after shopping at the wet market:
<-- Water Celery 
Some kind of weird plant ----> whose stem can be used as a cold dish. In Shanghainese it's called "xiangwushen"
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