shanghai postcard #19: books & squirrels

In Shanghai, attempting to completing even a simple tasks can take you down a rabbit hole of weirdness before depositing you back in the world you know.

I had a doozy of an experience at the Caojiadu Flower Market last weekend looking for bamboo stakes for my tomato plants last weekend.

The place where I get my stakes is on the third floor of the market. You have to climb two dead escalators to get up there, and there's something delightfully creepy about exploring a dimly-lit warehouse accompanied by the muffled booming of footsteps on escalator treads. 

The upper floors of the flower market specialize in fake flowers, vases, and store displays. They make a lot of fake trees, which is why I can buy bamboo there. I'm really not sure why there was a huge pile of eviscerated books, but there you go.

On the lower floors, one can buy plants and cut flowers as well as gold fish, and, apparently, pet squirrels. Oy.

I can't imagine a squirrel making a good pet. I'm choosing to believe these are escape artist super squirrels who promptly escape from their buyers, return to the market to tell their friends about their adventures, and then go home with a new buyer the next week. 

What have you seen around your home this week?