Qibao Water Town

On Friday, we went off to Qibao, our closest water town.  Shanghai is surrounded by canal towns, but most are an hour or so away on the train.  Qibao is actually on the metro line, although it still took an hour door to door.  The town is quite small, but very interesting.  It has a few nice bridges and lots of little alleyways to wander along.  One was full of food stalls, with some very interesting, and not always pleasant food smells.  There were some very unidentifiable meats there too!  We couldn't quite cope with the food offerings, so went to Starbucks for lunch instead - how boring of us!

We wandered to the local temple, which was very interesting, and very quiet compared to the rest of the town.

The tower had a different god on each floor, which were surrounded by tiny versions of it all over the walls.  I guess people had paid to have their mini statue there.  The view was just of building sites, but it was interesting to see anyway.

We suddenly heard a gong sounding very loudly, and it turned out to be this procession, probably happening because it was a religious festival on Thursday.  The procession was full of monks playing instruments and holding holy items.  They went around the block, then back into the main temple for some very relaxing singing/chanting.  It was fascinating, and very well timed on our part!

One of the buildings was full of statues representing the different animals of the years.  So, 2018 is the year of the dog.  Below was my birth year, and it's the year of the dragon.

We finished off the day with some green ice cream, which we had no idea what flavour it was - turns out it was green tea flavour, and was quite nice too!