Nan Xiang Dumplings

Sunday Feb 1^st…

Another gorgeous day in Shanghai, China.

I started the day by going to the market with Adam, Kyle, and Caitlin. Our favorite place to eat at the market was closed because of the New Year Celebration. I swear everything closes. It is unreal how the whole city just shuts down. The streets have been quite for a week. Anyway, we ended up going to a small little place that was open, the only problem was that everything was written in Chinese. So we looked at the menu and pointed to something, we had no idea what we were going to get. Kyle got a noodle soup thing, which ended up being good. Caitlin got a lot of spicy toufu with some rice, she said the flavoring was alright and the toufu was just overwhelming. I ended up getting some sort of sponge like toufu on rice with peanuts in it. The flavoring was actually really good, however I did not like the spongy toufu. I ended up eating the rice with the sauce on it and the peanuts. Adam was not adventurous enough and he just ordered a dumpling soup from the place next door.  Even though we didn’t have great meals it was a fun experience. The anticipation to see what we were going to get was fun for me.

After lunch Caitlin and I headed out to get our toe nails done.  We were thinking we were going to get a pedicure but it was a completely different experience. All she did was cut our nails, than file them, and then paint our toe nails. Even though it was not what we had anticipated it is still nice to have my toe nails painted.

After the walk back it was about time to go to the Yu Bazaar area. We planned on going to see all of the New Year decorations. The decorations for the Chinese New Year are overwhelming!!! Everywhere you look something is decorated with lanterns, something for the year of the ox, or something red.  I still cannot get over how big of a deal the Lunar New Year celebration is to the Chinese. After walking around and looking at the decorations we stopped to get some dumplings. First, Caitlin and I got a soup dumpling and then we went to a suggestion that Mom wrote down for me.

During the time of the Olympics there were all of the TV specials on places to visit around China. Mom took diligent notes for me since she knew I would be here. I am now proud to say I checked one of the restaurants off of the list.  We went to Nan Xiang. It is a dumpling place in the Yu Bazaar area. You can see them making the dumplings right in front of you if you order to go (the line was extremely long) or you can go upstairs to sit down. This dinning experience was unlike anything that I have experienced thus far in China. As soon as we got to the top of the stairs we stopped at the counter ordered what we wanted and received different colored tickets according to what we ordered. Then, we were lucky enough to find a table, so we sat down. Many people in China split tables. For example if it is a table for 4 and only 2 people are sitting there, 2 other random people will sit down next to them in order to get a seat. We did not have to do that, like I said we got lucky. So we sat and waited then a cart with a number of dumpling stacks just rolled into the room and they went from the front to the back and distributed the dumplings according to how many tickets were on your table. When they ran out on the cart they went back into the kitchen and got more. Eventually people started finishing up and more people filled in their seats only to wait for the cart to make another mass delivery.  Some advice if you happen to visit Nan Xiang…sit closer to the door, you get served first! The dumplings were fantastic, although they were a little more expensive than our local dumpling place.

I love Xiaolongbao (steamed dumplings). I think I could eat them everyday and be very happy!!!

After this late dinner we just wandered back to Nanjing Lu and ended up on the subway back to XuJiaHui.