sunday ghost market

On Sundays there is a Ghost Market in the Old Town part of town. It’s in the guidebooks, and they say arrive early and see people from surrounding lay out blankets on the top floor of a white building and sell their wares.

We finally went last Sunday — it was packed and overwhelming and filled, just as the books say, with trinkets, and shards of pottery and beads and statues and so on. We had a small window of time, just under an hour, which was probably a good limit to the image overload. One nice thing about living here is we know we can go back, it makes things seem less urgent.

Our time limit that day was determined by needing to get to an awesome artist salon at colorbox.  We heard readings by Tim Tomlinson from New York (who taught the workshop I took back in March), Katrina Hamlin from Hong Kong, and the visual artist Monika Lin, who lives here in Shanghai and runs colorbox arts.  It was inspiring and fun to find connections between the three bodies of work, which included stories of drinking in New Orleans, a Chinese grandmother getting an iPhone, and Shanghai take-out containers. . .

Here are some photos of the market. I left with a handful of old photographs and postcards, after some entertaining haggling between Sean and a feisty five-foot tall, 50-something lady.  A few lucky artifact subscribers will be getting Ghost Market Treasures in their mail box this month!

up up up the stairs to the ghost market

i want the flower to the right of sean's hand-which it turns out might be an opium pipe! but could easily be a bud vase with some strategically-placed silly putty.

woah!

more woah!