Blog tour Day Two

Day Two of my blog tour and here are a couple more photos from my time in Shanghai. This is the marketplace where much of the novel takes place. Anna rides through this marketplace each day to get to the Art Academy and at first is horrified by all the blood and gore and filth of the meat section. Like many sheltered Westerners, she is only used to seeing her meat under plastic, or preferably already cooked. Her father continues to eat this way, in fancy Western restaurants, where the meat is imported and the wine is from home. As far as he is concerned, if he can transport his comfortable life intact without having to deal too much with the locals, well, that suits him fine. 

Anna believes herself to be more adventurous. She wants to taste the local life and before long is eating at the street stalls and making friends with the locals - despite her father's warnings. She ignores his warnings as over-protectiveness, but it turns out that it is her friends who are more in danger than she.

The top photo is of the street stall where I would regularly eat my breakfast as a student in Shanghai. On freezing winter mornings, there was nothing better than a bowl of steaming tofu soup with a fried chive pancake to accompany it.