RIP: Jingwen Flower Market

Goodbye beautiful bunches of roses for 10 yuan. Goodbye piles of cheap Christmas decorations. Goodbye grumpy man who sold us a money tree. Goodbye woman who tied together beautiful corsages for our wedding, only to add the world's gaudiest bow at the bottom. Farewell. Adieu. You will be missed.

The Jingwen Flower Market, which was at 225 Shaanxi Nan Lu (and also had a gate at Maoming Nan Lu, which was a happenin’ bar strip) closed last week. It had more than 200 stores and sold around 3.5 billion flowers per year, according to the Shanghai Star, accounting for 70-80 percent of the city’s flower consumption.

Why is it being destroyed? So they can build a "music plaza." In fact, rumor has it that one entire side of Maoming Nan Lu is going down with it. (Don’t worry folks, it’s not the Blue Frog side.) We're not sure what the music plaza will entail, but we hope it won’t be like the one across from Jing An temple, where subway exit No. 5 empties out into the JAS plaza across the street from where we work. We can’t even begin to tell you the number of terrible gatherings and performances that have happened there. Just yesterday at noon, we heard wailing which sounded like a cat in heat, singing vibrato. We’re sure someone thinks it sounds good, but it didn’t help when we were trying to get work done in a cubicle 14 floors above. When there are no performances, they play Kenny G. Sigh.