Flowers

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I am (pleasantly) surprised to see how flowers are so popular here in China. There are many florist shops and they all seem to do a roaring trade. Certainly the corporate flower work is vry obvious, and occasionally I see other flower arrangements being carried around.

When a new business opens there is always a myriad of free standing bamboo framed flower arrangements. Apparently friends and business acquaintances purchase these and the more one receives the more success the business is likely to have. Gerberas are a popular flower in these.

When there is a special event there are amazing quantity of flowers - and this week when our college celebrated its upgrade to a university there were many many flowers. After the event the flowers were distributed to various offices, and I managed to score a rose and a stem of orchids that fell while being transported.

The photo above is of a display in the Hyatt in Shanghai when we visited a couple of weeks ago.

The Gerberas on the tricycle

As I was on the bus approaching the city square at Shaoxing, a man peddled past on his tricycle. It had several flower arrangements that I could clearly see were Gerberas. I was in a packed bus, so couldn't take a photo, but as it turns out I met up with the spectacle in the square.

These sort of arrangements appear at the doorways of stores - especially new stores, or when there is a big sale on, or some other important occasion.

Someone was telling me that a young man opened a new shop and he had 40 of these sent to him by his friends and family. The more you have the better apparently.

The Gerberas were a little worse for wear - perhaps half an hour on the back of a bike through crowded streets did affect them, but I think the quality of the flower was not as good as we would have had in our flower arrangements back home.

I'm not sure what one would do with the cane contraptions later - perhaps returned to florist, or recycled in some other way. Everything is recycled here.