It was off to the Tongchuan wholesale seafood market again this weekend. It was the third time I have been and it is one of the best nights out you can have in Shanghai.
The place is chaotic, huge and dirty, and it makes our own Billingsgate look like the Harrods Food Hall.
However like Billingsgate it functions as the city's wholesale market. But unlike Billingsgate it is also like a giant restaurant.
Restaurant and hotel buyers and chefs can go there to pick up supplies like any wholesale market, sure, but joe public can also make a night of it, walking around the stalls, buying live fish, then taking it wriggling and flapping to one of several restaurants dotted around to have it cooked while you get started on the beers.
The sights to behold are incredible: shop after shop selling dried sharks' fins (how many fish must have died to stock just this particular shark fin traders in this one city in China? It's scary); small turtles depressingly bound up in nets, lest their struggles make them tired and tough; tank upon tank of crabs; squirming eels, turbot, mackerel and codfish; razor clams, mussels and oysters (not that I'd go near an oyster from the coastal waters round here).
On my previous visit I even saw a very sedated cobra curled up in a polystyrene box - lid off. It is a visceral place, swimming in fish juice, bones and heads, with stall holders smoking and gambling on cards, while their wares await their fate.
We usually go for the crab which is the cheapest place to feast on it in all the city. You pay about 40 kuai (just under 3 pounds) for a jin (500g) of flower crabs, which is probably the same price as in the UK wholesale, or a bit more.
But then again we don't go there expecting wholesale prices - and, well, the beer is still about half the price, so there.
You then pay the restaurant to cook each fish by weight, but that's next to nothing anyway. Recently we have worked out taking our own butter, which we have the kitchen melt down for us, so we can just dunk the roughly cracked shells in and suck the goodness out.
It's not exactly Chinese, but we are getting abalone too, turbot steamed with ginger garlic and spring onions, and lots of white fish in a steaming chilli bolstered hot pot too - so we do ok on that front too.