I walk past this queue every morning to go to work and it seems to be getting longer. Now there are barriers for help with crowd control.
The two queues stretch right down HuaiHai Lu almost to Chengdu Lu and this morning the pavement was made even more perilous by a hanful of entrepreneurial women who had clearly queued up early and got a load of cakes (or whatever it is they sell) and were trying to sell them on to people in the queue at an inflated rate. Nobody seemed to be interested in buying off them. They prefer to wait 30 minutes for a fresh batch.
There are two queues. The first one is for meat, roast duck, chicken and dried beef. The second is a much longer queue and I think sells something which looks like moon cakes. I fail to believe it is moon cakes because 1) they are seasonal 2) they are disgusting and nobody eats them – they just give and receive them. I think some of these tins of mooncakes have been given and received multiple times.