Andrew Currie Online

(A recap of our China adventures on Friday, August 25th…)

Having denied ourselves any napping the day before we were able to get an early start and make the breakfast buffet at the J.W. Marriott. The western-style grub was great and wonderfully presented; can’t say the same for the western-style hotel guests, though. Their attire started the bland trappings of “business casual” and went downhill from there. Way downhill.

After breakfast we re-traced our steps through the west end of Nanjing Road in order to find a building known as “Fashion Mall”, which I had read about in this helpful blog. It’s known to locals (and savvy tourists) as a good spot for fakes, and sure enough not two steps in I got pulled into a stall to look at fancy designer watches out of someone’s gym bag. I didn’t really want anything so I made a ridiculously low offer on one of them—like, twenty bucks Canadian—which was unfortunately accepted. The deal was hampered a bit by passing police officers, who made the merchandise instantly disappear and forced a awkward discussion of the weather for a moment or two. But once the coppers were out of sight I became the proud owner of a Rolex watch, which hasn’t worked since I left the store.

Previous experience in Beijing’s Silk Alley has taught me the fine art of bartering, and while my travel partner was initially disgusted with the concept in short order she had me doing the haggling for her. One of the shopkeepers offered to take us in back for a gym bag-full of cheap DVDs, and while we didn’t buy anything pirated (because of course Hollywood produces nothing but stellar movies that are absolutely worth the over-inflated prices they charge for their copy-protected discs!) we couldn’t resist getting a couple of copies of Sideways 2, pictured above.

We also topped up on some more kitschy souvenirs, but the constant cries of “Hello, hello! Bag/watch/DVD!” eventually wore us down, so we dumped our stuff back at the hotel then set out to get some post cards at a bookstore nearby.

It was here, on the Nanjing Road promenade, that a working girl walked up to me in broad daylight to offer her services. She was taller than me and a bit intimidating—I knew instantly what was up by the way she grabbed my arm, and sure enough, when I pointed out my girlfriend just up the road her mousy colleague who was trailing a few steps behind made herself known by giggling “I guess there will be no opportunities for you”, and pulling her friend off into the crowd. I wonder if they ever hire themselves out as a pair…

Over at the bookstore I was given a demo of some Windows software that uses speech-to-text to teach Mandarin Chinese. I had test driven an electronic translator at Cybermart the day before, writing some dumb thing like “can you tell me where Dongtai Lu Market is”, then passing it over to the person hawking it to read. And of course he couldn’t. Since this computer program seemed like less of a scam I took the plunge and brought it home with me, where it’s been sitting unopened on a shelf ever since.

Later that afternoon and into the evening we surveyed an area once known as The French Concession, featuring boutiques of local designers and a Shanghai Tang. And on the way back to the hotel we had an unremarkable dinner at a fast food curry joint before turning in for the night.

(A recap of our China adventures on Thursday, August 24th…)

No sleeping in today… In fact, I went ahead and had the free hotel breakfast while LinLyn slept in. Why? I guess I was a bit antsy to get to Cybermart, Shanghai’s big electronics mall. In a week of shopping for chick stuff this was my one big indulgence, and I didn’t want to waste a moment of it!

To get there we took the subway, this time without our heavy luggage. A uniquely Chinese custom is the somewhat bewildering act of queue-jumping. Hey, if someone really needs to get onto a crowded subway car before me I’m not going to stand in their way, but on this particular occasion someone decided to walk on my feet to position themselves in front of me. Justice was served, however, when the guy tried to muscle his way onto the car before passengers got off, and was clocked in the chest by an angry disembarker.

So back to Cybermart… Having a mall full of electronics is certainly convenient, but the selection, particular of mobile phones, couldn’t compare with Hong Kong, which has a mall of its own devoted solely to handsets. Since I couldn’t afford any of the handsets on display, I decided to inquire about some of the dummy display models for souvenirs. Once I was able to communicate what I wanted to the vendors a bidding war ensued. Here’s what I came away with:

• a Nokia N93,
• a Samsung P300, and
• a Sony Ericsson M600.

At one point a small crowd gathered ‘round, thinking I was some kind of high roller buying the actual phones; to distract them, I whipped out my trusty hiptop. While the trademark flip certainly impressed, my fellow phone enthusiasts lost interest when I admitted the resolution of the hiptop’s built-in camera: “VGA”.

My gadget lust satiated, I found LinLyn happily writing post cards in a tucked away corner, and we proceeded together to the Dongtai Lu Antique Market. “Antique” is a bit of a misnomer—although there are some vintage items for sale, the market is much more well known for kitschy souvenir items like Chairman Mao watches, red army hats and the like. We braved the mid afternoon heat and humidity and did the bulk of our gift shopping in this four-block radius of stalls.

A word about the heat—during our entire stay there the outside temperature (with humidity) never really dropped below 40 degrees Celsius, even at night. Walking around the city was made a bit more bearable by the common practice of shops opening their doors wide open and blasting the sidewalk with full-throttle air conditioning, but if the global temperature keeps rising and China’s middle class keeps growing they’re going to have a major energy crisis on their hands, sooner rather than later!

Now back to the shopping… We cabbed our souvenirs back to the hotel then hopped back on the subway to Pudong, for a visit to the Super Brand Mall. It was in the men’s room here that I was reminded of another uniquely-Chinese custom—paying for toilet paper. It wasn’t until after I had made a survey of the facility that I found the small vending machine out in the hallway, and it must have been premium paper, because rather than flushing the stuff down there was a wastebasket for it in each stall. Despite all the ingredients for a hygiene disaster, the men’s room was pretty much spotless.

The rest of the mall, though big, was pretty ordinary… I found a nice coffee shop behind a Japanese department store, and some Senseo machines on the top floor, but after a Japanese dinner in the food court we were pretty much done for the night.