Sugah's Trip to China

My street research

Yesterday we went to the "purse lady." She has a shop in SoHo and when we arrived she checked the hallway before she let us in. It was shopping heaven, almost overwhelming. There was probably close to 3,000+ purses in there! There was also cufflinks, sunglasses, men's clothing and shoes.

I didn't know where to start. I looked at the Coach, just to see what they looked like, they were exactly the same - the patterns were perfect, the zippers were of the same quality. Some of the purses are really good knock-offs and some of them are real. Over runs at the factory.

I bought a Prada purse, a LV duffle bag, some gifts, a real Hermes tie for my dad (and I bought a good knock-off one too) and a Monte Blanc pen. Our entire group (there were 6 of us) spent about 9600 RMB. Not a bad deal.

Then Sean, Erin & I hit the silk market to do some street research for our paper. We went into Starbucks to get a drink and there were five guys outside selling DVDs. We told them we would look when we came out. They were plastered to the window watching us like the little kids outside the toy store in the "Christmas Movie." Finally they came inside the store and swarmed around us. I ended up buying 5 for 50 RMB. Some movies that are still in the theaters and some newly released movies that are in the store.

We walked down to Silk Alley (about .5 miles away) and decided to have a bite to eat so we could have energy to bargain. We ate at McDonalds. The staff was very nice and they wear these custom designed McDonalds jeans and a yellow and blue plaid shirt. I decided I wanted to try something not available in the US so I opted for the spicy McWings. Pretty tasty, pretty much every local in there was eating them too. A DVD vendor came to our table and an employee (tiny girl) came over and apologized and got the guy to leave.

We went to Silk Alley, started at the top and worked our way down. There is 6 floors of all kinds of crap. You name it, it's there. My skills started off a little cold and I think I got things for more than I should have paid (still a steal in US $ terms). I bought a lot of gifts and finished up my shopping needs. Towards the end of the day I got very good, I found a silk robe for my mom. They started at 850 RMB, but I walked away with it for 50.

The vendors are VERY agressive and it's fun to joke with them and bargain. I was looking at watches and told them it wasn't very nice. They got out another "level" of product, nicer but not as nice as I wanted. I told them it wasn't good and they brought out the good stuff. It's interesting that they have three levels of knock-offs depending on what you are looking for. You just have to ask.

Here's Sean bargaining with one of the scarf vendors:


We took the subway home and I decided to ride in a rickshaw from the subway to the hotel. I figured if I crashed Sean and Erin would walk that way and find me! I got in the back and we took off. It's a strange feeling to watch the traffic behind you out the back window and not be able to see where you are going. It wasn't a true rickshaw (it was motorized) but it was fun. Every time we hit a bump the door would fly open and I would see the concrete pass below my feet! I felt like I should have been on the set of Mash or something (wrong country I know).




Back at the hotel we checked out our DVDs. Upon opening them I was quite surprised. One of mine contained Chinese porn and the other had a Barbara Streisand movie from the 70s. The back of some of the disks were in very bad condition. Only 1 of 7 of Erin's movies worked. Either they didn't work at all, they were Chinese porn, or they were in Chinese. Out of my 5 movies, three are working just fine. All of my movies are real, not tapings of the movie playing in the theater.

We went to bar street near the US Embassy. John wanted to watch the soccer match. We had appetizers at one place and the moved onto the next place. All the bars had live entertainment. The last place we stopped in had two women singing and a man playing the key board. They were singing PDiddy in english. The dance moves were hysterical. Here's two short videos of the entertainment.

John & Erin enjoying the entertainment




They introduced this song by saying "it's raining outside but we'll make you horny inside"


Today is our last full day in Beijing, I have to work on my paper for both classes and some AKPsi work so I stayed back at the hotel. We won't have much free time going forward so I decided I had better take advantage of it now and finish my papers.

Tomorrow we're taking a regional airline to Wuxi, should be interesting!

posted by Chrissy @ 12:46 AM