A Shoppers dream

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It was raining heavily all day so we shelved our plans to look at temples and palaces and hit up some shopping centres. I think China must have the most shops of anywhere in the world. Within a few hundred metres of our hotel there are at least 5 huge shopping centres and all the streets are lined with small to medium shops - it's a girls paradise ! It seems to be what Chinese people do for fun !

We went to the movies ans saw a new Donnie Yen movie "the legend of the fist", the action was great and the story was ok and it was suprisingly easy to follow the story even without subtitles. We also went to the arcade and tried to play games, unfortunately half the consoles kept stuffing up, there is a "near enough is good enough" kind of attitude here which is strange. For example Chinese people work ridiculously long hours but you see heaps of them sleeping at their counters, also in the movie some tool was talking on his mobile (I told him to shut up) after Jack told us that he was speaking very politely on his phone saying, I'm out of the office at the moment, no the boss isn't here ..... so he had gone to a movie during work - weird.

Another interesting thing is the tax here. everyone pays income tax but tax on goods is only paid if people ask for a receipt. So the government issues official receipt books to businesses which are used to calculate their tax payable. To get people to ask for receipts and therefore increase tax revenue the receipts have a scratchie on them where you can win money. There is also a black market in fake reciepts, people will buy real reciepts off you for about 5% of their face value and some businesses will give you something (eg. free drink at a restaurant) if you don't ask for a receipt - very strange. I guess this is what happens when a society transitions from a co-op to a free market economy ???

anyway having lots of fun and will hit the historical stuff tomorrow

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Photos

basketball court
this is on the top floor of a shopping centre down the road