Advertisement
While waiting for Alex's friend Joy to get back to Hong Kong it was a good chance for all of us to get away to nearby Shenzhen for a break from our tiny room in hectic Hong Kong and to save some money. Sadly money saving didn't really eventuate due to the allure of what Shenzhen is best known for - SHOPPING. The Metro train system in Hong Kong is so extensive that we could just take a train to the border, go through the usual rigmarole of immigration and then continue on the same train system on the other side in Shenzhen. Easy as pie.
We stayed in a place twice the size of our previous Hong Kong accommodation for one third of the cost. Over five days we planned to do little more than sleep in all the time, catch up on some organising and emails, blogs (failed there) and explore a few malls and markets. I won't bore you with these details so will instead skip to the shopping.
Now usually it must be said I am not a great fan of shopping. However that is partly because places like Shenzhen exist for a once every
Phoebe showing off a new dress
And star-wheels in the background. two-yearly splurge and everything in between times seems exorbitant in comparison. Off we went then to Lo Wu centre, which is located right on the HK border at the metro station (convenient for day-tripping house-wives coming from Hong Kong to spend up big).
Jeans were first on the agenda - four pairs of imitation designer jeans and a polo shirt for $100 received the thumbs up. Kids clothes followed, then more clothes for Alex and I - all seemed to be of good quality and the styles were clearly targeted at westerners and Hong-Kong-ites. Bartering with the shopkeepers was a constant of course, as apparently the 'true' price is usually about a third of what they quote. Phoebe bought a remote control car that she named 'star wheels' and has been zooming erratically around hotel rooms ever since. I broke my own rule of 'don't buy electronics in places like Shenzhen' and bought a great looking little mp3-player/ camera/ video-recorder. And surprise surprise... I soon regretted it.
The guy demonstrated it and a similar product in the shop and told me the video quality was the same - that was lie number 1. In fact the video on
the product I got was unusable. I'd been generally suspicious from the start - while chatting to the store guy I thought I'd been fairly thorough in getting him to show me that it all worked properly, but I'd underestimated quite the lengths some people will go to rip you off. The second lie was with (Technophobes please excuse the following) the tiny little SD-card I bought for the device - it said 4GB on it and when put into the computer showed as 4GB. But that was the scam - it was actually only 128MB and had been reprogrammed to look like 4GB. Sneaky - lie number 2. Apparently this scam is going on all over Asia and sites like EBay as well.
I was fuming when I found this out and the following morning decided to launch a planned assault on the store I'd bought this piece of crap from. So I wandered down there by myself and made their life fairly unpleasant for an hour or two while we renegotiated terms of the sale. I'm pretty sure I channeled Dad (well known for 'making a scene' at stores, service providers, in traffic...), not to mention Alex
Wall Street English
Where ambitious Chinese learn to talk about credit-default swaps before they can say 'how are you?' who has also shown some real capability on this front! If you've also read Alex's blog about yelling at a Vietnamese hotelier you might be starting to think that all we do on this trip is go around abusing locals all the time. I swear this is not the case! Anyway, I believe I had just cause - just making up for the other 90% of customers who don't find out their beloved product doesn't work until after they've left Shenzhen. In the end I exchanged the product for two of the similar ones (which didn't double as mp3 players though) and a real 4GB SD card which I tested in store. Alex was highly amused.
Apart from this little debacle (which turned out alright in the end) we really enjoyed Shenzhen. It's an interesting place where people come from all over the world to do do business. We met a Mexican man in the airport who'd been importing electrical components from China for 15 years, and a Indian man who was Vice President of a slightly bizarro sounding multi-million dollar Buddhism themed amusement park to be opened soon in India. He was in Shenzhen to buy 10,000 chairs and was very interesting to chat with.
Next stop - back to Hong Kong to meet up with Alex's friend Joy.
PS: I didn't go into details above, but for anyone visiting Hong Kong for a decent period of time I'd highly recommend taking the MTR to Shenzhen and getting the special 5-day Special Economic Zone visa. You just get it at the border, it doesn't take long and is much cheaper than the full China visa. Then you can shop until your heart is content and save on expensive Hong Kong accommodation. Only catch is that you apparently can't get the visa if you are a US citizen or possibly a UK citizen also.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.129s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 19; qc: 62; dbt: 0.0596s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
birgit
non-member comment
just be glad , nick that you werent there when i told the man in hanoi to get his ......together and transfer us to mai chau.dont feel sorry for getting angry when being ripped off!!!!!!!!loooooove phoebis new clothes, lukas likes starcar.take care, guys!!!!