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Published: December 6th 2006
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Bike Merchant
Bicycles are an economical way to get around and tow products.Shanghai wins. Hands down. 1. It’s warmer. 2. Its sunnier. 3. The Grand Hyatt Hotel is a 5 star hotel, none of this Beijing Hotel stuff. Beijing Hotel, we overlooked Tienaman Square and the Forbidden City. It reality, you saw a third of the square and the Forbidden City was just rooftops and it was all smog covered anyway. Here we have a wall of window overlooking the city and the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. We’re on the 77nd floor of the tallest building in China and the third tallest in the world. I can’t wait to explore tomorrow!
So we went exploring this morning after a flippin’ 60 dollar breakfast buffet. Docking points from Shanghai for that one. Our very friendly taxi driver wisked us away to a maze of small Fuzhou Road, which turned out to be a fantastic maze of street shopping. Each store’s requirement seemed to be to have at least 20 Buddha, at least 10 fans, and least 1 merchant who would strategically stand in your path so that you’d either have to slow down and thus look at more things, or fake them out with a shoulder move to get around them. Dad was
Street Market
A Maze worth of street shopping! a little naïve about the street market system.
Rule 1: don’t look at any one thing for two long unless you seriously want to buy it or they’ll follow you down the street.
Rule 2: Don’t talk to any merchant unless you seriously want to buy something from them or they’ll follow you down the street.
Rule 3: The only way to get someone to stop following you down the street is to get another merchant to follow you, then the first one will back off. I guess the merchants have their own set of rules too.
Rule 4: When bargaining, never hold a big wad of your money in your hand. Keep everything in your pockets until you’ve decided on a price.
Rule 5: Always start at 60% of the asking price and don’t settle for more than 70% off the original price.
Tip 1: When given a price, off a little bit more for 2 of that item.
Tip 2: If you’re really interested in something, hold it up for a while, bargain, and then even if you’ve settled on a reasonable price, hold it for longer and say things like “hmm” and “eh”. That’s international
speak for “I can’t decide, is it worth it?”
Tip 3: If they don’e drop the price right then, start to put it back and walk away. They’ll drop it to just above the price they bought it for, which is all any of those merchants should be asking for, but props to them for getting the tourists to pay at least 2 times as much as that.
One highlight of that market was trying to haggle a guy who had a stamp booth. I wanted to see one stamp in a glass case underneath where the hole was where he was peering out. He didn’t speak much English, so I was trying to motion him toward the one I was trying to see. “Eh, no no, no, back, down, eh, uh! Er! Ep! Almost!” It took like 5 minutes of this before he figured out what Eh, Ep, and Er meant. When he put his hand on the right one we both cheered and laughed! Ha!
With shoulder bags bogged down with treasures for me and the fam and friends, we found our way via taxi to the flower market across town. The taxis are so cheap.
You start off with 11 yuen, which is like a dollar and it doesn’t increase for the longest time. An average length trip only comes to about 4 bucks. Taxi drivers have their set of rules amongst each other too. Trying to get off at an exit for one of the many tunnels that lead from one side of the river to the other, one of these rules became abundantly clear. Already being in the correct lane, there was no way in Hades any car was getting in ahead of our taxi driver. Our taxi driver would have gotten out of his car with a baseball bat it came to that. He was driving in the shoulder to get around attempts. It seemed like no one had any hope of getting in front of us in line until another taxi drove up. Then our taxi driver had tea and a palm leaf for fanning him ready.
The Flower Market was in this huge exhibition-type building. It was basically a huge place with 3 rows of wide hallways with glass rooms dotting the walls. Some of the vendors had enough flowers to fill their room, but most had so many
The Flower Market
gorgeous flowers for isles and isles they spilled out into a display protruding into the hallway. Stem and leaf cuttings lined the middle of the hallways and the amazing smell of familiar and foreign flowers filled the space between everything. Beautiful.
That night, we found tickets for a symphony on tour in China from Finland. The law of only having one child became very apparent. The crowd in and around the concert hall was dotted with couples holding both hands of one child between them catering to their every need. The concert was alright. This one solo violinist was quite a character. Every one is in tuxes and long sleeved long black dresses. She struts out in a red long strapless dress, red rose in the hair. She was really feelin’ the music too. Really. So was one of the only-children up in the front row of the balcony. I glanced over to see him leaning up against the railing conducting the symphony. Not just waving his arms around either. He was giving cues, getting everyone on his left to get louder and softer, he really knew what he was doing. The orchestra sounded great, so good job kid!
Our last day in China’s
The Flower Market
Unidentified Flora first stop was the 38th annual China Electronics Exhibition, which was held in three huuuuuge exhibition warehouses. After registering as “unemployed”, we got little tag necklace things and proceeded to the first warehouse. Those Chinese are pretty clever. The cell phones in there were out of this world. They did everything, were still small, but substantial and cool colors. They had digital cameras the size of business cards and TV screens with enough quality to see the people on screen’s boogers. Amazing.
Just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, Samsung started a show on the stage at the end of the warehouse. They started off with a DJ rippin’ some jams, if you will. Then a troupe of break dancers dressed all savvy bought their egos out to play. They must have a lot of practice trying to one-up each other in being the most boy bandish cuz they were really good at looking good and at rolling around on the ground. Next came a beat boxer that could take on that really good beat boxer, I can’t think of his name. He started off simple with a god complicated beat and worked up to that thing
A boy and a Phone
Man, those phone companys are getting us "hooked" younge and younger! where you talk and beat box at the same time. Impressive. Last came out a troupe of karate athletes. After warming and jumping around to the Pirates of the Caribbean theme, they put on choreographed fights, dances to music, and what looked life some forms with no music and a lot or “HUHHH”s and “HAHHH”s . Awesome awesome. There was one girl amongst the 10 dudes and she was awesome. About half as tall with twice the energy. They went into a lot of spectacular tricks with breaking 5 boards with one jump, kicking apples off of knives blindfolded and breaking bags of confetti with back flips. Great showmanship. A totally unexpected and wonderful treat and the whole event was free! I got to see Sumo wrestling on TV, a great cheesy Kung Fu movie with a Westerner being trained by an old mystical Sensei, and some ninjas show their stuff against blocks of wood, innocent fruit that got incinerated into the audience and aluminum containers full of colored paper. :-D. Couldn’t have asked for more!!!!
Our second and last stop was the Shanghai Museum. Go there if you’re ever in Shanghai. There are a lot of museums with
Guy in White
If you look closely, there's a guy that looks like he's made of paper, but he was real!! That's a good way to attract attention at an electronics fair! the word “Shanghai” in the title. It’s not those. Just “Shanghai Museum”. Their art and clothing exhibitions, calligraphy rooms and jade hall were untoppable. I finally turned into one of those people who read the information on the walls and stand looking at one particular work for longer than 1 second. I found myself immersed in history and actually loved it. Maybe it’s because I chose to be there and wasn’t on a class trip or with my ex boyfriend and his parents. I actually really enjoyed it. I sat looking at one tapestry in the Calligraphy room for a good 10 minutes.
Now to get to the airport. We know we had an interesting history with airports, so we decided to leave some extra time to get there. Gathering our belongings at the hotel, we crammed into a cab and headed for the highway. As the fare clock started climbing, we thought it was, then, a good time to see how much money we had left in Yuens. He had 100, I had 27ish with some coins rolling around in the bottom of my bag. It was too late then, however, we were well on our way to
Karate!
Kung Fu! WAhhhh! Shanghai’s international airport. As we got to the final stretch, the fare clock climbed and climbed as we sat there squirming. We kept just saying, just drop us off here! But on the cabbie went. Finally getting to the Emerites Air door, he began to unload the trunk as we scraped our money together. The total came to 135. Digging around in my wallet and my bag, we came up with 132. Still 2 short and cabbie didn’t speak any English. I kept pulling out my empty pockets to try and international language communicate that we were broke as far as Chinese cash goes. He was a bit upset to start with until I offered him American coins. He took two Quarters, we laughed and called it a deal!
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