Sounds...well, dirty, right? Maybe like a Tanzanian market? Plants? Animals? I knew it was huge...55,000 per day on the weekends (it's only open on weekends). I knew you have to get there early (5 am) to get the very best deals. Other than that...we just knew it was our destination this weekend.
Does THIS look dirty?! Well, there were some aspects, yes, (like when the little girl wandered over near where we were sitting, squatted and peed. On the cement. Only about 25 feet from a public toilet. And then walked away. Which is normal. And they did it in Tanzania, too. Only not as obviously. And it soaks into the dirt there. So I realized that all the little piles of poo along side the road when I ride my bike to school are maybe not all from dogs. But I digress.) but on the whole it was very very clean. They sell every trinket and bauble you could ever want, and with 55,000 people there, they can't all be tourists. But most are Chinese.
Actually, we are realizing that China is not catering to Westerners, but to other Chinese in their tourism market, so learning Chinese is becoming more important as my frustration rises (we hope to have a tutor by the end of October). But at least everyone understands numbers! There are rows of porcelein, Tibetan rugs, paper products, musical instruments, and calligraphy supplies. This man was practicing strokes. He dipped the brush into ink but as he made the stroke, the ink didn't appear at first, so it looked magical. You can see the huge brushes behind him!
I adored the little teapots. I'm not much of a collector (mostly since I'm not much of a duster) but I found myself ooh-ing and ah-ing over this little one shaped like a pig and that one with a tiny mouse on the top, and ooh, over there! that one in the shape of a lilypad with the teeniest frog perched on the spout...until Mark intervened and broke me away (although not before I started mentally constructing the disply shelves for all my teapot treasures). They have lots of regular and beautiful porcelein and pottery pots, but the little ones were "oh, for darling." Maybe I can get Ava interested in collecting...
One of the biggest shopping draws here in Beijing are pearls. There is an actual Pearl Market (on our "to-visit" list) but lots of places hawk pearls. The lumpy seed (or freshwater pearls) are the cheapest, but I've always liked them for everyday wear, so I picked up 3 strands (a wine-colored one for Ava and two strands of mixed gray, black, and cream for me) for about $15. Then I remembered earrings--about $4. The round matched strands, of course, start cheap and can run into the thousands of dollars. I've always loved pearls, and they come in so many different colors!
"Made in China" is already stamped on most everything we own anyway, but in addition to beautiful artwork, woodcraft, and porcelein, they have every kitschy thing known to man. Want a waving golden kitty for good luck? How about a Charman Mao wristwatch--he'll wave merrily to you all day long! Or a series of little ceramic boys, pants-less? Maybe some metal windup toys, circa 1950s are more up your alley. If there's something you want that is delicate, graceful, and sublime, they've got it. If, on the other hand your tastes run to the more colorful, tacky, or humerous, you won't be disappointed, either!
Bargaining is harder here...maybe because of the Olympics and having so many people in town paying high prices. The rule is to offer 1/2 (or less). I want a set of these lanterns and I know the smallest run about $1 and the bigger ones for $3-4. A set of 3 would run about $10. So the price he quoted was about $22. So I countered with $7 (and I was willing to pay $13). He shooed me away! I really thought he'd stop me when I walked by a few other times, but no. That's happened to me several times and in this instance I know the price range I wanted was fair because I asked someone who already had them. Sometimes in Tanzania I'd pay a bit higher because people were so obviously poor and I'd be tired, but the prices start here much higher, so I need to work the system a bit more!
Of course we were starving. Predictably, some people's children were down on experimenting. Fatalistically, we passed a huge KFC. When you can't recognize anything on the menu (and you can't because their menus don't look exactly like the ones we remember and everything's in Chinese) they give you a picture menu that shows every item. So we point and order popcorn chicken (score), fries (check), 7-up and Coke (OK, we got 2 7-ups, but we can live with that) and a chicken sandwich. Oops. Not chicken; rather, some mish-mash of corn and peas and carrots, and...Cameron lovingly dubbed it the "upchuck burger", grabbed some cash and went back to try again.
Luckily his attempt yielded an honest-to-goodness chicken sandwich. A trip on the subway, a jump in a cab, and we're home!
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