Halloween is a big deal around here so we had to get a witch of our own and to keep the evil spirits at bay we had to carve a pumpkin.
On Saturday we went to Yashow to pick up some clothes we had ordered to be made. I got a suit and Alex got a dress, but my real story stems from the weekend before when we were having our final fittings done. We had finalised all the details with the tailor and his handler and the handler’s overseer*and had gone upstairs to check out the food court on the top floor. It was pretty early in the day and so there weren’t many people up there and we were the only westerners. We looked around and decided (despite the earliness of the day) to buy a plate of baozi. Whilst eating we were suddenly surrounded by a mob of Chinese guys. I looked up as they formed a cordon and noticed that they all bore poster paper and fat markers, so I relaxed a little and waited for the best English speaker amoungst them to open what I suspected was some kind of sales pitch.
To my surprise they were not selling us anything and in fact wanted us to write a sign for them in English for their juice bar. I obliged them and in thick blue marker I wrote:
Rape the Juice Bottle with Forgiveness
Well I wanted to. It is really hard not to fuck with them and come up with one of the many crazy signs I see every day. I can see why these signs are so prevalent. It’s not Chinese people with dodgy English language skills, it is Chinese people with dodgy friends doing the translating. What I really wrote was:
Wild Date Juice in a Bottle
*it takes a lot of people to get a job done in China
Comments (5)
Yesterday we took a trip downtown to the Dirt Market with our buddy Travis. The stuff on offer is many and varied but what made the experience for us was the tourist factor. Every day, bus loads of tourists come down to the famous Dirt Market for the experience of haggling with the locals, but all they really do is teach the locals a few things about westerners.
Lessons learned by the market stall holders:
- 1. Westerners are rich
- 2. Westerners are stupid
- 3. Westerners don’t know how to haggle
We bought quite a few items at the market and because we are starting to get used to haggling we didn’t fall into too many traps, however it didn’t mean they didn’t try. Alex wanted to buy a tiny stone ornament, about 2cm long and 3 cm high, made of some miscelaneous black shiny rock extruded from a volcano hundreds of thousands of years ago and shaped by an old woman in a shed in the mountains last wednesday to be sold to tourists; locals aren’t buying these kinds of thiungs. Our conversation with the stall holder went like this:
Us: How much is this? -holding up the tiny stone animal-
Stall guy: -looks us up and down- 500
Us: -snorting and laughing-
Stall guy: Ok, for you I can make it 450.
US: Maybe if it was made of gold and not some rock you found in your cousin’s garden.
Stall guy: Ok, what’s your best price
Us: -looking at each other for a moment- 20
Stall guy: -looking at us quizzically- too low. How about 275? 275 is my best price.
Us: Way too high -turning to leave-
Stall guy: Ok, 150
Us: -starting to leave-
Stall guy: Ok, 100
Us: -Taking a few steps away-
Stall guy: -chasing us out of the shop- ok, ok, ok, how about 75.
Us: -turning to him- make it 50*
Stall guy: ok
So we got got it for ten percent of the opening price.If tourists were told to think about what they are spending their money on, rather than just blindly spending, then it would be much quicker and less dramatic for us to reach a reasonable price.
*50 RMB is about 8 Aussie dollars or 5 Euro.
Comments (6)Thanks to team Hoelscher for putting this site together.
Thanks also to dan from waferbaby.com for hosting saaga for all those years.
The old posts are all archived here for those that want to peruse them.
