5 November 2011
Xujiahui
I read that Xujiahui is where all the weird chinese brand electronics are. Not really, they have the same stuff we have in Australia but it costs more.
This is a common misconception now, electronics in Australia are cheap, the Australian dollar has made that happen in the last couple of years, this was also true in Korea and Taiwan, even with their domestic brands.
The stores are an interesting setup, they are mostly brand stores that are little more than booths, samsung, lenovo, HTC, Dell, Acer etc. Each floor of each building has many identical booths.
Every booth has annoying guys standing out the front yelling at you to buy something in branded clothing, only as far as I can tell you dont buy it from them, theres a cashier on each floor. I tried to see anyone buy something to find out how that worked, but no one did!
Head further upstairs and you find motherboard makers, RAM, PC cases etc, but its still branded stores, gigabyte, transcend etc.
It is not possible to look at anything without people descending on you and yelling in your ear, and the prices are identical everywhere. I played a game, stop at each store and look interested until someone yells at me 'IPHONE? NETBOOK? PAD? YOU WANT PAD? LENOVO PAD????!!!!' as soon as that starts, move on.
Unfortunately I never found a store that would let me just look at anything, at all. The big multi storey multibrand store I went to the other night was much better, and I think the prices were also identical.
In other news, I saw blue sky this morning for a few minutes, it was a bit weird! It quickly dissapeared behind smog again.
Xujiahui is an intersection of 5 streets, some go under via tunnels too, and the subway is under that. Theres malls on every corner and they are all linked under or overground.
Each time I went outside I never knew which corner I would come out on.
I was a bit early for things to be open, so I was on the hunt for coffee. Problem is coffee places dont open until 10am. I find this very weird, it seems going to a cafe is not a breakfast / before work activity in China.
People seem to flock to the places at 10pm though.
Akon (performing in Shanghai tonight), is proudly brought to you by a dancing can of budweiser.
At the top of every subway exit are guys like this. All of them looking to scam you in some way, generally they want to take you on a shopping tour or sell you a watch or an ipad 3.
Inside the never ending branded shop booths.
At a nearby church and park there were at least 10 weddings going on at once, or at least the photos for them.
This girl is getting married wearing sneakers.
At the top of one of the malls selling overpriced identical electronics was this abandoned games arcade and a closed down maid cafe. They have tried to make it like Akihabara in Japan but no one seems interested.
The upper floors of the malls are labelled \DIY high end products' which means motherboards and DSL routers.
For my lunch, I had many different parts of a pig neatly arranged on rice.
This was in an actual restaurant, but they sat me at a bar as I was alone.
The food at the nearby food republic giant food court looked better, but you need a prepaid membership card to eat there, I tried to buy one and failed due to no English.
However after my pig lunch, in a different mall near my hotel, there was another food republic and I was able to purchase a card, even though I had already eaten.
Now I probably wont get around to using it, I put 100 Yuan on it which is about $15, enough for at least 5 full meals!
I like this building a lot. I would love to go up the top where those glass pyramids pointing skywards are.