29 July, Action-Man, Beijing
Tonight, we took the Beijing subway to the famous silk market. It must have changed a bit since Marco Polo's day. As we ascended from the station, smiling young Chinese girls stood behind trays of Portuguese egg tarts (If you haven't had one you haven't yet lived) and crates of Chinese candies. A makeshift shop displays hundreds of pirated DVDs and CDs. But this, in the locals' eyes, is a respectable shop. They even let you test the disks to see if they work. True class.
In the silk market itself, those smiling girls turn into different animals. Outside rows and rows of shops, each selling fake Gucci bags and North Face jackets, they wait to suck in customers whose eyes linger too long over their merchandise. They whip out calculators cooly and begin their trade. "OK," said one, "retail price this shirt go for 680 yuan [80 bucks, yeah right]." She punched in the first number then said, "but I see you are student, ok, so I give you wery good price, give it you for 400, ok?" Sam and I asked for about a tenth of that, which infuriated her. She refused flat out. Soon enough though, with many punchings of buttons, she yielded. The price dropped to 20% of the original. We left with booty in hand, followed by cries of outrage.
After the silk market, we feasted. Chinese hotpot is not to be missed while in the Orient. Sharp waitresses bring out boiling bowls of soup and drop them down into a hole in the table. A fire is lit beneath. Then, eaters choose from a panoply of raw foods that make up the core of the meal. Sam and I ordered, among other things, duck paw, which arrived looking more like raw squid with bones. We dipped our morsels deep into the steaming soup, and soon even the most frozen bits were fired and ready to eat.
In our eating frenzy, Sam and I pushed our time in Beijing right up to the edge. Our sleeper train to Shanghai left at 7:21, and we left the restaurant at 7:00, bellies full. We taxied with all speed across town to the station and arrived with five minutes to departure. We sprinted like warriors across the busy steet, through crowds of glaring Orientals, past the ticket gate, up an escalator, through a long hallway and down to our platform. We jumped aboard with seconds to spare. As Jules Verne says in Around the World in Eighty Days, "Trains, like time and tide, stop for no one."
Drew
In the silk market itself, those smiling girls turn into different animals. Outside rows and rows of shops, each selling fake Gucci bags and North Face jackets, they wait to suck in customers whose eyes linger too long over their merchandise. They whip out calculators cooly and begin their trade. "OK," said one, "retail price this shirt go for 680 yuan [80 bucks, yeah right]." She punched in the first number then said, "but I see you are student, ok, so I give you wery good price, give it you for 400, ok?" Sam and I asked for about a tenth of that, which infuriated her. She refused flat out. Soon enough though, with many punchings of buttons, she yielded. The price dropped to 20% of the original. We left with booty in hand, followed by cries of outrage.
After the silk market, we feasted. Chinese hotpot is not to be missed while in the Orient. Sharp waitresses bring out boiling bowls of soup and drop them down into a hole in the table. A fire is lit beneath. Then, eaters choose from a panoply of raw foods that make up the core of the meal. Sam and I ordered, among other things, duck paw, which arrived looking more like raw squid with bones. We dipped our morsels deep into the steaming soup, and soon even the most frozen bits were fired and ready to eat.
In our eating frenzy, Sam and I pushed our time in Beijing right up to the edge. Our sleeper train to Shanghai left at 7:21, and we left the restaurant at 7:00, bellies full. We taxied with all speed across town to the station and arrived with five minutes to departure. We sprinted like warriors across the busy steet, through crowds of glaring Orientals, past the ticket gate, up an escalator, through a long hallway and down to our platform. We jumped aboard with seconds to spare. As Jules Verne says in Around the World in Eighty Days, "Trains, like time and tide, stop for no one."
Drew
posted by Unknown at 10:50 PM
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