Day 3 - Silk Street
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On our last day in Beijing, we decided to skip the planned activity of visiting the Imperial Summer Palace and instead visited the Silk Street Mall. It is a very densely packed mall full of small shops selling mostly counterfeit items. As you walk around its 6 floors, the shopkeepers try to get you to come into their stores and check out their stuff. The most memorable exchange being: "Do you want a new bag?" "I already have one!" "It's ugly!". Then there was another woman who tried to get me to buy a second Peak jacket, dropping her price from 200+ to 60Yuan! Less than 10 bucks. Boy did I feel ripped off buying it at 25$. There was also the incident when a woman tried to sell me Go pieces, starting at 400Yuan, a special price because I was her first customer that day, and lowering all the way to 100Yuan when I decided I really didn't want to buy Go pieces without knowing what they were made of. There's an essay in here waiting to be written about price discrimation, supply, and demand but I'll leave that to you economists.
Little did we know it at the time, but Silk Street would be our best shopping experience of the whole trip. Had we known, I think Etienne and I could have each easily spent the majority of our money there. But because it was only the third day, we didn't spend all that much figuring that other opportunities would arise and that we had no basis for comparison anyways. It is a very intense place, where every transaction is a high pressure situation and you can't even look at an item without 2-3 people approaching you. A couple of things I learned: There almost isn't a price too low, and I really can't buy clothes under pressure like that. When I go back to Beijing, Silk Street mall is one of the places on my list of Must Sees.
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| We had lunch at the mall's foodcourt and headed off to meet up with our group at a Hutong, a neighbourhood of ancient houses where people still live but which has become a tourist attraction - much like the Vieux Port in Montreal or Vieux Quebec. There were many locals who tried to give us rides on their bike drawn rickshaws. Inside, we got a tour of one of the Siheyuan and a little presentation of what life was and is like in the old neighbourhood. As always, there were merchants peddling wares. We said goodbye to our guide (a very cool artsy guy who majored in French Lit at U.Beijing) and left for the dusty town of Xi'an. | ||
  
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