The travels of Justin

• I ate delicious french bread with cheese and garlic from a local bakery near where I’m staying. The croissants actually taste like croissants, unlike Tianjin where bakeries use oil instead of butter to make their product look like the foreign and exotic croissant, but the flavour isn’t the same.
• On a street corner — far from the downtown core — about 20-men and a young boy sleep on the pavement. People tell me that they are given 1-year notice to vacate their apartment buildings to make way for new development, but many families don’t plan for the eventual day. I don’t know if that’s entirely true, but I know that it’s not common for many Chinese to plan even 1-day in advance. I personally have a hard time imagining a family — any family — not making plans to avoid homelessness.
• At a Shanghai bar some girls walk around to each table offering free complementary cigarettes. One girl hands them out from the giant box she’s carrying, while the other uses a PowerPoint presentation on her tablet-PC to show you how good these cigaretts are. “They are very good for your health,” she tells me. No thanks, I think I’ll pass.
• Helping my friend buy a new DVD-Writer we visited Tai Ping Yang Shu Ma (太平洋数码) — the big electronics market in the Pudong area of Shanghai. My friend negotiated hard for a BenQ model from one vendor, but decided he’d go to another. The second vendor had a Samsung model. As we inspected the hardware we noticed the box and packaging for the Samsung DVD writer was identical to the BenQ packaging with one exception: only the brand name was changed. You have to be careful to spot the fakes.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 12:09 am and is filed under China 中国. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.