Leesburg Mall??

So Paul is in Washington D.C. this week. For work. (And work seems to involve an endless string of dinner parties with old friends, neighbors and colleagues.) Yes, it is hard work.

Paul's trip to D.C. reminds me about one of the oddities of life in China. In the country that gives name to "made in China," it can sometimes be hard to buy things at a reasonable price.

Sure, if you go to the markets and bargain hard, you can get good prices and some knock-off items for a few dollars or euros. But if you want to buy quality, it can be hard to find and often things are much more expensive than in the U.S.

To give you an idea, here are some items on my wish list for Paul to buy in the U.S.:

• Kids' shampoo -  Shampoo is either expensive here, or it's a brand that makes you think your hair might turn green or fall out.
• Over-the-counter medicine - At the doctor's office we can get any medicine that we might need, but for over-the-counter things (tylenol, paracetamol, etc.) I put more faith in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration than in their Chinese counterpart. It just seems safer to buy in the U.S. (Plus, you can read the directions.)
• Lego and other toys - Lego is available here, but at a much higher price. Many other cheap toys fall apart or break within the first hour of play (see also this blog post). I asked Paul to just go to the toystore and see what games and toys are around these days.
• Contact lens fluid - My preferred brand seems not to be available in China. Weirdly enough in the stores I only see fluids for soft contact lenzes, and in any case not the one that I want. So we buy it in bulk and ask friends to bring it when they visit!

While Paul already has been shopping in the Leesburg Outlet Mall, last Saturday I actually had to go to a shopping mall close to us to get some shoes for Simon (who had accidentally exchanged his shoes at school for a smaller size shoe and now literally has no shoes to wear- poor boy). Here are some pictures from that mall. It's made to look like an American outlet mall, and I think they might have actually used the Leesburg Mall as the model!


Just like Leesburg, VA (in the U.S.) except for the Chinese people in the picture.

If you are tired from shopping...
I can't believe they actually haven't invited this kind of transport at a U.S. mall. (Or have they??)

Leesburg or Beijing?

 

Kun - Teng - Kou - Frei - Chi - Kun

OK, I just made that up.

Isn't that an oxymoron? "Armani Outlet"?



Brooks Brothers is also present. (This is a common store in U.S. outlet malls. I am not sure if it's also in The Netherlands?)

More to come...

In het nederlands: winkelen in China valt niet altijd mee. Je moet onderhandelen over de prijs en de kwaliteit laat het vaak afweten. Jasjes voor de kinderen zijn bijvoorbeeld goedkoop, maar dan vallen wel de knopen eraf na een week en de rits gaat een paar keer stuk. Je hebt tandpasta van een paar cent (die we dan niet vertrouwen) of van bijna een tientje.

Vandaag ging ik schoenen kopen met Simon en liep een half uurtje rond op deze Amerikaans uitziende winkelbuurt. Paul is nu in Amerika, in Washington, D.C., en deze Chinese winkelbuurt lijkt echt op een outlet mall vlakbij Washington waar Paul gisteren was. Ik heb Paul een boodschappenlijstje meegegeven voor wat dingen die hier niet makkelijk te krijgen zijn.

There is a market for everything

In Beijing there's literally a market for everything. Want a new dress? Go to the fabrics market and then to your tailor. Decorating your home? Go to the furniture or antiques market. For pearls, real or fake, visit the pearl market.

If that's not enough, you can also visit Beijing's eye glasses market, tea markets, lamp market, silk market, toy market, camera market, and bird markets. (And these are only the ones I know about.)

Each market typically consists of rows and rows of indoor stalls or small shops; all on the same theme. The advantage is that you can easily compare products and prices. The down side is that it can be quite a drive to get to the market, and it is also not that rare (at least for me) to get totally overwhelmed by the number of products and people at the market. (And that is separate from the issue of trying to find out whether or not these products are real or fake.)

Yesterday we went to the camera market to look for a new camera. Here are some pictures from the day.

Narrow hallways inside the market. Everywhere are stores with camera's and camera equipment, from the actual camera to waterproof bags, clothes, and photo albums.

A Nikon store. We believe the products are real. (The prices were real.)

A Canon store.

Which lens did you want to buy?

Some happy customers at the Nikon store.


In het nederlands: gisteren zijn we op een "fotografiemarkt" geweest. In Beijing zijn enorm veel markten. Ze zijn soms buiten, maar veelal gewoon binnen. De ene markt verkoopt bijvoorbeeld alleen maar lampen, een andere antiek, en weer andere verkopen stoffen, thee, parels, zijde, of speelgoed. Ik ga niet zo vaak naar deze markten, maar als je (ongeveer) weet wat je wil dan kan het heel handig zijn om op zo'n markt alle prijzen en produkten te vergelijken.

First Impressions

While China and its 1,325,639,982 inhabitants (a 2008 estimate) are busy celebrating the Chinese New Year, one small person in Washington D.C. is reflecting on her recent whirl-wind trip to Beijing.

In December 2009 we learned we will be moving to Beijing in the summer of 2010 (a time chosen so that Simon can finish his school year in First Grade at Murch Elementary School). Paul will work for the Beijing office of the World Bank, Simon and Thomas will go to school, and Anna is sure she'll find something super interesting to do, be it working, studying Mandarin, or taking a Chinese cooking class.

So on January 30 we flew to Beijing to learn about our new home, visit schools, and explore neighborhoods and apartment buildings. While friends (you know who you are!) joked that this was our honeymoon -- the kids indeed were staying with grandpa and grandma from Holland in our house in Washington D.C. -- this was hard work. Running on a steady supply of (mostly) Starbucks-supplied caffeine, we saw about 25 apartment buildings and homes, visited five schools, and spent countless hours zipping back and forth between the various locations. A great way of course to get a feel for the layout of the city (or at least the east-side of the city, with its fancy shopping malls and western-style office complexes. Check out the Solana Shopping Mall Website if you don't believe me.)

In fact, I will leave you at the end of this blog post thinking about shopping malls, simply because that was such a weirdly huge part of my first Beijing experience. Let's hope that my Beijing experience will become a little bit more diversified! Stay tuned.