Walking

So I spent most of yesterday afternoon walking around inner city Beijing, then again in the evening. I have come up with some rules for Beijing (maybe China) walking:

1. Travel like you have the right of way
2. You don't have the right of way
3. Everything smaller than a car will go straight through a red light and sometimes cars will too

Following these simple rules I have not yet been run down. Though I have gone close.

Last night we went to one of the Carrefour department store places, which was an experience. We decided to walk after trying the previous evening with two different cabs, both of whom went in entirely the wrong direction after having been shown the address. Also both cabs went in different directions to each other! So this time, walking there and cabbing back.

The Carrefour is kind of like a Target upstairs, a supermarket downstairs and an insane asylum all over. A story to demonstrate this is when we went looking for pillows. We walk down the aisle and immediately women in yellow shirts appear, about 6 of them. They start grabbing pillows off the shelves and showing them to us, gently at first but with increasing vigour. They don't speak English and we don't speak Mandarin, but they still talk to us fairly loudly (so we can hear each of them over the others I guess). They show us the labels for the pillows, some say mulberry leaf some have buckwheat, some have silk. Maybe they thought we knew what we were looking for? So after a while this started to become hilarious, them saying something, me saying "that's great, so silk you say, excellent but too soft" then trying to mime something that's soft. Can't be done incidentally! We finally picked some and the woman told us (over protests from the other) that they were 99. She then took us (including our trolley) away, found some 99 tags and stuck them on. She then went back to have a huge argument with the other ladies. They were still yelling at each other when we walked past later.

Once we got downstairs it was sort of a supermarket/butcher thing, the guy was there chopping up the meat and eels, it was ok. There is only one queue to stand in to use a credit card which we had been warned about thankfully. Then we were accosted at the exit by a woman who I think wanted our receipt. No idea why but she followed us outside and around the corner. I think we outdistanced her! And strangely enough the taxi back to the apartment was really easy, the guy knew where to go and we didn't crash, not even once! All in all, a successful trip even if we didn't find tea towels. maybe they don't have them here?

Tonight we had a look around the Sanlitun area, near one of the embassy districts. It's full of designer shops like Puma, Adidas etc and the Apple store. One thing I've noticed about China, they don't like to mix brands. Every brand has their own shop. Also inthe middle of the shopping centre was a concert that seemed to be celebrating coke for some reason