Travels in China

Marc, my friend's son, is currently in China,

His blog, My Beijing Life, describes his experiences in Beijing.

 

Scorpions on a stick street food,

Currency worth $0.00146.

Beijing pollution myths and truths.

 

http://www.mybeijinglife.com/

 

 

 Here's a sample:

 

Later I ventured out to Zhongguancun (中关村), a bargain-priced electronics mall for what I imagine was my first of many trips. I just needed to pick up a wifi router and a digital camera battery and since I had a few hours, I had fun haggling with people.

10x is a pretty standard mark up, especially for a white person, so I always opened with exactly one tenth of the starting price. People usually laughed at me, but since I only would go up in small intervals while they were coming down in much larger ones, I learned what the actual values were pretty quickly.

For example, the first price I was quoted for a Casio Exilm battery was 200元 [Yuan]. I responded with 20元. The came down to 100元, I stayed at 20, they came down to 80元, I started to walk away. They came down to 50元, I offered 30元. They came down to 40元 and I walked away. After going to about 10 different vendors, and having all of them stop dropping the price at 40 - I finally bought the battery for 35元. I felt a little silly afterwards, when I realized that I wasted 30 minutes arguing over 5元 ($0.73).