Whoever said money can’t buy happiness, obviously hasn’t shopped in China. (or isn’t me, having the opportunity to shop in China)
And yes, this is going to be a post about shopping. In detail. With photos. Anyone not interested, check back tomorrow.
(It’s also going to be a post about chilling out at Kro’s, but that’s later)

We were around six girls who met up after class at noon, had lunch in the cafeteria that’s quickly becoming my favourite (clean, modern, big and good food), and then we took a cab to the indoors market I went to last week. (Do not make the mistake of equating an indoor market with a mall. A mall’s big, spacious and clean, a Chinese indoors market is big, crowded and not clean, and typically consists of rows and rows of stands, tiny narrow passageways and gazillions of people.) It’s quite amusing really – we’ve all gotten along well in class, but it wasn’t until I brought my brown Chloé bag to school, which they oohed and aahed over, that we decided to get together after class. It’s a little surreal just how quickly girls can bond over bags. Then, I wore some of my other newly-bought stuff to school, more oohing and aahing, and we decided to go shopping together at the place we’d been to.
After two minutes inside the indoors market, I had lost sight of all others save QQ, the girl I’d gone shopping with last week. We never found the others, and ended up shopping with each other again. I didn’t mind at all – she’s good fun, we speak Chinese exclusively though she grew up in Austria, and she’s a much better haggler than me. With her, I don’t feel like a foreigner – I feel like a regular Chinese girl, out shopping with her friends. We joke and gossip in Chinese, and when we haggle, she brings out the 东北人(Northeastern Chinese) in me. I don’t know shit about formal, official Chinese, but I the way I talk when we’re haggling, you’d never believe I wasn’t born and bred here. And that’s exhilarating, even without the added high of shopping. Moments like those, I’m not a Western girl masquerading as a Chinese, I am a Chinese girl. Also, the sellers are founts of wisdom when it comes to real-life examples of swearwords I only know in theory – that’s the kind of stuff I just can’t learn in class.
Anyways, so for 270 RMB, I bought happiness in form of:
zip-up Roxy hoodie – 50 RMB
zip-up pink hoodie – 25 RMB (they’ll both come in handy when I’m freezing my ass off in the apartment in winter)
black haltertop – 10 RMB
underwear set – 25 RMB
two underwear thingies – 20 RMB in total
four pairs of cotton boy shorts underwear – 25 RMB in total
turquoise knit sweater – 35 RMB
skirt and belt – 40 RMB
2 necklaces and 1 bracelet – 37.5 RMB
Three pairs of thick socks (see comment about hoodies) – 15 RMB
And best of all:
brown knit sweater – 25 RMB
Except it had this tag on…


It says: Åhléns, 299 kr.

I kid you not. I’m dead serious. This sweater, that I got for 25 RMB, is sold in Sweden for 299 kr. Price tag, Åhléns tag on clothes, washing instructions tag – everything was there! It was ready to be sold in Sweden! My question now is: how the hell did the seller get it?? It was the last one, on sale, (meaning you can’t haggle, or can only haggle a little) and the thing about that indoors market is that a lot of things are unique to one or possibly two stores. Even one store will only have one or two of each kind. I just have this image of the seller running after the truck transport and picking up the stuff that falls out.
I love China =D
After the shopping, I bought candied fruit – another reason to love China, you can eat an entire meal from the street vendors (provided you’ve lived here for some time or have taken traveler’s vaccines) – and we took an unlicensed cab back to Beida. The driver was almost having a heart attack over the traffic jams – with unlicensed cabs, you agree on a price beforehand, meaning there’s no meter ticking when the car’s still. Good for the customer, bad for the driver. It cost us 20 RMB in total to get to Beida, but in a normal cab, it would’ve cost us at least 30 RMB during that rush hour. As we pulled up to Beida, we mentioned he could always drive around inside the university looking for passengers. He told us he was too afraid to, because apparently, Beijing is divided up into strictly controlled areas, where the unlicensed drivers operate. A driver can only try to find passengers in his own area, otherwise there’d be violence. Funny, there’s this whole territory scuffle going on right under our noses at high and noble Beida, like stray dog territories in Manhattan. (not that I saw any stray dogs in Manhattan, but in my imagination, there’s a whole bunch)

Later, me and Hannah went to a jiaozi place nearby and then to Kro’s to chill out. Amongst the things we saw and experienced were:
- a whole table of westerners trying to drink one poor Chinese guy under the table. It’s like stealing candy from egg cells.
- said Chinese guy laughing the most maniacal laugh I have ever heard in my life. It sounds deranged, loopy and hysterical at the same time. If only I could’ve recorded it.
- a Jamaican guy in a red sweatsuit dancing
- REAL good music
- a Swedish girl from Uppsala engaged to be married to one of the, uh, most Chinese Chinese guys I have ever seen. She’s been studying Chinese for three years and he’s a TV producer at CCTV (China Central Television). He took a couple of pictures of Patrik and wants to do a commercial with him.
- a Chinese guy wearing a Norwegian moose T-shirt

All in all, a quiet Friday night in Beijing.

*Update: 一分钱一分货 - you get the quality you pay for. Still so worth it though.