Sunday, July 29, 2007
On Shopping
There is nowhere like Shanghai to shop till you drop, really. For the more affluent shoppers, there is no lack of Paragon-ish shopping malls, big international brands and their hefty price tags. The budget-conscious, on the other hand, will be thrilled to be in places like Qi Pu Street.
It feels like ten Queensway shopping centres combined. The sheer number of shops here is simply overwhelming, and there is always this sense of guilt whenever I settle for a purchase knowing somewhere else in this enormous place must be selling cheaper, better. Most things here have no price labels, which means, the price is open. Therefore, knowing how to bargain is an essential skill. As a rule of thumb, never agree to anything more than one-third the original price.
This is Nanjing Street in the day. To be more specific, it is called 南京步行街.
It's one of my favourite shopping places in Shanghai as it feels very organised. The walkways are clean and spacious and there is air-con wafting out from the shops that flank them.
At the western end of 南京步行街 is the People's Square. It really looks like our City Hall, because the People's Square MRT station is an interchange,
there is an underground shopping mall a la City Link and
there is even a Raffles City!
The Chinese name is a little different though.
CD shops are a rarity in Shanghai. I'm not even talking about pirated CDs or originals. The former is probably non-existent since nobody bothers to sell them anymore what with baidu MP3 and whatnots. And the one and only place selling original CDs that I found is a bookstore. Along the street, however, these makeshift stalls selling 5RMB DVDs are extremely common.
It is here that the Xiangyang Market famous for its $12 Prada bags and $10 Gucci wallets once stood.
I bought too many clothes for my own good, so I decided to do some reading for a change. The 上海书城 is just a couple of streets from Nanjing Road.
I saw a better side of the Shanghainese here. Uncouth and roudy as most of them may be, they are a book-loving lot. The 8-storey book mall was more crowded than any shopping mall around, and everyone was so fixedly poring over their books it looked like they were all reading chapter thirty-six of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
which I left the place with. It was the second day of the book's official release and it was apparently selling very well among the Shanghainese as I stood there and observed. The proverbial selling like hotcakes.
There is nowhere like Shanghai to shop till you drop, really. For the more affluent shoppers, there is no lack of Paragon-ish shopping malls, big international brands and their hefty price tags. The budget-conscious, on the other hand, will be thrilled to be in places like Qi Pu Street.
It feels like ten Queensway shopping centres combined. The sheer number of shops here is simply overwhelming, and there is always this sense of guilt whenever I settle for a purchase knowing somewhere else in this enormous place must be selling cheaper, better. Most things here have no price labels, which means, the price is open. Therefore, knowing how to bargain is an essential skill. As a rule of thumb, never agree to anything more than one-third the original price.
This is Nanjing Street in the day. To be more specific, it is called 南京步行街. 
It's one of my favourite shopping places in Shanghai as it feels very organised. The walkways are clean and spacious and there is air-con wafting out from the shops that flank them.
At the western end of 南京步行街 is the People's Square. It really looks like our City Hall, because the People's Square MRT station is an interchange,
there is an underground shopping mall a la City Link and
there is even a Raffles City!
The Chinese name is a little different though.
CD shops are a rarity in Shanghai. I'm not even talking about pirated CDs or originals. The former is probably non-existent since nobody bothers to sell them anymore what with baidu MP3 and whatnots. And the one and only place selling original CDs that I found is a bookstore. Along the street, however, these makeshift stalls selling 5RMB DVDs are extremely common.
It is here that the Xiangyang Market famous for its $12 Prada bags and $10 Gucci wallets once stood.
I bought too many clothes for my own good, so I decided to do some reading for a change. The 上海书城 is just a couple of streets from Nanjing Road.
I saw a better side of the Shanghainese here. Uncouth and roudy as most of them may be, they are a book-loving lot. The 8-storey book mall was more crowded than any shopping mall around, and everyone was so fixedly poring over their books it looked like they were all reading chapter thirty-six of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
which I left the place with. It was the second day of the book's official release and it was apparently selling very well among the Shanghainese as I stood there and observed. The proverbial selling like hotcakes.
posted @ 8:16 PM