Mall of China

Before I came home I needed to go shopping for some presents to bring to people. There are a lot of stores around the main mall but they're pretty much exclusively clothing stores and they can be a little pricey. There is also in a different area of downtown Changzhou a mall called Lu Qiao. Lu Qiao is a mall in the Asian sense which is completely different from anything we have in America. The whole place, which is the size of a regular mall in America across five different floors, is filled to the brim with individual stalls selling all manor of things. It's sort of like an outdoor market which you see in some places but the whole thing is under one gigantic roof. The stalls aren't always separated by walls like in a real store some are just divided by sheets thrown up all over the place. The mall sells about anything you can find in China. The whole first floor is only cloths and me and Carrie spent a lot of time walking around buying people t-shirts with funny badly written English on them. The next floor was all luggage for some reason. The floor above that was all shoes where I was able to find some of the squeaky shoes that I've seen children wearing which sound like a dog toy with each step.

The floor above that was jewelry. On the top floor was anything that didn't belong on one of the previous floors including all sorts of traditional style masks and combs and what not. Me and Carrie spent a lot of time wandering around buying lots of different stuff. In Lu Qiao everything has to be negotiated for and my lack of Chinese puts me at a huge disadvantage which is why I was so grateful that Carrie came along. By far the most effective negotiating position was to walk away. Basically no matter what the person said in about 20 seconds we would look disinterested and start to wander over to another booth, that'd be when the price would mysteriously be cut by half. Without Carrie there to conduct most of the negotiations there's no telling how much I would have paid. The oddest thing in the whole place was a dress which was a nice normal dress except for the work FUCK written across it in large black block letters. I took a picture of it and couldn't contain my laughing. In retrospect I wish I would have told them what it meat to see what there reaction would be. There's no way that they would have knowingly put a shirt like that on display for everyone to see. I hope it's still there.