The Great Mall of China
Monday, March 2nd, 2009by the lady, who prefers to create than consume
Guangzhou, China
So it’s the Great Wall the kids are hanging out to see, but they’ve had to do their time in a few malls first. The biggest mall in Asia is in Guangzhou…..but we’ve spared the kids and have given that one a wide berth. Coz let’s face it, the ones we tripped across yesterday were big enough to leave a serious impression on us without having to see the biggest one.
The first one was (choose your own predictable adjective) massive/big/large/huge/ immense/gigantic/enormous. We think of malls as being boutiquey shops clustered around big open spaces, but this one was a rabbit warren of tightly packed corridors making paths between hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of small shops, little more than stalls, nine storeys high and confusing enough, big enough to get lost in (yes, that sentence was purposely difficult to read!) The next one went underground.
(sorry, should have taken the photo to show the stairs, but can’t always get it right!)
Four storeys down. Wide passages stretched out to the four points of the compass, miles in each direction, again bordered by shops, all crammed full of merchandise. Back above ground, all the way along the street there was shopping complex after shopping complex after shopping complex. How they all stay in business beats me. But there are lots of people here, I suppose.
And we saw a good portion of them. From a bridge over the road we looked down on the couple of dozen lanes of bus depot outside the train station, each lane filled with three or four buses out of which people were pouring in a steady stream….and the square in front of the train station looked like it was filled with a crowd spilling from a sports stadium after a big game. Only the crowd did not disperse, it did not come to an end. It just kept coming and coming and coming. But with a minimum wage of under $200 a month, how many of those people would have spent $100 on a shirt? I still don’t know how the shops make money.
Then there’s the supermarket. This surprised us. I guess we were expecting outdoor markets everywhere, just like Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam. We were not prepared for huge clean sterile supermarkets with their over-packaged big-distances-travelled goods. Just like home. We had become used to seeing fish flapping about in plastic buckets on the ground – not already dead on a high glass counter. It’s interesting how after nearly five months of not being in such a shop (with the exception of where we bought icecreams in Phnom Penh!), it can feel alien. Well, maybe not quite alien, but it seemed less natural. Maybe it was all that plastic between me and the lettuces. There’s something a bit more earthy about buying from a lady, who has picked beans from her garden that morning and cycled them to an open air market, where she sells them to me from her bamboo basket. It seems more personal. More connected even – both with the person and the product.
And while we’re talking about shopping, come back to Yangshuo with me. I had read that it would not be offensive to offer 10% of the initial asking price for any product you want to purchase in this tourist town. Ten per cent? But that seems so rude!
We saw a t-shirt and surprisingly it had a price tag attached. At 30 yuan, it was twice the price of t-shirts in Guilin (non-tourist town), but at least you knew what they wanted for it. Next door – the very next shop – was the very same t-shirt. Exactly the same. But the price tag was unknown. So we asked. Starting price, 300 yuan, but special discount for you, 260 yuan. Ten percent no longer seems rude; it feels positively generous.
Jgirl14 sets her sights on a beautiful embroidered linen shirt. Identical ones start at anything from 120 yaun to 300 yuan. Left to bargain on her own, she ends up paying fifty, possibly still too much, but at less than NZ$15 for a really nice shirt, it was an acceptable-to-everybody price. Cheaper than in the city malls anyway!
rayres