Mickey Mao watches

I love to haggle. I didn’t know this about myself before.

I went to Hangzhou’s night market last night with Wei, Josh and David. The night market has approximately five copies of each of the following stalls:
1. silk scarves and dresses
2. knock-off designer hand bags and wallets
3. “antiques” = old coins and chairman mao memorabilia (watches with moving mao arms, little red books, etc)
4. seal presses
5. bootleg DVDs, VCDs and CDs (its best to avoid new releases as they may have been recorded with a camcorder in the theater)
6. scrolls and paintings
7. sneakers/sweaters

The shop keepers yelled “hello hello” and “look look” at me and Josh (but not David and Wei) and were ready with their calculators out for some hard bargaining.

Haggling at the night market is a lot like car shopping.
1. Don’t get emotionally attached to thing you want to buy. There are more stalls down the line selling identical goods.
2. If you walk out, you’ll get the best price. Walk out early and often!
3. After you make a deal and give them your money (waiting for change) they’re going to push stuff on you that you don’t really want.
4. Don’t be embarrassed when they laugh at your initial offer. Usually they’ll accept it if you walk away!

I ended up with some good bootie: nail clippers, a knock-off leather bag (perfect size for hauling around Polchinski), wallet (it says on it “made in Italy” Ha!)


and a silk dress. The silk dress purchase was hilarious. Obviously there were no fitting rooms there and it was pretty darn cold anyhow. So the stall keeper held the dress up to me to see if it fits. She then held it up to my butt to see how the bottom would fit (and gave me a bigger size), Josh was too kind to take a photo of this but we were laughing our arses off.