SZ: Shopping, Crazy Shopping

Now that I've finished updating my pics from last week's trip to Japan, let me jump back to the present: my mom's been visiting since tuesday. Today I took her across the border to Shenzhen.

She was mostly only interested in getting cheap gifts for her friends, etc. The problem is that the only shopping i've ever done in SZ is for electronics and DVDs... so it was a challenge to find the right places to go.

Everyone goes to Lu0 Wu city mall, which is right across the border (like 100 feet from the border crossing). But it was too insane in there. every 5 feet there was some touter or shop keeping shouting (worse than I ever get when I'm by myself... which is usually just ) Aggressive shop keepers like this is too much, it makes me want to start cursing people.

 We decided to retreat and try another market I read about on wikitravel,  the so-called 

. It was a bit more reasonable and not purely designed at getting money out of foreigners:

its the 10 Yuan Fengbao! Some amazing stuff available here... one place had a 9 LED flashlight with three AAA batteries, only $1.25! Even more impressive was the 2 yuan store! :-P

This place was crazy crowded though. Every side street led to another 3 side streets + 3 malls full of small shops. Mostly clothes but also lots of DVD shops and a few electronics places. My mom bought a lot of cheap dress watches to give her friends. Of course I had to play 'bad cop' in the negotiation phase. I pissed off more than a few shop keepers. :-P

I'm surprised how much english some of these shop guys can speak, I haven't ever needed to speak to them in english before, so I never really noticed.

 Of course lots of knock-offs, some blatant, some just bizarre:

 Its the freaky bizarro Adidas... the 

! (see blow-ups)

The hawkers weren't /that/ agressive here, but still a lot of 'hey DVD!' people.... and a lot of old ladies panhandling (they always have a bowl for some reason). At one shop a lady came up to us and the shopkeepers started bitching her out, threatening to call the cops, etc.

WRT panhandlers: I've come to the conclusion that if they try to touch you, you are required to (and entitled to) react aggressively. I actually knocked the cup out of own old lady's hand when she started grabbing onto my mom's sleave as we were trying to walk down the street. Polite No's or even stern verbal warnings don't work anymore. For some reason Shenzhen is the only city in China I've been to that this is a real major problem....

Also for some reason tattoo parlors have become popular here... there were bunches of middle-aged ladies milling about with laminated cards advertising hair saloons, manicure/pedicure parlors and tattoo parlors.... I'd say getting a tattoo in cheap tattoo parlor from someone who comes up to you on the street is the 2nd stupidest thing you could spend your money on (after the laptop thing I mentioned last time).

 This is all I bought:

 Season 1 of ST:TOS! and I got some games for 

my newly acquired Gameboy Advanced SP... 2 Star Wars titles, a super mario, a tetris and a Marvel game... I paid ~$3 each, I probably could have talked it down further.

 I like the game quality on the GBA, its pretty good. :-P