2nd September-Shanghai

I woke up at around 11.00pm. Calvin recommended that we head towards the “—a” for a Mongolian buffet lunch. Unfortunately when we got off the cab, the restaurant he knew had already closed down and there in its place was a new Sichuan restaurant. Hungry and too lazy to look for an alternative, we decided to just have lunch there. It turned out to be a decent choice as we had a big five-course buffet at the cost of 80rmb. Unfortunately, it didn’t have rice or hot tea for the longest time because of a power outage. Kind of ridiculous, but oh well.

After lunch, we decided to head towards “—a” to make a suit. There were a lot of different stalls offering different kinds of cloth for tailoring. You might think that this was a good place for perfect competition to take place since there were many sellers offering the same homogenous product or service. But I thought that the whole place was in cahoots, probably agreeing on a certain mark-up price. Shopping in China is always a hassle, because it always involves haggling and you never know what the fair value of the product is. To be fair, to the extent that haggling is costless, this process may be more efficient as the seller is essentially in a sense, charging different buyer at the price the latter is willing to pay. However, psychologically, the person who is unfortunate to find out later that he is charged at a higher price will feel cheated. Back then I couldn’t really tell the difference in quality of the cloth, and the rational thing to do was perhaps to go for the cheapest price. Unfortunately, I picked a higher “quality” cloth and tailored two suit and two shirts, paying around 1340 rmb. Until now, I am not sure whether I got a good deal. Anyway, one of the suits was a Sun Yat Sen-styled suit. In a moment of revolutionary fervor and mindless consumerism, I bought it. Not exactly sure where I can use it, haha

After the buying spree, Calvin and I went to Xintiandi. That place was supposed to preserve old Shanghai buildings, but was rather tourist-oriented, and lost whatever charms it used to have. I suppose it is much like the revamped Chinatown. Although to be fair, I don’t think anyone can preserve the past in the strict sense of the word unless you get actors to do nothing and live there and reenact the past for you (even then it is contrived.) Anyway, after Xintiandi, we went to this place called Tianzifan. Tianzifan, at least for now, is a different creature than Xintiandi. It is more charming and less pretentious and has lot of arty and hand-made stuff. At Xintiandi, we saw some purses that were made of sheepskin and wanted to buy them. As part of their sales pitch, the shop assistants told us they were the sole distributors of such bags in Shanghai, China etc. Well, I didn’t buy any as my innate sense of skepticism told me otherwise. True enough, we found the exact same bags in Tianzifan at two-third the price with the additional benefit of further price cuts if we buy in bulk. You just need to be a bit more street-smart when you shop in China. I strongly urge you folks to visit Tianzifan soon before it becomes overly commercialized and becomes another Xintiandi. As Marx astutely pointed out, capitalism makes the world after its own image. I don’t think it is a mere coincidence that cities around the world look more and more alike.

As Calvin was flying from Shanghai to Dubai at the end of the trip, he had to deposit some of his luggage at Haojie’s place. Haojie, together with 5 other Singaporeans, were rooming together in an apartment near Sun Yat Sen Garden. So, I went there with him, as we would be leaving for Beijing that he deposited his luggage. I can’t exactly remember the details of the conversations, but our hosts were very congenial and hospitable to us. They were kind enough to treat us to dinner and I suppose we enjoyed ourselves too much for we left too late and nearly missed our train. Our unfortunate tendency to take our own sweet time without allowing for sufficient time buffer would subsequently cause me to miss my flight to Singapore. But, oh well, I would leave that for another day.

Anyway, we ran like hell and finally managed to board the train with only three minutes to spare before it left the station.