This author is currently on hiatus for the ignoble cause of mugging. The public is advised to remain calm, as this routine protocol has been shown to have no effect on one's violent tendencies in 96% of cases.
| Thursday, December 14, 2006 |
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Today's tour took us around sight-seeing, to marvel at the historical architechual of monumental value. The younger kids were more interested in chaptek, though, and i don't think the adults enjoyed sightseeing buildings very much either. Knowing Singaporeans, we generally would rather burn a hole in our pockets than hear about some fire which burnt a hole through some building, so there's nothing much to talk about on what we saw today. However, there are lots of enterprising Chinese who go around the streets hawking odds and ends (something like those salesmen who harrass you to sign up for credit cards at the age of 15), so some of us did manage to satisfy our urge to take out our wallet necessarily a little. At least, there were these young children whose parents gave them a fixed allowance, and going by how they've splurged mindlessly these couple of days (even worse than teens patronizing malls), it doesn't look like their cash is gonna last long. In China, prices range from cheap to dirt-cheap. If something's expensive, its probably yet another enterprising Chinese trying to swindle some cash from tourists, which is actually quite a common sight. tUnfortunately for the Englishmen, the Chinese's interpretation of "expensive" is their intepretation of "cheap". So they end up slapping themselves later when the find the exact same item in another shop which is 1/3 the price they paid. So to be extremely safe, only purchase stuff which is dirt cheap. Do make sure that it's not dirt though. The Chinese are really good at suckering people. Before we continue, the current exchange rate of the Chinese Yuan (RMB) to Singapore Dollar (SGD) is roughly 5:1, for comparison's sake. So just divide the price in RMB by 5 to figure out the price in SGD. There was this case when we were visiting Tiananmen, and the tour group was approached by this hawker selling these small paper kites strung together at ¥10 a packet. The littl'uns took some interest, managed to bargain a little and got it for ¥10 for 2 packets. Not bad, picking up the skill of legally shortchanging others. However, the adults were already guessing that they could buy those kites at ¥10 for 4 packets, if you haggled hard enough. Speak of the devil. Just as we were leaving, yet another hawker came up to us offering those kites again. This time, the starting price was ¥10 for 3 packets. Argh, been suckered, those littl'uns. They were already content with their ¥5-a-packet-kites though, so they declined the offer. But the hawker didn't give up,following us all the way to the exit. Dring that period, the price dropped from ¥10 for 3 to ¥10 for 4 and finally ¥10 for 5. Aw, the adults were wrong, the price was even lower than what they expected. The littl'uns, not willing to let an offer down, accepted 5 packets for ¥10. So we exited the area, the kids having fun running around with he kites trailing behind them. And then we met another hawker who was selling the kites, with a starting offer of ¥10 for 5 packets. She even offered us ¥10 for 6 packets. But we had more than enough of blasted kites, already having 9 packets between 7 children. I think the price was more like ¥10 for 10 packets. Not surprising, since some of the kites broke within 10 minutes of the children's manhandling of them. Anyway, there are offers abound for the more prudent ones. There was this JC girl in our group ("Wenn" her name was) who got a pair of stylish tall leather shoes with fur padding at ¥120, after her mum's bargaining brought the price down from ¥180. It would probably have costed about $60 or more in Singapore. Oh but of course, if your pockets are feeling heavy and you're feeling a littleover-the-top, China also has just the thing for you: .jpg) Some vases on display/sale at an engraving workshop. See that giant one in the center? Beautifully hand-crafted right down to every detail, an authentic work of art. All for the price of ¥700,000. |
'Twas teh winnar at 10:35 pm.
