Went out for lunch. Lots of people everywhere, getting used to it. The three others have been here for >1 week, so they mostly know where the close by stuff is. A row of attention-grabbing restaurants present themselves on the sidewalk, and we pick the 'barbecue' one.
The waitress ushers us to a table. So far everything looks the same as it does in the Western world. She hands us menus, with text and pictures for each dish, and it looks Chinese to me. Good reason for that expression. This time, however, an arsenal of translators surround me; both to translate the Chinese writing and culture for me. My intern friends know Mandarin, Chinese writing, and English. The pictures help, and they tell me of the various dishes.
We pick a garden of dishes to share, writing them on the order sheet (China has much better restaurant and fast food ordering conventions - for big orders, you write what you want and you often [~50%] pay before you eat so you can leave whenever). The foods arrive one plate at a time and we dig in.
No idea why it's called a barbecue restaurant... just a branding thing. Beef skewers are tasty; really chewy with bones and gristle - a common thing in China, but takes a spoiled Westerner some getting used to. Vegetables actually taste good here. Stuff that looks like noodles, but apparently is a vegetable is consumed. Colourful 'salad' assortment is as aesthetically appealing as it is scrumptious. Chicken pieces and legs appear soon after. We fill up and pay the bill. A minimum $20 CDN meal is ~$5.5. Sweet.
After eating at a couple more places, I've noticed a few trends:
- The food is saltier (all of it)
- There are more and better vegetables
- Apparently meat is more expensive than it would be in North America with the same currency
- Smaller portions than North America
The next day 3 of us went to a major Chinese shopping mall. The subway there was good. Higher tech. than Toronto's subways (video screens inside traincars, everyone uses cards to go through gates). Lots of people there (like Toronto rush hour, but all the time).
We got to the mall and it was an oddity. Huge and internationally branded stores (Nike, Apple, etc.), but they were in this square area with the outside separating the buildings. Weird. Apparently it's just that particular mall that's like that.
We went through a couple of stores, and I slowly came upon a revelation: Everything costs the same as it does in Canada! I didn't come to China to buy stuff I could just as easily buy in Canada... An iPhone without a plan was ~$1000 CDN! I hit Nike, Addidas, Puma, Oakley, Apple, probly some other brands, and they were all North American prices (looked unreasonably expensive in yuan). Since Chinese people treat their currency as we would treat ours (in terms of the value of a dollar), there's no way they'd buy this stuff.
Turns out this is the fault of the internationally branded stores and the famous shopping mall. International brands cost just as much here in stores, and I haven't yet seen the side of the road stalls with questionable branded goods (not saying that they don't exist - I haven't explored too much yet). That particular shopping mall is for foreigners and rich people
It was not a wasted visit. There was a popular Chinese branded clothing store there that sold good quality stuff at 1/2 the Western price you'd expect (but I can't tell you the name cuz it looked something like this: 字 <- random character). I bought a fuzzy fleece from it.
A final note: lol all the foreigners congregated in the lone starbucks. Saw lots more foreigners now that I was in downtown Beijing.
-dough