turtles

First of all, more pictures! Mostly of what I bought today.

I'm wearing one of the sports bras mom bought me right before I left - it's a size smaller than usual...tight, but it pretty much acts as a binder. I didn't even realize that would work at my size, LOL. I won't be able to sleep in it though, although I've been sleeping braless here anyway. Usually at home I wear a sports bra 100% of the time, to keep my boobs as hidden from myself as possible.

I've been wearing my binder too, btw. I thought I might only wear it sometimes because of the heat, but after not wearing it for the plane ride, I felt so gross that I knew I would have to wear it. I don't think it would make much of a difference to not wear it, anyways.

So today we started off by doing surveys of random people in front of the train station. It was surprisingly successful - we filled out all the surveys we brought, a total of 40. It helps that Ying is really friendly, and also that surveys aren't common here, so it was a novel experience for them, unlike in America where we're all sick of them :P apparently us being American also helped, and two different groups of people who filled out surveys asked to take pictures with us after.

After that we went to a modern mall to eat. It was pretty much like an American mall - complete with American brands; every store name was in English. The only difference was that it was six or seven floors high o-o; anyways, I had a sort of chicken with several different kinds of onions on top of rice, and some mango/peach juice. It was all really good. After that we left - didn't buy anything at the modern mall, since it was all American brands anyways, and Ying assured us we were going somewhere with much cheaper stuff.

We went to a traditional mall then. It was pretty much nothing like an American mall; it was much more like the night market stuffed into a building. The shops were all tiny stalls, and the place was a maze with very narrow hallways between them; it wasn't uncommon for us to come to the end of the shops and find several empty stalls, or stalls where shops were being set up or closed down - the space is cheap to rent so they open and close often. Most of the clothing was very cheap, although not quite as cheap as the night market. There was also a lot of cheap jewelry. There were some low-quality things, but the high-quality wasn't any more expensive, with the exception of some hand-embroidered shirts that were 100 CNY apiece. I almost bought one for myself, but I couldn't justify spending that much when I couldn't try the shirt on first to be sure that it fit.

The most interesting part was the haggling. We did a bit of haggling the other night at the night market, but we bought a lot more here and consequently there was more haggling; I bought the most (clothes shopping - so many things here are my style, and they tend to actually have XL shirts in stock, since nobody else is buying them) and so I got into a sort of strategy of haggling...probably the normal one, but I had to figure it out for myself. I would figure out what I was willing to pay for an item before asking the price, and if it was too expensive and the person either wasn't willing to haggle or wasn't willing to haggle enough, I would walk away. Every time they would call us back and accept my offer. That probably means I could have gone lower still on at least some of the items, but I don't mind paying a reasonable price for something. I estimate in all today I spent somewhere from $50-$70, which is not much at all considering I got 10 good-quality shirts and a nice pair of gold-plated earrings (for mom) plus some other odds and ends.

Tonight we're going to the night market again, but at most I'm buying an umbrella and getting something to eat. I doubt we'll be out long since we went shopping already today, although Pamela saw some things that she knew she could get cheaper at the night market, so she'll probably get those things.