Voyage to the Antiquities Market

Because there was no organized touring today, this afternoon we took taxis to the Antiquities Market. Or at least that's where we thought we were going. To make things easier for foreigners, the hotel provides cards with "please take me to..." and a list of checkboxes of interesting places, which one can show to taxi drivers. Our drivers certainly delivered us to Zhangshan road, but it turned out that we landed a couple of blocks away from the antiquities market, instead starting in some sort of modern jade exchange. We wandered the jade exchange for a while, then negotiated in broken English and fubared Chinese for directions to the antiquities market (as far as I could tell from the very patient policeman with whom I spoke, we needed to walk north to the "5", although whether this was 5 minutes, 5 buildings, 5 blocks, a statue of a 5 on the street, I couldn't tell).

On the taxi ride, we saw this apartment complex, which reminds me of some of Gaudi's apartment buildings in Barcelona. I don't think that the Chinese architect even knew of Gaudi, but I'm intrigued by the similarity of style.



At the antiquities market, I couldn't handle the cigarette-fouled, uncirculated air and ended up waiting outside. Joyce and Linda and I decided to make for an area that the hotel staff had referred to as the "eyeglasses market" on Renmin Zhong Lu (People's Middle Road). I rather enjoyed this walk, as it involved navigating a map with Chinese street names on it (not impossible, as one can match characters on the map and on the street signs). We eventually found the eyeglass area, which is a clump of eyeglass shops, some facing the street, but most housed within two buildings. It's rather like the diamond district in New York, or many of the other such specialized blocks in NYC, where some nifty network economic effect makes it better for all of the suppliers of a particular good to be within yelling distance of each other. I wish we had such a street in New York, instead of having (a) Lenscrafters, (b) Morgenthal-Friedrichs and (c) wierd, overpriced boutiques. Joyce and Linda bought matched sets of reading glasses. I saw a couple of fun frames; maybe I'll go back tomorrow after I've read my prescription off my contact lens cases.

While we were waiting for our glasses to be ground, we went to the "Kung Fu" fast food restaurant. It has Bruce Lee for its spokesperson. The rice was yummy, the soup had large chunks of unknown meat in it but had great broth, the broccoli was tasty, and the eel and pork that I ordered were quite good. Everything was of course greasy.