Racketeering on Nanjing Lu

Here is my buddy Colin with Chinese racketeers.

Today Edward Bennett and I taxied to the Bund again in search of authentic antiques, the Chopsticks Store, and a good meal. Nanjing Lu is a pedestrian mall connecting the large People's Park to the Huangpu River and the historic buildings, and it is filled with shopping opportunities for tourists. On the way there, our cab driver displayed a remarkably ignorant understanding of street addresses, taking us first to the wrong end of Nanjing Road and then passing our destination before we got him to stop and let us out. I suspect that the fellow was looking for a way to make a few extra kuai by driving us a longer distance.

We dined briefly on Cantonese style dumplings and negotiated our way to the Chopsticks store. Chopsticks stores are notoriously difficult to pinpoint because they tend to be rather long and narrow. Finally, we left with a couple of pairs of low quality chopsticks and decided to save our big money for something more applicable to Western life.

About every 30 seconds one of Shanghai's many transients from Anhui Province would come up to us trying to attract our attention into out-of-the-way shops that sell cheap watches, DVD's, shoes, clothes, massages, hashish, and other unmentionables (please let me know if anyone needs any watches or DVD's). I nearly lost my voice today dealing with these persistant but ultimately friendly people. I managed to repeatedly throw them for a loop by pre-empting their offers, instead offering to sell them my watch for 1,000 rmb. Edward, not as gifted in the Chinese language, merely waved plastic cards from his wallet saying, "Would you like to buy IP card?" They quickly learned we were old China hands.

Before dinner, we met up with Colin, who seems to attract solicitations even more than Edward and me. Colin had been befriended by three Chinese youths who "happened" to know a good place to go for tea and the traditional "tea ceremony". I will try to get him to post the entire story in length as a comment to this entry, as it is rather amusing when told by him. The above picture is of another group of Chinese who wanted to go out to dinner with Colin. Fortunately, he had his wits about himself.