Flashing Lights and Things that Go "Bing!"
Trip Start
Dec 2007
1
24
41
Trip End
Aug 2008
Beijing,
China
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
My roommates had a local person write out the name of the place so we hop in a cab and off we go...except the guy misinterprets the message and just takes us to a random electronics shop, which is much smaller than your average 7-11. Nope, this is not we're after at all.... So back into a cab, and a call to my personal concierge at the Holiday Inn. I hand over my cell to the driver and we're on our way. After a long drive all the way across the town, we are dropped in the center of 10 large buildings. We were expecting just one large mall, but this is an entire district with at least 5 or 6 huge multi-level heavens of silicon engineering. Oh Yeah!
We go inside the first and are just assaulted by gorgeous women (and men by the way) in nicely pressed color coordinated uniforms of Sony, Panasonic, JVC, you name it. Each has a huge area with fancy chairs and 70-inch plasma screens showing their wares in High Definition. If any of you have ever been to NAB in Las Vegas, the huge broadcasters convention, if is just like that, except you can buy all this stuff. I'm talking 3-chip HD broadcast cameras, editing packages, ENG equipment...it is truly amazing. All of this is of no interest to me...I want the cheap stuff upstairs.
I don't know what it is that I'm actually looking for, and that is a huge problem. It is like going to Whole Foods after not eating for two days. Everything looks amazing, and must be purchased...after all, this new copy of Photoshop is only 3 dollars. I bore my roommates to death, as I go from stand to stand, checking out all the cool toys with flashing lights, neat clicking knobs, and prompt messages with strange sounding warnings. In the West we are used more buzzers and here its all nice quiet non-treatening tings and bings...and most are strangely expensive. More expensive actually than they would be from one of those gray-market electronics webshops in Brooklyn, but where else in the space of about 75 feet you can play with over 50 different HD cameras. Also unlike other Chinese shopping experiences the molestation is minimal. Everywhere else you shop in Beijing, someone is literally yelling at you at all times to buy their product, and it can be purchased "cheaper, cheaper...best price...cheaper, cheaper."
I play with a really cool 3 chip HD handycam from Panasonic, long enough that one of the shopgirls has gone to the basement to grab a newly boxed camera for me to take home for only 50,000 yuan (about 7-thousand dollars...) Um...no, I'm just looking, thanks anyway.
I can go on and on, but to try to let you off the hook, so you can get back to work (because I know you are reading this at the office) I'll just say, all I buy is a new wireless Linksys router (for about 20 bucks) and a handful of software, Premiere Pro 1.5, Nero 8 and some other stuff (for about 2 bucks a program) We then decide to have lunch in the neighborhood before leaving. We wander around until we notice that, out of the dozen or so eating establishments on this busy street, all the local Chinese diners are going to this one place, and for an added bonus, their signs are in English. Awesome (...well, maybe not.) We stumble in from the cold and a nice group of pretty girls leads up to a table by the window and gives us menus, completely in Chinese. Immediately a very attentive girl comes to the table, says nothing and just smiles. We smile and open our menus. She stands there, and we are lost. She just stands there. We smile, she smiles, and stands there. Finally one of us says, "Coke," and she scribbles on a pad, then smiles and doesn't move. We are drowning in confusion, finally, someone notices a photograph of a dish in the window. We point and she says in very broken English, "Noodle Beef?" This was akin the Beirut Accords, a breakthrough that was only dreamt of for years. I nod, "yes" up and down and give a thumbs up....however, one my compatriots says, "um, no...let's see..." and looks at the menu, as if instantly a translation would appear if he just clicked his heels together 3 times and promised to believe in fairies.
Finally, our waitress who has been standing beside us for a good 8 or 10 minutes points to a dish on the second page, and says, "Very Good..." My friend turns to her and says, "Well, I don't know, what is it exactly," as if she had instantly studied English extensively in Brussels in one of the world's finest Prep Schools before returning to Beijing to become a 3 dollar a day waitress. She just smiles and says, "no." He continues to check the menu. Imagine any one of those silly cinematic montages to illustrate timing passing; the hands of a blurry clocks turning quickly, pages of a calendar falling from the wall, days and numbers flying by in a dreamlike fashion, the ticking of a clock, all of these were flashing through my mind as we sat there. Finally, and I mean finally, a good five minutes later, he says, "Curry?" She nods, turns and leaves. It was a miracle.
Literally less than 3 minutes later, two bowls of "Noodle Beef" come to the table, along with a huge plate of florescent green mush. We noodle-eaters both take our chopsticks and dive into our gigantic bowl of noodles, which has been carefully scalded to the incredible temperature of roughly 457 degrees. I think in order to get these noodles to this intense temperature, they needed to send them into space and have them heat up during reentry... Meanwhile, my picky eater pal, plays with his mush briefly, and then signals to the waitress. She arrives, and as he says, "Rice?" She smiles, and we smile. He says again, "Rice?" and she smiles and then leaves to return with the Coke we all had forgotten was ordered as soon as we sat down, you know, about 35 minutes before we actually ordered. 2 days later, or so it seemed, when the Noodles cooled to the average temperature of molten lava, we slurped and spilled our way to full stomachs, while my fussy friend reluctantly found a way to eat most of his lunch, and avoid a stomach pump.
