Shopping

On Saturday we went shopping with Alan and Karen for our winter clothes. It was also our first real chance to see the city centre. There's three main parts to the commercial centre of Harbin: the shops around the pedestrian street called Zhong Yang Da Jie, which is a pretty cobbled tree-lined street built by the Russians; Nan Gang, which is the business end of the city, a jam-packed bustle of businessmen, shoppers and cars, an endless flex and flux of building and rebuilding, its dug-up streets bordered by towering department stores and office blocks; and the underground market, a huge Cold War era bunker that stretches for miles underneath the city, and is now a massive subterranean shopping centre. Behind the pedestrian street lies an ancient bright green and sandstone Russian orthodox church called St Sophia's, with pointed domes that wouldn't look out of place next to the Kremlin, which has somehow survived the destruction of China's recent past, and now sits in surreal isolation, surrounded by brand-new city skyscrapers and high-rise shopping centres.

The crowds! Especially in the department stores and underground market, the sheer volume of people is immense. Toe-crushing. Rib-cracking. Head-spinning. I felt like a character in a movie, you know when time stands still for just that one person but the rest of the world keeps on moving in a blur all around him, all speeded up, with that one man unmoving, isolated, distinct?

The floor of the underground market is spread with sawdust, which is swept into piles continuously by these little women in blue overalls with long wide brooms. The sawdust is to absorb the gallons of spit ejected onto the ground every day. By evening, the sawdust must be bloated and wet with the phlegm of thousands. A horrible thought. A horrible job.

To buy anything down here you have to haggle. Alan is very good at this. Almost too good, it turned out. We had been advised to buy quilted jackets and thick ski-pants, all of them fake, all of them cheap. He took us to a shop in the underground market where we picked out jackets and saluppettes and asked how much. The women stated her price, whereupon Alan pulled an insulted face and let out a low whistle. He told her (in Chinese) he'd been coming to this shop for some time, and that these new guys were teachers at the same school. If she gave us a good price we'd come back. The woman thought for a moment, seemed to agree. They talked some more in Chinese, the woman all smiles. However, the price of our clothes didn't seem to go down much. Then, Alan threw down the jacket he'd been eyeing himself and walked off, Tam and I hot on his heels. We asked him what the problem was.

'Well, it's not my problem, more yours,' he replied, cryptically.

'Huh?'

'In fact, she was willing to give me a very good discount indeed, on my jacket, as long as I'd let her overcharge you on yours.'

Seems like I've still got a lot to learn here. But when I do, this haggling business might be fun.