More things about Shanghai

Having the parking sign on the road tell you how many parking spaces are left in the parking lot is cool.

Not cool is getting into a near death experience in the car. Drivers here seem to have relatively little experience compared to a person in the US and it shows in their driving skills. Making a left hand turn is best when there are no oncoming cars. Personally, I dislike watching a car doing a full screeching brake heading towards the side off the car that I'm on. I had visions of being a whole lot thinner.

Cool is having stores sell tons of mp3/mp4 players and phones. It's all about choice. Probably something like 40-100 mp3/mp4 players in the stores, not including the iPod. Most are cheap Chinese brands, but some are quite interesting. I'm surprised they haven't done better in the US.

Shopping in Shanghai is quite different than the US. In the US, you do not encounter many faked items in the stores. In Shanghai, it's more likely that the items you're purchasing are faked, but at the same time, there's no way to tell if something is faked or not. Part of the problem is the obsession with name brands that many people have and the high prices that the original products sell for. Rather than use items that are not a known name brand, people will purchase cheap name brand items suspecting that they are faked.

The other oddity about Shanghai is the number of sales people in the stores. In the US, getting help in a store is hard. Sales people are pretty much focused around the cash register. In Shanghai, there's someone trying to be helpful in just about every department. In some of the stores, the number of sales people outnumber the number of customers.

Restaurants in Shanghai also operate with a higher number of service people. At our last lunch, we had three waitresses serving at the table. In the US, our waitress would be serving five or more tables at the same time.

One more interesting shopping tip in China. Most small back alley merchants don't publish their prices. If you ask how much something is, they'll look you up and down and figure out how much you can be ripped off for. It pays to do your homework and figure how much everyone else is willing to sell the items for. They'll usually start at two to ten times the price they'll end up at if you negotiate. Lowball them and when they balk, walk away. Amazingly, the price will start to drop. Do this a few times and you'll find the merchants who are willing to deal. Usually, the same stuff is sold by many merchants so don't worry about not finding that pair of chopsticks at another merchant. Of course, the merchants will complain that they're losing money and cannot feed their grandmother and kids at the same time they tell you to buy four or five instead of one.