Yesterday (Friday 8.9.) we (me, AJ, Henkka, Livia and Philip) went to Shenzhen to do some shopping and see what the real China looks like. I quess that Shenzhen is still not like the real China, but at least it is less western than HK. Only a minority of the people speak English, and since I don't speak Putonghua at all yet, it was very interesting to bargain and order food.

The prices are lower than here in HK, but shopping and bargaining are more difficult because of the language barrier. The first prices are even more bizarre than in Mong Kok. For a collar shirt or trousers the initial price can be like ~150rmb:s (RMB=yuan, 1€ is ~10rmb) you can get them by less than 50... Most of the stuff is counterfeit, at least in street markets, but there are some nice quality Chinese brands in some distant shopping malls. I bought such collar shirt by 50rmb:s. Remember using counterfeit clothes is piratism! =)

So this is what Shenzhen looks like:







What can I say.. A lot of variety.. First there is a golden skyskriper, and the next building is under demolishion. Next to the main road there are very poor looking houses. First impression from everything is that China is a country of opposites.

Hints for travellers: if you go to Shenzhen and to some shopping area with your friends, arrange a meeting somewhere at some time. It wasn't a nice feeling to get lost from your friends and be all alone in the masses of people and notice that you can't make a phone call with your HK prepaid simcard... I wandered there alone for about an hour and half untill AJ called me from his Finnish simcard, which he fortunately had with him. Well, my situation wasn't even a bad one, since Livia and Philip gave their passports to AJ (he had a safe pocket), and they didn't know where AJ was either. After all, with AJ's Finnish simcard we could find each other, but without it they would have been totally lost...

What else? The food in Shenzhen is much cheaper than in HK, and thus you can go to pretty nice restaurants pretty cheaply. A nice meal with a Tsing Tao beer costs about 25rmb:s. Unpaid commercial: Tsing Tao is actually pretty good =) In addition, we went to a very nice restaurant for Tsing Taos. It was on the top floor of a 5 star hotel, and the view was nice =) People there were in suits and night dresses, we were in shorts and t-shirts (inappropriate?). Well, they didn't mind the money... It was like 45rmb:s for a beer, which is insanely much in Shenzhen, but it was worth it =) The place was in the Panglin Hotel, 2002 Jiabin Road. Here is a lousy picture of the restaurant: