Shopping and bargaining

For those who are interested in our weekend trip in central Beijing I recommend to visit Nina’s blog (written in Slovak). And all my pictures you can find here
I will mention only one part of our trip and that’s visit of Pearl Market. Is department store, where you can find clothes, electronics and one whole floor is full of shops with ear-rings, bracelets, watches and other fancy stuff (Meno, tady by ses zblaznila :-) ostatne jako vetsina zenskych). Firstly I made small market research, find the most beautiful pear ear-rings and start bargaining. The lady was quite tough, so I was not able to reduce price by a single yuan. So I left and try to find another place, but they were much more expensive (on average 4x , after bargaining 2x than first shop) so I went back and try another strategy – pretending that I want to buy more pieces. But when we get to number five and price was still same (or more precisely 5 times higher) I resigned and bought only two pairs of ear-rings. Than I decided to find another shop to get my lost self-confidence back. I found a nice red tie with Chinese signs and ask for price – 35 RMB (1 RMB = 3 CZK, so quite cheap but I tried…). I sad no and I received new price 30, I sad 20, she sad 25, I sad ok gave her 20 and left with new tie whohoooo….
On the street here you can by almost anything, shoes, clothes, books (I found Harry Potter in English), toys, bags, watches etc. Twice I also met guy, who was selling small puppies (krasny roztomiloucky stenatka). Close to our office is place where is a lot of this street shops, so it takes some time to get to bus stop, especially when you go with girl :-) But yesterday it was funny, we went through this street and entered for while normal shop to buy local specialty – tea with milk and jelly – and suddenly we realized that the street is almost empty. Than I noticed three police officers, how they are shouting to some woman and she had to leave very quickly. But after five minutes most of the sellers were back. Business is business and this police cannot change.