Shopping - Shanghai style

For our day by ourselves, we did the following:
Went to the French concession where they have a lot of foreign restaurants, and to Amy B's delight, a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf

Ate lunch at a hot pot restaurant (eddies recommendation), where we managed to order ourselves a pretty good meal, considering I couldn't really decipher the menu, and the only English speaking waitress had difficulty explaining some of the things on the menu. Oh, I also had to draw a shrimp in order to indicate that we wanted shrimp. Pictionary does come in handy!

Took a night time river cruise, which was beautiful!

Got a full body massage at the hotel!

In between all that, we shopped. Shopping in China is different for tourists. You barter. And you barter for the price you think it cost for them to make it...and that's probably still even a bit high. If you are shopping for knockoffs, you follow middlemen to the back streets of Nanjing Road where they sell knockoff hand bags and shoes in small apartments. We followed two people into the back of the alley places for Lili to successfully acquire two Coach purses for $15 each. And you just keep bartering. You stick to your price, and if they don't give it to you, you walk away. And then they chase you, and then you stick to your price, and then they say no, and then you walk away, etc. And this goes on until they finally give it to you for the price you state. you communicate via calculator. You say yes or no.

This got to be very tiring, and we were all glad to go into UniQlo (Asian version of the Gap), and get clothes that we liked without having to barter for it. After that, it was a little more shopping here and there, and then we were done. =)