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Before I launch into travelogues in earnest, I had to include this. While in Shanghai all we did was shop. Really. At one point they dropped us off at a place where there was a huge collection on stalls, a hodge-podge of North Face knock offs, faux designer sunglasses, and imitations of every other possible brand you can think of piled on top of eachother (I even spotted some fake Von Dutch baseball caps...random). Not unlike the Silk Alley, for you Beijing people. Places like these often attract the foreigners like my group and the vendors tend to be on the shrill, obnoxious side. While it can be fun to browse and shop around, you go in knowing that people are going to be putting every ounce of effort into ripping you off beyond belief. I love the fake sales tags attached to stuff like these "designer" bags that read $8,000.00. That's one expensive imitation Prada purse, yo. In places like this in China, if the saleperson is speaker English to you, then you can pretty much count on being fleeced.

In Beijing, I had bought a winter hat that had a Timberland logo that read "Timrenlaad" -- they had some of the basic letters, and they almost got there. When you're buying stuff like that, though, the vendors are like: "it's the REAL thing." I love it. Sometimes you can find the real thing in these stalls (I got some Tevas and an Abercrombie skirt that I still wear that have lasted through the ages), but you pay for them.

Anyway, another attraction for foreigners in China are the pirated DVDs that are being so cracked down upon. Places like that market are usually where you can find them. People will mill around murmering "Hello, dvds? Hello, dvds?" under their breaths to you, and you nod and then follow them down some dark alley where they will pull out a shoe box filled to the brim with pirated movies, stuff that only just hit the theater in the States. Real kosher stuff. You pay anywhere from 60 cents to $2.00 for each movie, and it's a gamble as to whether they work or not. Often they're filmed in the theaters, so you're treated to people's coughs, laughs, and trips to go to the bathroom.

Erik got "Van Helsing." Like any other DVD cover, they include reviews of the movie. On closer examination, he discovered that the reviews were these:

On the front: ONE CATCH. IT'S NOT GOOD. - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

On the back: UNDERWHELMING AND OVERBLOWN. - Ty Burr, The Boston Globe.

That is so awesome. In other cases the information on the DVDs was just pulled some random sources (for instance, on my cousin, Alex's "Harry Potter" the movie description was of "Die Hard 2") but here, instead of slapping together any old crap, they were looking at actual reviews (of this movie or another) and just happened to choose the worst ones to display.