It looks so romantic from afar.
Jill and I get a weekly massage at Butterfly Nail Salon and massage in the massive Yashow Market in Sanlitun.
This market sells clothes, electronics, jewelry, and all kinds of other stuff.
And, everything is knock offs and usually pretty cheaply made.
In fact you can get a Burberry/Hermes/Louis Vitton scarf for about 10 bucks.
5 bucks if you bargain hard.
The quality isn’t the best but when you are in China, no one knows the difference so you can impress people that are easily impressed with supposedly expensive stuff.
I personally don’t care about brand names so I don’t bother with this stuff but it is a great way to buy a bunch of gifts, at a very low price, to bring back home and people seem to do that a lot.
The basic idea is to see what they offer, and then start at about 1/4 of the price and never go over 1/3 of the price at the end.
In reality it is a pretty stupid thing because people that know what they are doing will just waste time (like us) as we try to get down to the price we know they will sell it to us and we aren’t tourists that will overpay.
Nothing says romance like sour love.
However, they make loads of money off the tourists that do overpay so we are stuck bargaining when we know what is a fair price and just want to get it over with.
Trust me, either way, they are making loads of money because this stuff costs them nothing to produce.
Anyway, there is some classic Chinglish at the Butterfly Nail Saloon in Yashow.
We’ve gone a number of times, but I didn’t realize it until just recently.
So, if you are in love, I hope these words don’t come true:
“May your love SOUR on the wings of doves in flight.”
Now, I know they meant to write, “May your love SOAR on the wings of doves in flight” but I have to admit it sort of sounds like a death knell of a relationship.
Maybe I’m just not romantic enough to get the meaning.
To each their own.