Today we awoke to a snow-dusted Beijing. Madeline was thrilled until she discovered that the snow melts with a black residue on her hands. At any rate, it was a beautiful day despite the frigid temperatures.
After making our saturday morning calls to friends and family in the US, we went to a breakfast party at a neighbor’s house. Afterwards, we headed to the Laitai Flower Market to start shopping for Xmas gifts. We didn’t have great luck so we headed down to Silk Street which is always a great place to shop in Beijing. These are all a haggler’s paradise.
A huge contingency of Europeans were shopping there. Apparently, they fly to China to shop because they can almost offset the price of the trip with the savings. Their first stop is always the luggage area to buy big rolling suitcases. Then they work their way through the market, filling up the suitcase with clothes, pearl jewelry, and other gifts.
Afterwards, we headed to the Kempinski for desert and a stroll through the Lufthansa shopping center which is a modern mall with very high-end merchandise - the real versions of the stuff we were shopping for at Silk Street. This is the nutty dichotomy of China - it’s either the crazy-cheap bazaars OR it’s high-end shopping malls with stores we can’t afford.
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