Wangfujing and Silk Street

After Chinese class today, we ventured over to Wanfujing Dajie, which is the shopping hub of Beijing, with a bunch of huge malls with Chinese and Western stores and alleyways full of people who will grab your arm as you walk by and try to convince you to buy everything from chopsticks to posters of chairman Mao for about 15 times (or more) what they're worth. It's a really fun place though - definitely bustling. My favorite part might have been the fountains which were dancing to "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" which I found to be a little ironic in China. And I saw some of the most exotic snacks I had seen yet...

At the entrance to the snack street. We posed for a quick picture, then these Chinese men came over and started taking pictures of us taking pictures. Haha.

Scorpion Kabob, anyone? How about a seahorse instead?

This guy kept trying to get me to eat these grapes he had?

After that we took a really long walk over to Silk Street, which is basically a 4-story black market full of stalls of people with "Louis Vuitton" and "Gucci" stuff. It's a huge place for haggling and bargaining, and also a lot of fun. I'm usually super non-confrontational, but I for some reason I got really into the whole haggling thing today, and just followed my friends around and knocked down prices for them. I also spent a whole lot of the time just chatting with the people selling the stuff, which was SUPER interesting. They were really fun to chat with, even if they were really suspicious of me wanting to know about their lives (My favorite line was "You are too happy. Why are you so happy? You need to calm down."). They all have been to language schools teaching them how to sell things to Americans so their English is pretty good and it was amazing how much you could get them to cut prices by asking a little about their family, etc - that, and telling them in Chinese that we were sisters, which I learned how to say in class today :).

"Proving" that the purse is real by setting it on fire?

Our new black market salesmen friends :). So much fun.

We head out to go hiking on the Great Wall tomorrow, which should be pretty awesome.