Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

There’s an Apple Store coming to Beijing. The three-story building is being designed by US architect Ben Wood, who runs an architecture firm called Studio Shanghai:

Beijing’s second official Apple store will be built on Qianmen Street, just blocks away from Tianamen Square. It will open this fall.

I wrote previously about buying faux purses in Shanghai, but another great fake good I bought was a leather “Prada” wallet. I needed a wallet to replace my aging and small genuine Kenneth Cole, since it couldn’t really fit all of my credit cards. So, when we ran into a small stand on the streets outside of XiGong area, I bought one for 25 RMB:

As you can see, it’s very pain. There was another wallet identical in every way, except the bottom right corner read “Gucci” instead of Prada. Nice way of differentiating the products! Mass production for the win…

However, this wallet is quite large. It can hold 9 cards, plus 1 ID, and pockets for miscellanies. There are two billfold sections for holding dollars / receipts / etc. Anyway, for $3.66, I think it’s a fair deal!

If you’re looking to buy a fake purse, handbag, bag, watch, or even shirts, ties, and iPods in Shanghai China, there’s plenty of selection. Today, I went shopping for fake bags for my two sisters. We headed to Nanjing Road (南京西路) aka People’s Square and waited to be approached by a fake-goods peddler (they carry laminated cards with faded samples of the goods).

This is approximately the location; there’s a huge, wide walkway for people–no cars, lined with stores. If you haven’t been to Nanjing Lu, you haven’t been in Shanghai too long.

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You should expect to pay 100-300 RMB for bags, depending on quality & size. Some bags are cheap fakes, other higher quality fakes are indistinguishable from the real thing, because they’re made as an extra run in the factories making the real things, and sold on the side. For example, we bought this high-quality knockoff LV bag for 300 RMB:

I’m not sure which LV bag it’s most similar too–the Claudia Monogramme Multicolor seems close–but for $45 we received a bag that would cost upwards of $2,000 on 5th Avenue in NYC. I also bought two watches, in the 150 RMB range (probably too much):

Some other suggestions I’ve seen to find counterfeit goods in Shanghai include (but not limited to):

• Science & Technology Museum underground shops
• Qipu Lu
• HengShan Lu
• Xiang Yang Market (now closed)

Using Bittorrent (BT) in China is quite a bit more difficult than in the US. Popular trackers, such as the ubiquitous PirateBay are blocked. Torrent sites are blocked. Torrent software such as uTorrent does not appear to discriminate against geographically distant peers.

Currently in Shanghai, I’m downloading a torrent with 500 seeds and another 500 peers on uTorrent. Most of these came from decentralized systems (DHT, Peer Exchange) and not from a tracker:

Name			Seeds	Peers	Downloaded
[DHT]			198	170	0
[Peer Exchange]		523	587	0
mightynova (timed out)	6	7	30

The speed is also nothing to write home about, at 10 KB/s, about 120x slower than my 1.1MB/s I get on Verizon FIOS back in NYC:

According to Speakeasy’s speed test, the connection here gets 123 KB/s down, so it’s not that I’m hitting the cap, yet! If you’ve got hints, let me know.

You might not know it, but Pizza Hut in China (必胜客) is strictly a black-tie affair. The western pizza joint is significantly more upscale in Shanghai than back home, with elegant staff and fixings and a pricier gourmet menu.

The first store was opened in 1998 in Shanghai. There are now more than 200 restaurants in China, even some in Mongolia and Uyghur regions!