Don't Judge a Shop by its Cover

Don’t Judge a Shop by its Cover

11-12 September 2010

Shanghai, China

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This was a pretty functional weekend, so I’ll keep it short. On Saturday, Gerald and I went to Carrefour to stock up our flat. We got important things like bedding, notebooks, and Jack Daniel’s. The Carrefour was huge and had shallow escalators for taking your shopping cart between floors. The didn’t waste any selling space: products lined both sides of the escalators.

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We also needed to make a bunch of photocopies so spent a good part of a very rainy day searching for an evidently underground FedEx Kinko’s. In the end we stopped at a very sophisticated-looking digital imaging shop expecting they could make copies for us. They couldn’t but they pointed us back up an alley to a store that looked like the entry to a house except for its red neon sign. (Please see pictures.) Indeed, we walked in and a Chinese man and his wife uncovered a computer, scanner, and printer from under a sheet and proceeded to make copies of our documentation for our landlord and to submit to the police in order to get our temporary residence registrations.

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My other functional need was an Ethernet cable. Based on the uncanny surprise of where we found our copying services, I slipped out to a shop next door that I had noticed had a wide range of things including surge protectors. Using my dictionary, I looked up the word for “cable” and “Internet” and, lo and behold, that little store saved me from a trip across town to Best Buy. The cable cost 10 kuai or about $1.50. (This store also pictured with the inexplicable heading “Rose Garden”.)

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Pictures: not-FedEx-Kinko’s; not-Best-Buy; French efficiency at Carrefour