Duck Season

Hong Kong is supposedly a center of commerce, so I got dragged around to various malls where I get to stand around doing nothing for 5 hours. Some observations:

--Everything is on sale! 10% off, 20% off, 30% off, even 70% off! Basically, everything here is sold like how Persian rugs are in the US. It's not only roadside stores or those that sell seasonal goods, it's major department stores, even the high end ones. For people who live here, they probably know what is a good price and what isn't, but it's impossible for most tourists.

--With floating prices there is also a lot of haggling. Even when something has a price tag on it and it's "on sale", the price is still negotiable. Of everything I bought, I paid the listed price at only 1 store. Not that I know how to do it; this was all done by my mom who seems to be an expert at this kind of thing.

--"I'm not crazy I'm just a little unwell ..." All the stores that try to be cool here play American pop music. I remember hearing songs from Sister Hazel, Michelle Branch, Three Doors Down, Five For Fighting, Beyonce, and Dido.

--Many stores also have English (or at least non-Chinese) names. Among them there were some pretty hilarious names. Many of them take an English word and changes it by one of two letters, and turns it into something with a completely different meaning. One place I saw reference something inappropriate about a cherry. And guess what the store "Enter the Password" sells?

--Saw a Grant Hill poster in a sneakers store. Heh.

--Bad design: the escalators in malls are all in random places. If you want to go from the first floor to the fourth floor, you would need to find the escalator to the second floor, walk to a different part of the mall to find the escalator to the third floor, and repeat this process another floor up.

--Stores here openly sell counterfeit merchandise. The most auspicious are those selling CDs and VCDs; it's much easier to find a place that sells the counterfeit stuff than originals. There were also a lot of counterfeit stuff of Disney and other cartoon characters. Since no Hong Kong company stands to benefit from curtailing counterfeit stuff, the government doesn't bother to do it.