Saturday 25th April 2009

I started my day off with having a light breakfast with Eunice in our room. We met Wee Tyng and Lee Peng and our china buddies in the lobby and headed towards the bus stop. On our way, we got ourselves "bao" to eat. The "bao" was different from those we had back in Singapore. The filling was great. We tried all 3 flavours (chicken, pork and beef). The skin was bad though. It turned soggy and oily after awhile. Having stayed here for almost a week, I would say the food are mostly prepared using quite an amount of oil. Nevertheless, the bun kept us warm in the cold weather.

Then there was the bus ride. It was the 2nd time we took a public bus (no. 414), and the experience is still like a roller coaster. Due to some parts of the road which were uneven, the bus ride was a bumpy one. I was observing our 4 buddies' expression, and I realised they were shocked by the bumps too. It was a rather cute scene as we would expect them to be used to bumpy rides.

After about 40 minutes of bus ride, we reached the place. It was an underground shopping area. It totally threw us off our feet because there were so many shops! Too many to even finish shopping all in a day. Initially we thought it was a totally different place from the one the rest have been to on friday (underground shopping). However, only at the end of the day, Wee Tyng and Lee Peng then realised that it was the same underground shopping centre. You can imagine how big it was! It was really huge, as if they have a north, south, east, and west wing shopping centre and 5 basement level. We can never finish all in a day!

We started from the last level up. There were around 50 shops or more on this level alone, all selling apparels, head gears, accessories, bags. A pattern was common amongst these shops. They categorised the area into different sections in such a way that there was a level for shoes, near to 6 rows of shops selling bags and one level for apparels. The design of those apparels did not repeat much, like Singapore's Bugis Street. In fact, they are so many different designs to choose from.

We had lunch with our buddies later in the afternoon and we continued shopping. Basically it was quite a good shopping experience because of the low prices. However, some of the salesperson did frighten us because they do not like it when we lower the price to an extend that they cannot accept and they will start cursing and swearing. Our buddies helped us to bargain and we were of course thankful for that. We bought them drinks in the later afternoon because we could see that they were very tired.

(Something I did not mention was, my clumsiness caused quite a lot of trouble for my buddies. I was browsing a shoe from a display shelve which was facing out. I was curious and wanted to see what was the base like, then disaster happened. Just as I was about to put it back, it toppled and fell into a bucket of water which was just right next to the shelve! My reaction was "oh my..!" My buddies immediately told me to put the shoe back onto the shelve. I am so glad I listened to them and acted fast, because the next moment when we pretended to walk away, a salesperson came out. She tried to arranged it and was angry to find that it was dripping with water! She was also once again, cursing and swearing, demanding to know who wet the shoe. We obviously did not admit it as I would probably have to pay for it. I felt really guilty to have caused my buddies so much trouble. They are really a bunch of kind and helpful people.)

We ended off our day with grocery shopping and quick dinner. We thanked our buddies before we bid farewell to them in the cab...