China According to Brad: Zongshang Street (Walking Street)

Well I typed out 3/4 of the blog post disconnected from the internet and then I updated firefox and lost it all. Grrrr I hate retyping things.

Basically Chris and I went to Zongshang Street (a street closed to cars in the center of Xiamen) and walked around looking for a guitar string and a keyboard.

Zongshang Street is one of the oldest "roads" in Xiamen. It was where the British established a settlement when they first started opening up China to trade.

Xiamen may be better known to some as Amoy, and was one of the early places where trade was allowed.

It is now full of little shops, vendors, and restaurants and a pretty neat place to spend a night wandering.

Here are some photos of assorted shops and vendors.

Food vendor

After at a particularly bad attempt at trying to order food at a buffet (The girl we dealt with will not be my partner if we ever play charades! She also continued to speak very rapid Chinese even after asking her to slow down and and telling her we didn't understand in Chinese) we decided to to try Xiamen KFC to see if it was any different and for ease of ordering. It wasn't. (but it was easy to order)

After we walked around a bit and I amused my self by taking pictures of all of the obvious attempts of Chinese businesses to knock off American brands.

Examples:

"Pearl Boy" and obvious knock off of "Playboy" bunny and all, sold mostly women clothing.

This company sold running shoes. I'd wager that swoosh is identical to the Nike swoosh if you flipped it over.

Crocodile sold men's work clothing. Their Croc logo looks just a liiiiitle bit like that of Lacoste.

http://brandnoise.typepad.com/brand_noise/images/lacoste_logo.gif

This one didn't seem to be knocking anyone off, but I had to take a picture for obvious reasons. Unfortunately it was just a logo. The store only sold bed sheets that didn't even have dinos on them.