soyoufound.me

It must have been on March 28, a fine Sunday morning, when I decided to take the subway and get off at a particular station that seemed to have a resonance from the last time I was here (but could not remember why). I walked around and found a mall, entered and exited and walked around some more. It was then that I caught sight of Ikea, a happy place. Oddly enough, my purchase was that of a very functional bag.

the Ikea bag

when opened

Wandering aimlessly but with the intention of getting back to the subway station, I chanced upon a bookstore. (Naturally, I was going in the wrong direction but that happens so often it ceases to surprise people.) There were a couple of shelves with English-language books and to my delight, the books were not entirely of old Western classics (nothing wrong with them, just that we need more variety) and English textbooks (again nothing wrong with them but not really that delightful to read).

Interestingly, the books did not have the RMB-tag prices and only had the usual published US and Canadian prices on the back cover. When I asked the seller how much, she had me put the book on a machine that looked oddly like a digital weighing scale. I did. RMB8, she said. There must be a scanner on it that I couldn’t see, I thought. I computed for the peso equivalent in my head. P560. Not really that much different from book prices in Manila. Oh wait a minute… it’s P56! Not P560!! There must have been a mistake!

I got another book and asked the woman how much. Again, she made me put it on the machine. RMB9. RMB9? I repeated, making sure. RMB9, she confirmed.

Oh. My. God. Realization finally hit me. The machine WAS a digital weighing scale. The books were being sold by weight! Sure enough, a young lady brought a whole stack of books to be weighed before paying. Whoa! A whole bookstore of pirated books! I loved it!!

my purchases

If I did not have the weight of my baggage to consider, I would have bought more. Seriously.

Tags: books, china, great gratefulness, Shanghai

This entry was posted by joni on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 6:21 am and is filed under Big Red China, Lighting the Lit Fire, Out and about. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.