Now I see!

When we first got here, we were told that you could get prescription glasses for practically nothing in China, and that the place you could do that was right next to what is called the dirt market, where you can get antiques, authentic and otherwise, of all kinds. Accordingly, we planned an afternoon to make the excursion.

Our first stop was the glasses mall,
where it turned out that I could actually get glasses for practically nothing. I bought a pair of prescription sunglasses, and a pair of regular glasses for 350 Yuan, or about $55. The cute Chinese girls in the store, and Lori my co worker helped me to pick out some fun frames to try out. I always feel like I need to be conservative when spending hundreds of dollars on glasses at home, because it is an expensive risk if I don’t end up liking something. But for $20, I wanted something a bit more fun, so my new regular glasses are tortoise shell and lime green, and much larger than usual! It has been fun to try them out! It took them 2 hours to make the glasses, so we went over and spent the afternoon at the dirt market.

It was a shopping mecca with all kinds of different things, from artwork, to jewelry, to ceramics and fabrics, and most of it was cheap, and so fun to browse. The layout had a main building filled with real antiques, furniture and expensive artwork. Then there are small shops built into the walls that hold the next tier down in terms of quality and price. Then you get the stalls under the covered area, the blankets on the ground in the covered area, and the blankets on the ground in the “bring your own umbrella or swelter in the sun” area. Prices and quality dropped at each level, so depending on what we were looking for, the further we got from the main building, the less we paid for what we were buying. Mostly we just picked up a few trinkets, but had fun wandering and seeing what people were selling, and watching the other people shopping.