I promised
to write you guys, didn’t I? The theme I had in mind about writing my entries
was to bring up things that catch my attention, which I hope to imply certain
interest in other people as well. The story I have to tell you this time
happened to me about two weeks back, actually the day following my short-ish
introductory entry. Pretty much next to the campus is a place called
Wujiaochang (五角场, I like to translate it as “Five Corners Market”), a quickly rising shopping and business center with lots of  |
| Yup, they had floors. |
Pretty much
next to but still comfortably an arm’s reach away from Wujiaochang’s awesome
Shanghai First Food Mall (A place of which food courts I’d like wed in a holy
matrimony, can’t wait to let you hear about it more… I mean the mall, not the
wedding.) is an electronics and home appliances superstore Suning. It’s
basically four or three floors filled with all that you could possibly need in
your home, mansion, summer house, bungalow, teepee, prison cell or igloo.
The
floor level is dedicated to cell phones, cameras, tablets, cameras and the
required services to get you hitting the information highway like a proper
neo-first-world-consumer -monkey (assuming you are Chinese and not European or
some other OLD-first-world-consumer-monkey). Nothing interesting there, really,
so I didn’t feel like grabbing any pictures from there.
The second
floor instead was a miracle of sight and sound and, oddly, baby products. Above
the hand-held status symbol fidgets you can more often than not fit in your
shoe was a mustering ground for the Big Players. Check out THIS!
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| It's... beautiful! |
That
Samsung television defies reality. Its definition is better than real life. Its
screen is nothing less than 85” big (that’s 2.16 meters from corner to corner
for metric-thinking people), although it’s not the biggest the shop has to
offer. I can easily say it was the best television I’ve ever witnessed, the
minutes I was standing in front of it speak for it. My eyes were crying honey,
candy cotton and baby seals just by staring at them pixels, there were so many
of them! The price tag made me cry as well, but not because of joy (it also
slaughtered all those baby seals). 249 999 RMB/kuai/yuan, however you
like. That’s about 30 000 FOKKIN euros for a TV!
Besides
that, roaming around that TV heaven gave me an impression I was on another
planet or dimension. It was all familiar, but somehow nothing I saw there
looked like I had seen it before. Or what do you think?
Yeah, yeah,
I know you Chinese like to romanize your brand names into something
international, but “Konka”? Seriously? With a font smoothly snatched from
Nokia? That’s just… unsettling. Anyway, all those TVs looked like rather solid
and good-quality products, something that I could buy to my living room with
the money I will not have with me for years.
 |
| *hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm* |
Third floor
was filled with home appliances, you know, that stuff you actually NEED.
Washing machines, water boilers, coffee machines, and since we are in China,
water HEATERS!
That’s right, you don’t get hot water from the tap just like
that, you need to have a water heater to do that work. It’s maybe the worst
bathroom interior decoration element, I can’t think of any interior designer
that would not strangle them with his/her cashmere scarf just because of the
idea that they had to actually include those monstrosities above the supa-fancy
red porcelain toilet seat… Anyway, the mall was electronic one-stop for your whole home, go here and
you never need to go anywere else. Here’s some more footage for you with
captions that attempt to strike a chord in your sense of humor. If they don’t, forgive
me for bad taste. Next time I’m gonna talk something about food. Stay tuned!
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| Ain't that one sexy washing machine? |
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| Sometimes the brand names just don't hit the nail in the head. |
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| It's almost like Finnish, except the that guys who came up with that most likely don't even know Finnish exists. |
Emm, I'm most likely being stupid and not understanding your clever ironical marks about the water heaters, but they are quite common all over the world. If I'm not totally wrong almost every house here in Finland has a water heater too. They are called "lämminvesivaraaja" in Finnish. Here the winter is so long and cold, that the heaters are usually incorporated to the building plans which means that the heaters are hidden in the basement or garage. This means that you don't usually see the heater, which could be leading your thinking astray.
VastaaPoistaAccording to the Shanghai wiki page, the average temperatures stay above 0 Celsius. I'm going on a limb here but I'm guessing that this could mean that water heaters usually/sometimes are not incorporated to the building plans, which could lead to malls selling small water heaters, that we see in one of your pictures.They sell water heaters in hardware stores here too.
Oh and yes, I know about district heating too, but that usually is slightly reheated at the location, as far as i know at least. Water heating really isn't my strongest subject. Otherwise awesome blog post !!!
PS. Electricity is generated in the wall socket, right?
It seems that the Chinese don't have centralised approaches to heating water or room temperature... Most of the buildings seem to have an air conditioner in every single apartment, those ugly fans sticking out like boils on the other side of a building.
VastaaPoistaWe don't have heaters in buildings here either. Basically that means that the temperature and humidity inside the room is not that much different from outside. The point in water heaters is that they are just ugly and they take some space. I have one above my toilet seat in the already small bathroom. Not having central water heating means also that in the building where I study, tap water in the toilet only comes in fixed temperature, that is, cold... The water heater also turns on with a flick of a switch, it's not running all the time; therefore I see my hot water consumption in my electricity bill!
Maybe that clarifies the reasons for my irony. And you can't say they weren't ugly?!