Tianjin

So Sunday July 29th at 5.00am I arrived back in Beijing. Bright, alive and ready for the day ahead...not. My hostel didn't even have a free bed available at that hour, so I dumped my stuff and went off on a day trip to Tianjin, a city just outside Beijing itself that's reasonably well-known for it's concession-era architecture. It was somewhere that was not Beijing so, worth a look.
I think I severely underestimated how tired I actually was, and the day was a bit of an effort, but had a few highlights. The first was wandering round an antiques market trying hard not to buy things. I'd never had that much luck with haggling in the past and always tried to drag someone like Seven out with me to get the best prices, and now I know why. It's all down to your role. In the past I was out with the purpose to purchase. Wrong strategy.

This time I was out 'just looking' and was up to the sellers to flex their persuasive muscle and make me buy something I blatantly did not want. There was no shortage of takers. I was dragged into this shop, then that shop, all over the place. I looked at lots of antique vases, some 'apparently' over 800 years old. I didn't believe that. When the price went down from 1400 to 100 yuan plus an ancient scroll thrown in for free then you just know they're getting desperate! I had to laugh when one poor man pulled out a piece of pottery with a badly crazed surface and started to explain that it had been recovered from an ancient shipwreck, pointing out half a cockle shell polyfilla'd onto the side! I may not have been a fantastic archaeologist, but please, a little credit!

Some of the stuff was genuine enough, and quite nice, and the prices I was getting were pretty decent, but there was no way I was going to get some ming dynasty vase back to the UK in one piece so talked my way out of any purchase by pretending to be meeting my friend 'who was bringing the money', which in itself usually knocked another 100 or so off the price!! I did buy one little thing for myself but apart from that had an entertaining hour just looking round. When else do you get the opportunity to have a close up look at museum-worthy pieces for free?
After all this I had a crap lunch then walked round the old foreign concessions down Jiefang Beilu, which used to be known as Rue de France, which gives you an idea of what it's all about down here. It was nice enough, but some of the buildings are suffering a bit in places.
After a little while I got bored and decided to head back to Beijing. I was meeting Anthony's family that evening and had to grab a shower before we all met up. It was good to see them after all I'd heard about them, and we had a good time at the German Brauhaus next to their hotel, which was very nice indeed.