The start of my weekend started exactly as planned. On Saturday morning I got up bright and early and went off to the Cultural market. This market is by Hero mountain. We were accompanied by Cynthia and Reed. There were a lot of people at this place when we got there. The people were selling all sorts of stuff. There was a huge rock market. They sold all types of rocks (polished, unpolished, interesting, dull), and even some pretend jade stuff as well. After the rock market we went down the one street. On either side of the street were book stores. There were a lot of people in between the building selling stuff in the middle. They sold all sorts of cultural items, and goods. There were people selling watches from famous brands (although they weren’t), people selling plants, some selling pictures and books, and other selling what Nathan was interested in buying. . Nathan bought a tea pot and some cups. The teapot took a while to pick out since there were so many different pots to choose from. He ended up taking a dark colored pot and the same colors cups. After the cultural market we walked down a little bit and got to the bird market. There were all types of birds here. Some of the birds seemed familiar to me, such as the cockatiel and the small green birds. Some other birds were as familiar, these would be the black birds and some other types. The best talking birds were the black birds. They looked almost like the birds from The Birds. Some of them were able to say hello, and ni hao (hello in Mandarin). That was the end of our trip at the cultural market. After this we headed on over to the bus.

Our adventure was only half over at this point. We took the bus till the end of the line and got off at Carefore. This is a famous French supermarket. Here is the place I bought a controller to play games on the PC. I bought a controller that very closely resembles a playstation dual shock controller. I probably paid more than if I would have gone to the electronics market but I am satisfied with only have to pay basically $11 Canadian. So far it has been working really good. After Carefore we rode on the bus all the way home.

Sunday:
We didn’t go computer shopping like we though we might. Instead we went with Jerry to the IT market. Here, Nathan wanted to buy a 256mb usb flash stick. The stick itself is grey in color and made of metal. It weighs slightly more than most but it feels so much more stronger. After Nathan picked out the flash stick he wanted to buy a network cable tester. This device tests to make sure that all the cable in a Cat5 cable are good. A simple device that doesn’t really cost a lot. The only thing I was kind of interested in was if anyone would have Gameboy Advance flash carts. Too bad nobody did, and if they did they didn’t tell me. It doesn’t seem that video games on the tv or portable are popular over here. Most people seem to stick to the online pc games such as Counter-Strike.

After the IT market we got on the bus and went west across town to the Electronics market. This market sells all sorts of interesting pieces that seem really cool. They have switches, fuses, solder, soldering irons, cable, wires, mcu, cpus, circuit boards, different procesors, lcds, and other things that people could use for their electronics goods. The place was really big with a lot of people selling their stuff. Thats one of the big differences that I notice. In Canada at shops there will only be one person and they seem to carry a lot of everything. At these places there are a lot of people and each person seems to carry a lot of one type of good. Another thing that I haven’ done (since I didn’t buy anything) is bargain the people down to get the best price. That was the end of our day with Jerry, and the end of our weekend! It was a good time, and hopefully it is a preview to what out 7 day holiday will be like coming up on May 1 – May 7.