Just wanted to make a quick post about an interesting phenomenon I observed.
Apparently, unregistered street vendors are against ordinance in Beijing--locals tell me this is new, and probably has a lot to do with the volume of Westerners running around this summer. But that won't stop the most determined nightmarkets, that spring up on busy corners at a moment's notice, but when they see flashing lights (the Police have a curious habit of making their presence very easily known when they "crack down" on such events), most nightmarket salesmen have some clever way of wrapping their goods up in a few second and hiding them as if they were simply heavy loads on a bicycle (for example, drawstrings around a mat that can be tugged to turn the mat into a bag). It frustrated our shopping attempts a few times, but was otherwise quite interesting.
Most of the goods being sold were cheap knockoffs, and the only cheap knockoffs I decided to buy were replica Cultural Revolution posters. I did some haggling with the man to bring it down to $5 for 3 of them--at that price, I should have gotten more. But perhaps another opportunity will crop up. The posters looked old and were printed on cheap brown paper, but this maybe made them look more authentic. The three I got included Mao/Zhu/Deng looking upon "progress" during the Great Leap Forward. The second was a portrait of a red/black/white Mao in front of very happy Communists. The third was a bunch of angry Communists aggressively uniting for something on the order of spreading Chairman Mao Zedong thought to the world. Pretty cool stuff. Let me know if you want one, I can look for more.
Strangely, though, it seems more complicated in this country to find what I'm looking for.
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