Shopping in Shenzhen

Somewhere in Hong Kong there must be a vast graveyard of window treatments and light fixtures. When apartments turnover (at least in our complex), all the window treatments and light fixtures are removed; new tenants are responsible for selection and installation of new ones.

For us, this means that we have single light bulbs on our ceilings and newspaper or nothing on the windows - it's a sad sight! So, last Friday we headed to Shenzhen, China to do some shopping.

We went to a district that was like a huge Home Depot, but with each department broken into many, many, many separate small shops within a mall-like building (usually not air conditioned!).

It could have been completely overwhelming, but we had fantastic assistance from a person from Dave's office. She's amazing - can speak Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and is a terrific negotiator. And, she is Lydia's newest friend. We enjoyed spending the day with her.

Window treatments were easy; we picked out the same blinds for our entire apartment and were done in less than 30 minutes. As for the lighting selection...WOW. There was an unbelievable amount to choose from and we needed to choose 14 fixtures.

If we were in the market for very formal crystal chandeliers, we would have been done in about five minutes. But, since we're not into formality or crystal, it was a little more challenging. There were some pretty wild designs. Several shop owners bragged that their products were imported from other countries like Italy and Australia. I'm not sure if that was accurate or if they were trying to make their products more appealing to Americans. In any case, here's a selection of items we did NOT choose (my apologies for the dark photos; ironically, lighting in the lighting stores was poor).

A pirate ship:

A funky feather chandelier:











The ever popular "birds nest" design; the eggs are the lights (as the ceiling shows, this shop was in a very old building):

After the full day in China, we came back to Hong Kong to check out some additional shops. I'm happy to report that on Saturday we made final decisions and our lights are ordered. I don't think we have the stamina to have another day of that kind of shopping!