It is Le Cold
星期二, 十二月 06, 2005
memories of warmer weather: twin boys bicycling on campus
The mercury suddenly dropped this weekend and it is freezing cold in Beijing. Technically it is below-freezing, especially when the wind blows because, as indicated by the smoke puffing due south out of the 食堂 dining hall chimneys, the wind comes straight from the North. And what is North of China? Siberia.
Good thing Craig just bought a contraband North Fake jacket from 秀水市场 The Silk Market aka Knockoff Market this weekend. Contraband because a number of companies (like Gucci, Burberry, Prada) recently sued the market for selling knock-offs so there is now a big show of notices posted throughout the market saying certain brands such as North Face are no longer available. The stallkeepers have replaced inventory with knockoffs of other brands and even shout "Columbia? Columbia?" instead of "North Face" as you walk by.
We were looking at a jacket that looked suspiciously like North Face but minus the logo and tagged with a Chinese label instead. So imagine our surprise when we asked the stallkeeper for another size, and she pulled the identical jacket - except boldly emblazoned with "North Face" on the chest - from neatly folded pile hidden in a black rubbish bag! After some haggling and chitchat with the stallkeeper (where I discovered she is from Southern China and only knows the English for important selling terms such as "best price!" "very beautiful" and "small, medium, large"), we got the price down from the asking price of over 800 kuai to 200 kuai or 24 USD.
And it is a good knockoff as North Fakes go. Of course the shell isn't Gore-Tex but the zippers are good and even the snaps and lining are printed with North Face. Curious about how to tell a real from a fake, we did some googling where we discovered that zipper placement is one thing that separates real jackets from knockoffs: North Fakes have zippers on the left side while the real deal have zippers on the right.
On Craig's jacket: the zipper is on the left.
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