William Chow's Personal Web Page

The year is 2006.

China Round 2

Friday, May 5, 2006

Today is going to be the day I do some computer shopping and get the pieces to assemble that computer. Now, my logic behind bring some of the parts of a computer and not some others was simple. Certain parts of a computer are name branded and thus there is no real cheap place anywhere in the world to get it because lets face it, they really only make Pentinum 4 Chips and AMD 64 Chips in very few places in the world, and unfortunately mainland China is not one of them. Memory chips is probably the same idea, where if you want to get the Korean or Japanese stuff, it will cost me more anyway. The place I get the savings is in the generic parts like the computer case, the fan, and the power supply are made in China, and don't have to be a name brand.

But first it was lunch time. Ami and Alexanderia, joined me for a nice lunch first. It was a big restaurant near Carre Four, they are famous for a special kind of dumpling referred to as "dumpling with snow". When we got there, it was relatively busy because someone was having a wedding banquet there.

Beef Strips : Thin cuts of roasted beef in a rich oyster sauce. This was very good too, although I think rice was needed for this lunch.
Lamb Strips : This a strip of lamb that has been covered in a light batter and fired up. This was not too bad either. The coating is very light not like prawns but more like tempura batter.

After lunch, we walked over to computer town to do shopping. We went to a Samsung dealer. They mostly carried things like monitors and some accessories. They had a wall of miscellanous computer cases. We picked a good solid ATX case, four 5.25" and two 3.5" bays, 350W power supply, regular price 270 yuan ($38 Cdn which is about how much I pay in Vancouver) but Ami got it cut 160 yuan ($22 Cdn). In the pricing battle for the computer case, I realized that Samsung makes a reasonable monitor and I figured I may as well buy the screen here too. Now, as nuch as I would have like to buy a flat screen and then bring it back home with me, I think I better just stick to the cheapest thing I could find. Well, they had a 794 MB Plus, 17" CRT for 1100 yuan ($158 Cdn). Now remember what I said about stuff that is made outside of China, for example this monitor is a Japanese one, The mark up on these things are so low, Ami could only bargain it down to 1070 yuan ($152 Cdn) which of course still too much considering I could have gotten refurbs from CompuCentre and Future Shop for $49 and clearance ones from The Source for $99 Cdn.

Anyway, while they were getting new ones of them from their "storage area", I also remembered that I wanted to put a DVDRW drive into this thing. Now I suppose I could have gone through all the hassle of trying to find BENQ or LGs or other name brands but you know, Samsung is good enough. So I just wrote on a piece of paper DVD-+RW, 8x RW, 48x R, 16X W and just gave it to the guy. The guy instantly knew what I was looking for. He got out a Samsung TS-H552D, your basic 48x16x8x DL DVDRW drive for 390 yuan ($55 cdn). Unfortunately, although not unexpectly, Ami could not get me a price discount on that. Our total came to 1630 yuan total.

We grabbed a taxi back home to begin setting it up.

The Experimental Chinese Food Of The Day is:
Dumpling With Snow (Xue Hua)

We actually had this at lunch. At the restaurant, Xihong Ji, they have this famous dumpling called Xue Hua. It by itself, the thing is a just a normal dumpling. You can choose the regular stuff inside like pork or vegatable or beef just like any other dumpling too. The only real difference is that sugar egg butter like topping painted over top. When cooking it, the coating hardens into a kind of web that looks like frozen ice on the surface of it. Purely for effect. The dumplings themselves are still full of water and oil. Still, it was very good.