Barbie World

Friday night I went out for a meal with the other expat lawyers again, which was good fun but they were going away for the week so they didn't fancy staying out too late. They were going to Suzhou and invited me to go with them but I've been before and was playing football on the sunday and had vague plans for the saturday night so turned them down. Think we are planning on going away somewhere in april as we have a "bank holiday" one week - tomb clearing festival!



Saturday day with the others out of town I wasn't too sure what to do with myself so just ended up walking around again. This time I walked around the French concession and ended up staying out for about 5 hours. One of the things I bumped into was ths Shanghai barbie shop/museum. this was an absolutely fascinating place. 6 floors of bright pink with everything you could possibly think of emblazoned with the barbie logo and on sale for a ridiculous price. They had a circular stair case that went up from ground to 6th floor that was encircled with different barbie toys. There was even a barbie cafe with barbie burgers and pink drink!

The people in there were mainly shanghai's new rich with their spoilt kids and other curious foreigners. Some of the kids were throwing horrendous stops because their parents refused to buy them things. Most of the girls in there had an obsession with pink - as you can see from the photo at the bottom.

The chinese have an obsession with blonde hair. The people who I were with before who had blonde hair would get stopped in the street all the time and people would try to pluck hairs from their heads as they walked past - so it's no wonder that they chinese have such love barbie. In all it was quite an odd experience - surely this type of thing only happens in china?

I'm a barbie girl - in a barbie world.