Shanghai crippled by Olympia.

My brother's in town during his summer vacation, and that was reason enough to visit a fake market yesterday. He wants to stock up on some nice things. We went to the nearest one on Nanjing road, but were shocked to learn that Olympia has reached even to there. No watches available. No DVD's. No fake iPhones. Nada.

Of course, they have insane amounts of faked T-Shirts and other cheap stuff, but it felt liked a half-hearted fake market. And the shop keepers seemed kind of silent - I was asked to 'looky looky' only three times, and we spend almost an hour there. Weird. Really weird. And police! We passed police guys like three or four times. The security seems rather strong there at the moment, too.

So we only bought half of what we wanted, we didn't find any fake Nike shoes (what!), only these fugly Crocs everywhere and 90's Converse sneakers. Back to the future, baby. I wonder what the shopkeepers eat during Olympia, their income will probably be pretty low.

Then we went to two different DVD stores, while I really want that new Angelina Jolie movie WANTED my brother wanted some TV-series. WANTED is out on the net as a downloadable DVD image, so I was pretty sure that the stores would have a DVD-9 already. Wrong.

They told me that until after Olympia, there will be no new movies arriving. None.

And last week, I went to a pharmacy to buy some stomach ache fighting medicine for my wife which I had bought there before, only to learn that you now need to go to the hospital to buy certain kinds of medication - 'until Olympia is finished'.

Damn. I never thought that this 800 kilometer far away event would ever really 'touch' my life in some way. But it does. Not in a good way.