As luck would have it, the largest MixC shopping mall in China had just opened in Qingdao a couple weeks before our arrival. It was so new, the roller coaster wasn’t even working yet. Yes, the roller coaster. Shopping malls are not usually on my itinerary, but on this trip my fifth-grader was taking the lead. We ended up spending a couple days at the mall, and I mostly didn’t mind it. It was the biggest blow to American provincialism I had experienced in a while. I think of myself as being way beyond thinking America is the end-all, but even I tend to think that if America excels at one thing it’s commercialism.
We’ve got nothing on China. It would take days to explore the Qingdao MixC shopping mall, which contains a theme park, Olympic standard ice rink, and IMAX muliplex cinema, and you would not see a single American store. And it’s not even the only mall in town. Eye-opening.
