My favorite new store

In my free time, I have been wandering around, looking for interesting places and rediscovering the city. So far, I have discovered the suspiciously gay Japanese magazine store (above), 2 specialist stores importing Brazilian fashion, one selling only babushka dolls and a Russian internet cafe, and 5 Thai DVD stores (two near my house – and yet, you still can never find the title you want! The Thai film industry has serious distribution problems.)

A vast Korean DVD store has sprung up near the city’s central instersection, and a new Korean convenience store decorated with magazine cut-outs of BoA and Yong-sama (but no Harisu )

I also wondered: How many other cities of four million people have a live sex show, a porno store and an STD clinic on their main street? Surely, the real estate is valuable enough to be used for something else…?

There is also an Ethiopian jewellery store than doubles as the country’s consulate, so you can fill out visa forms while you buy beads, and in the ever-growing Chinatown, a bubble tea cafe where you can sit on swing-seats decorated with plastic fake-jungle vines, and a restaurant serving only dishes enjoyed by Mao Tsetung, ( now with a spin-off restaurant dedicated to Deng Xiaoping’s favorite meals).

 

And the super-mainstream cineplex where I used to go to see “Ghost Busters” or “Jurassic Park” now also shows movies in Arabic.

Nightlife-wise, I saw an advertisement for Australia’s first “Water-only” bar, selling nothing but overpriced H20, and a place called “Dumplings Bitch!” where you can eat gyoza while you dance.

But my favorite new discovery has to be this place :

Chinatown Aquarium and Reptiles. A shop selling, as you would expect, fish and reptiles, but also – upstairs – pornography! Pornography and reptiles in the same store!! Admitedly the selection isn’t quite as good as some of the stores I saw in Tokyo (I’m talking about the reptiles here) but they did have something I have never seen before – big, fluorescent orange and deep blue creatures called “Sea Apples”, a kind of polyp that opens up and blossoms with feathery branches. Quite reasonably priced at $40 I thought too……