Since all of Emma’s shoes are held together with hair clips and grim determination, we went shopping for a new pair around the fashionable end of Nanjing Lu. To me Emma has very feet-sized, even dainty feet; a UK size 5 1/2, but apparently in China she is verging on the specialist, the annecdotal.

We went to a department store which seemed to have roughly 8-9,000 different styles of plain black shoe, some of which took Emma’s fancy, some of which she took to the shop assistant.
“Do you have these in a size 39?”
she would ask in her elegant, faultless Mandarin (bear with me, I’m doing some damage limitation for talking about her feet on the interwwweb) the saleswomen would wave their hands in front of their face in a paroxym of awkward embarassment, back away nervously for fear of being crushed under enormous laowei soles, or laugh nervously and promise to go in the back and check- in the same way as a clerk in a glove shop might indulge a man with 8 fingers on each hand. Consistently though, no-one had a high-heel, boot nor flip-flop in anything bigger than a 38.

Photo by Liam
Me and Emma @ a shoe shop

On the other hand (or foot, haha!) I had a great time in a shoe shop called ACU on Changle Lu. So rarified and sought-after is the footwear in this place, they have a security guard to stop people taking photos of the buggers.

Adidas has a new range of limited editions which are based on seasonal foods; September is truffle season so they have a brown pair with a logo of a little dog snuffling around, October is Hallowe’en with pumpkin orange leather and little Jack-o-lanterns on the laces. I picked up one pair in red that I liked and was about to try them on when the manager snatch them away:
“These aren’t released until December, you can’t wear them now!”

Once he’d calmed down and had a couple of puffs on a ventilator, he talked me through the other stuff in the shop:
“These sold out on the first day, we had people fly from Beijing and camp outside overnight to buy them, this pair are made from pigskin- the pigs showered daily in Evian and were moisturised by NASA dermatologists. This pair are so ultra-cool that only people who wear sunglasses indoors can actually see them.”

adidas Flavours of the World range
These are the ones I bought, tomato shoes!

I asked him if he had anything for girls in a size 39, but he told me that such a thing is beyond the boundaries of footwear engineering.

ACU, Changle Lu near Chengdu Nan Lu
Normal sized women’s shoes available from Zara- opposite Plaza 66, Nanjing Xi Lu