My new specs. What do you reckon?

When I was just a curly haired young chap I had to wear glasses.

I hated wearing the cursed things, thought they made me look geeky and suspect that they were one of two things that held me back from being a professional football player (the second is that I’m crap at football). As soon as was humanly possible, I started wearing early prototype steam-powered contact lenses and have never looked back.

Nevertheless, if you’re as blind as me- there will come a point where you still need a backup pair of specs- perhaps because you have conjunctivitis, or need to give your eyes time to rest after a hard day.

Or because your girlfriend makes you get up in the middle of the night because she thinks she can hear your pet turtles trying to tip their bowl over.

So, following a tip from Shanghaiist I spent Saturday at the Shanghai Railway station where they have an enormous market selling nothing but piles and piles of glasses.


Some bird or other, at the glasses market.

The area around the train station is bizarre- if you wanted to hire an unemployed farmer from Hubei Province, who is down on his luck, nothing left to lose, and will carry out a contract killing for the price of a McDonalds Happy Meal, this is where you’d come.
(What? I said “If“)

Once you’re in the relative safety of the market, stall after stall will shout out to you and it’s just a case of walking around until you see something that catches your eye (haha!) or if you prefer, until someone shouts to you in English.

In comparison to the UK where it’s easier to buy Ketamine than a pair of spectacles, these people will help you chose a frame, test your eyes, and grind the lenses within an hour of you first saying “Ni Hao”.

When buying the complete set of glasses, I didn’t bargain on the price because I’m a sucker- nevertheless it was only 280RMB. Someone with a bit of brass neck who is prepared to play the whole
“Oh look at me, I’m walking away because that price is too high, even though it’s a fraction of what I pay back home”
game could probably get them down to 150.