Every week­end we swear we’ll go out and get stuff done, and most week­ends we end up sleep­ing in, eat­ing lunch at 3pm, catch­ing up on our blog feeds, watch­ing movies…does this sound all too familiar?

Well, this week­end we lived up to our promises, and spent Sat­ur­day scoot­ing around a very humid Guangzhou, finally scratch­ing some key items off our “To Do” list.

Now, here in Guangzhou, there is pretty much an inde­pen­dent store that exists for any ser­vice you may need. Some­times it’s not even a store, some­times it’s a lady posted on the side­walk with a sewing machine who will hem your pants for a few kuai (bucks). Okay so that’s just one exam­ple, and most are indeed actual stores. Unlike any­where else I’ve seen, and con­trary to a log­i­cal busi­ness model, each store is located next to tens of other stores that sell the exact same prod­ucts, or pro­vide the exact same ser­vices. For exam­ple, the store that sells gold­fish will be located next to ten other stores that also sell gold­fish. The place to go to buy med­ical fur­ni­ture will be next to the all the other medical-furniture ware­houses (yes, these places actu­ally exist and do legit­i­mate busi­ness). Though you would think this to be con­ve­nient for a shop­per, these clus­ters of stores are spread out in pock­ets through­out the city, mak­ing it so the task of run­ning your errands can lit­er­ally take you run­ning– from one end of town to another. More than that, plan­ning an after­noon of errands takes more than just mak­ing a small “To Do” list, it also means google-mapping the approx­i­mate loca­tion of every mar­ket and its cross streets, writ­ing the Chi­nese trans­la­tions down in case we get lost, mental-noting the side streets to take, mak­ing sure we have appro­pri­ate can­vas bags to take things home, and mak­ing sure we have good rec­om­men­da­tions or busi­ness cards from our friends who have done the same exact thing.

One thing down on our list this past Sat­ur­day was to visit the fram­ing mar­ket. No, there’s no Michael’s or Aaron Bros. here in Guangzhou. I know, shock­ing. So to get any­thing framed, log­i­cally a Guangzhou res­i­dent would take a trip to the street where ALLLL the framers are located. Span­ning one stretch of a large street com­bined with a big mall full of lit­tle shops ded­i­cated to fram­ing art­work and Chi­nese scrolls, the fram­ing “mar­ket” was just as over­whelm­ing as every other shopping-type expe­ri­ence I’ve had in Guangzhou.

We finally set­tled on one– not because its prod­ucts were supe­rior, or that it had evi­dence of good work, but sim­ply because the peo­ple looked friendly and there were a lot of sam­ples of frames hung out­side. Is this kind of like choos­ing wine based on the label? Hm, maybe.

Alto­gether we brought with us seven items to be framed– the small­est rang­ing from 11x17 and the largest 15x35. After spend­ing a few min­utes pick­ing out the frames we wanted and lay­ing every­thing out on the table, we were quoted a price. Now, we had heard this mar­ket was cheap, but when she quoted us a final price– 270 kuai for all seven pieces, I thought for a sec­ond she was quot­ing the price for our largest poster. And then she held up her cal­cu­la­tor for me to see the final price, nod­ding her head and smil­ing as if to say, “Yeah, it’s good, right?”. I re-calculated in my head just to make sure I did the math right. Forty bucks to get our pieces mat­ted (if we chose), with Plex­i­glas panes, and brand new custom-built frames? She might as well have told me they would do it for free.

We picked up our pieces 24hours later (after vis­it­ing the “Coney Island Hot Dog” shop…but more on that later this week!), par­tially afraid that we were about to pick up all our posters framed onto one giant plex­i­glas. But as usual, my fears were quickly dis­pelled. And let me close by say­ing that after com­ing home and hang­ing up all our beau­ti­fully framed new works, we’re now look­ing to see what else in our home can use a good framing.

update 6/10/11: Here are some images, below, of a few things we got framed– really cool mod-style Star Wars themed art, an Ork poster, a Williams print I received while work­ing at an art gallery a few years ago, and oh yeah– a super off­i­cal cer­tifi­cate signed by a cou­ple of impor­tant people!