Dan's China diary - day 15

In May 2006, silicon.com senior reporter Dan Ilett travelled to China, seeking to get behind some of today's most interesting tech and business stories. This is his warts-and-all diary, which appears daily this month. For in-depth coverage of this fact-finding trip inside China, including analysis and exclusive stories, click here.

Saturday 20 May, Shanghai

Ouch - overdid it a bit last night. Woke up to see I'd filled in the hotel questionnaire when I got home drunk at 4am. It looks like a child has scribbled all over it. The shame of it.

Melissa Keyward, a PR for Weber Shandwick who lives in Shanghai, has promised to show me around today. I'm to meet her down at Xiang Yang Market (known as the fake market) but I'm finding it hard to summon the energy in my current state.

When I arrive at the market there is blistering heat and people bustling around everywhere - there are a lot of foreign people trying to haggle for things. It's a huge advantage having Melissa on my side as she speaks fluent Mandarin.

Haggling is part of the culture but you can be conned so easily if you don't have your wits about you. If you're impatient enough to think you're getting a good bargain in the first few seconds, you're probably not. Don't lose face - just as when negotiating in loftier business circles.

There's an American lady near us buying a table cloth for the equivalent of £25. She seems to think she's got a bargain but I bet she could have got the vendor a lot lower.

After a few minutes haggling over things I don't really need, we head to Moganshan Road - an area full of disused factories converted into art galleries (think Shoreditch in London).

Some of the work in the galleries is impressive. There's nothing that directly demonstrates an anti-establishment sentiment but there are hints of it - sculptures of beggars, a huge photo of a fire brigade blatantly ill-prepared for the job at hand. But the art's too expensive for me and the people seem a bit precious about it all - so we move on.

Just down the road from the plethora of galleries is a soon-to-be demolished area called Suzhou Creek. The government has marked the buildings clearly with the character for 'demolish' but there are hoards of squatters living in tiny huts filled with what looks like people's rubbish.

It strikes me as odd that you can have people living in poverty here and five minutes down the road be selling expensive sculptures of them.

I bet that by next year these buildings won't be here. The rate of development is so fast.

After saying goodbye to Melissa it's almost time to say goodbye to Shanghai. There's just enough time to take leave of Kit - my friend who owns the seedy Eager Beaver bar.

Kit introduces me to some street food he calls "meat on a stick". He's not sure what it is, he says, and I'm not sure I really want to know. This is so different from my meetings during the week at sterile software parks, with Chinese creators and American MBAs making their fortunes.

Monday: Down south with the sellers of pirated software.