小 資 .

There are lots of ways to blow dough in shanghai. There are German cars and Italian leathers that line big, glassy boulevards. You could book the private bower at the Cupola, and have dinner and champagne for two in the ballpark of $2,000. You could have a *really* wild night on the Bund; you could buy art (if this is your fancy, you should call me). yYou could spend a wad of cash to get out of shanghai - to Hainan, to Yunnan, Xinjiang if you're a culturally adventurous, Japan if you're a baller, Singapore if you're corporate.

Pretty much everybody, though, who spends any significant time here, has chosen at one time or another flash cash at the Pacific Digital Mall at Xujiahui. Xujiahui, be noted, is a fantastically futuristic nexis of consumerism. The subway stop has sixteen distinct exits, each pumping queues of Chinese people into separate shopping havens. On one end, resembling a silver layer-cake, is Grand Gateway Plaza, a high-end mall so glamorous it has its own cab line. On the other, the giant chrome globe of Metro City lords over the steroidal intersection of three major avenues. Dwarfed by this sensation is the demure, but never forgotten PacDigital Mall.

I'm not a big techie, but it's hard not to get excited at the sight of the entrance (itself an extension of Exit 10) - the first of eleven floors of electronic fantasies, each one with possessing the inviting, solicitous gleam of the floor-sized cosmetics counters of any major department store.

The first two floors alone are devoted to cameras and photography accessories, which is where I first jetted, to haggle for a new telephoto lens in anticipation of this week's trip to Sichuan and Tibet. (For the record, I'm now the happy owner of the 55-200mm Nikon VR.) The third floor is digital storage. Memory cards, external hard drives, thumb drives the size of thumbnails fill display cases like silicon candy. I took the escalator up past floors of palm-sized laptops, wall-sized flat screen televisions, technicolored MP3 players, and stopped at the fourth floor to pick up a cell phone, as my old one had unceremoniously bit the dust a week before. After a bit of window shopping and a good deal of haggling, I settled on the clean and tasteful Nokia 2680.

I skipped out with my packages, and crossed over to Grand Gateway. Costa Coffee pours out onto a terrace over looking Xujiahui, and it was a seasonably perfect afternoon to people watch from that quiet height, between reading and sipping designer coffee.