It is always very stressful going to buy new glasses because when you go to International Glasses City in the north square at Shanghai Railway Station, there are so many and they all shout at you, trying to lure you into their shop. They don’t seem to realise that foreigners hate it when you shout at them ‘What do you want? We have glasses, many glasses, sunglasses, prescription glasses, all glasses. Come and look’.
And you get it from either side as you walk through the place. It’s without doubt the worse place to shop in Shanghai, even worse than the fake market at the Science and Tech Museum. 
So this time, I took some advice and went to that very same fake market and to the section which is called ‘Optic City’ or similar. And it is better, quite a bit better, because it only has about a dozen shops, but there is still a lot of shouting.
So I prepared myself and ambled through the place, looking left and right trying to assess which shop to give my business to. The trouble is they’re all the same – they sell the same products at the same prices. In the end I chose a shop which had a snazzy machine for testing your eyes. 
They all have these machines but this one looked new. So that was the one I chose.
Eyes checked and new prescription obtained the next stressful part was the choosing of the frames. So so so many and of course, the shape of my face rules out all the round ones, all the cool one and I am left with oblong ones only.
And then it’s a choice of black or brown or exciting coloured frames. In the end, I told the optician that I would get on much better if he just left me to it.
Eventually I picked a pair of glasses with no frames and then as I was on something of a roll, I also chose a pair of prescription sunglasses. I wandered off around the fake market for an hour while he made them and after an hour and a half (I had got lost in there) I went back and collected two pairs for about £55.
What a bargain. Leet’s hope that I won’t have to go back glasses shopping for a long long time.