On November 17th I took the metro down to a particular quarter in the city of Beijing where a Chinese friend of mine had told me I could find some good strings for my guitar. Out of sheer coincidence, a few minutes after I got out of the Xinjiekou metro station, already in the quarter in question, I saw a Chinese girl walking on the sidewalk with a guitar inside a canvas case hanging from her right shoulder.

I kindly said hello to her and, showing her a guitar string I had brought along with me, asked her whether she knew where I could get that kind of things. She understood me and, in the few English words that she knew, indicated to me the way to a place where I might find them.

And, in fact, following her instructions, two or three blocks down the way, after turning right on one of the streets,  I was faced with a good number of small stores that had guitars, flutes, violins, cellos and other instruments displayed on their windows.

Bingo! I said to myself, and went all along the street going into each and all of the small stores looking for my Savarez Hard Tension Strings. As is very often the case, the great majority of those stores had D’Adario, Fender and Martin strings, along with other lesser-known brands, but they didn’t have Savarez. Savarez strings are my favorite, but they aren’t the easiest to find, particularly the Hard Tension ones.

The thing is that, as I was going from store to store, I was also looking at some typical Chinese instruments that aren’t very common in the west, like the one-string Erhu violins, or the guitar-like “Yue-Qin”, which are four-stringed instruments that have round bodies, or the “Pi-Pa”, which have oval-shaped bodies and are also four-stringed.

Among the Erhu violins and the Yue-Qin and the Pi-Pa Quatros (four-stringed instruments) the most expensive are the Pi-Pa’s, which have prices ranging from USD$500 to USD$1,200.

Then there are the plucked instruments, like the Gu-Chin and the Gu-Jen, which have seven and twentyone strings respectively. The Gu-Jen is the same Japanese “Koto” and it’s basically the same Korean “Guyuagem”. The Gu-Chin and the Gu-Jen sell for about USD$500.

But the real surprise for me was the Hu Lu Si Flute, which has a small gourd on one of the extremes, with the mouthpiece at the top of the gourd. The rest of the body is made of three flute-like wooden cylinders, with the lateral ones shorter than the middle one. The lateral cylinders may be opened at will, thereby producing different sounds.

A Chinese guy who was hanging out at one of the stores played one of the Hu Lu Si flutes for me to show me what the sound was like. The sound is pleasant and it’s special, particularly when the lateral cylinders are open.

The price of the Hu Lu Si flutes vary from USD$20 for a basic one, to USD$50 for a professional one, to some USD$120 for a more sophisticated one like the one shown on photos HuLuSi-02 and 03. It’s worth mentioning that here in China, in most small shops and stores, all prices are subject to bargaining.

In the end, my search bore fruit and I was able to find my Savarez Hard Tension strings in one of the last stores of the street for 70 RMB a set, which amounts to some USD$11. If I remember well, the same set of strings would have cost me some USD$20 back there in Santa Barbara or any other city in California.

Finding all those instruments was a very pleasant experience, although not as pleasant as playing my guitar once again with Savarez Hard Tension Strings.