After we had moved into our new apartment last fall, I found an article in an English language magazine called Time Out describing different framing shops in the city. The author of the piece highly recommended a place called Today Photo and said they are the best place in Beijing for the price. Last month we went there with a student of mine, Tracy, to get our paintings framed, and imagine my surprise when they told me they couldn't do it. They said they could only cut one hole out of each mat. Now, I think that's pretty silly. Isn't the definition of a framing shop a shop that frame things (emphasis on the plural)? I don't know if they were trying to get more money out of us by encouraging us to frame each picture separately, but if that was their strategy, it didn't work: we just walked out the door. I was pretty frustrated with the shop, but even more so with the magazine. If you recommend a framing shop in print, it really ought to be a decent shop, or you should let your readers know the limits to what they can do. Then we wouldn't have wasted my student's time and the $12 for the round-trip taxi ride.
Anyway, Tracy thought we should try a photo print shop right next to campus. She said she had recently taken something there to be framed and that they had done a good job with it. So we nervously took our beautiful artwork to this rinky-dink little photo place, picked out a frame, and were told to come back in three days. It cost significantly less than it would have at Today Photo, and though I'm not completely satisfied (the paintings seem only to be mounted from the top, so they aren't completely flat), it is nice to finally have some artwork on the walls. Of course, now the stark whiteness of the walls stands out even more...
