So far, nothing has happened as I expected it to and doing the simplest task such as shopping can become problematic for a myriad of reasons. Looking back, this is how I felt in Beijing. The feeling of dread and frustration subsided eventually there, and is beginning to do so here as well.
Max and I had an interesting day of shopping and basketball yesterday. We took the the bus into town from the new campus. The ride, as always, was long and jostling. I don't think shock technology has quite reached the shores of the middle kingdom yet. Since the bus only takes us to the gate of the old campus, Max and I hailed a cab and I asked for the driver to bring us to Bayi square. He responded by asking me if we were going to Walmart. It was a lucky guess. He let us out directly in front of the door of Walmart, but Max and I decided to navigate the indoor mall below the Walmart. It was an interesting lay out of sock, jewelery, antique and food vendors.
About half way through our subterranean tour we stumbled across a shop that made our day, if not our week. We had found an Italian ice cream shop. Even after only being in China for a week, finding something as western and decadent as this was cause for quite celebration. We were greeted by a young man who spoke to us in English. He explained the flavors to us, which were fairly varied. Max had a scoop of white chocolate and a scoop of melon and I opted for taramisu and espresso. All of the flavors, apart from melon, tasted like vanilla to me but then again I was expecting as much.
As Max and I sat at the small bar in the restaurant, which faced out of the large windows of the ice creamery, and enjoyed our treats, I noticed that we were being gawked at by everyone who passed by. This is by no means an odd happening, but at that moment, behind glass eating at a western shop we had become zoo animals. We were living in a replica "natural" habitat enjoying our snack like a pair of lazy pandas at the San Diego Zoo. Max and I both thought this was a pretty funny thought and decided to end our trip in the mall and head up to Walmart.
Walmart was packed, just as it was the previous time. This time we knew where everything was, and we made fairly short work out of our shopping experience. However we were still unable to buy fresh produce. The previous trip to Walmart had also ended unsuccessfully in regards to our ability to buy produce. We got to the register and the clerk told me something about the fruit and vegetables that we had. All that I understood was that we need to do something additionally in order to purchase such things at such a high scale establishment as Walmart. This time we tried to bag everything up, but were again denied. Perhaps the next time we will be victorious.
Content with our load of vegetables, DVDs and Eggs we headed back to the old campus to play a little basketball with one of the staff members of the old campus. His name is Lobo and he turned out to be a very nice fellow. Max and I had both apparently run into some bad dumplings earlier in the day, which led to a nice puking session on both of our parts through the course of the basketball game. Fortunately, our team managed to win (despite the incredibly horrible referring by two students...I've never seen so many penalties called in my life).
Today was a slow day, we headed over to another campus near by in order to check out a large dome like structure that glows brightly every night. We were both incredibly impressed by the other campus and a little jealous of their buildings compared to ours. I took a video of this trip and a trip that Max and I made later in the evening outside of the school gates. Both can be found on my video site.
I hope everyone is enjoying the blog, and I hope I can continue to update even more frequently than I am now. I miss everybody, talk to you all soon.
3 comments:
When you buy produce in a supermarket in China, as far as I can remember, you have to scale the stuff by yourself or bring these things to a counter closeby. People standing behind the counter will scale them for you and stick a price tag onto each bag.
I said you will be a rock star there. But stay humble!
Hi Scott, Wow.. Sounds like a really interesting adventure thus far! Great Blog, well written and interesting. -Keith
Thanks for the info Lei Lin. I think that in Walmart we have to wait in a line to get things weighed, then they'll give us a sticker for our bag.
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