7:41 am
I have to leave the apartment early today for a medical check that I need to extend my visa and complete my work contract here. Should make for an interesting topic to talk about here. But in the meantime, I don't have the time to properly right about yesterday.
PROPERLY, he said. While breakfasting I've been jotting down the bullet points I'll be mentioning later. I've occasionally left myself a note or two the day before to help remember something I REALLY wanted to mention. Do you want to see the bullet points? The first one I wrote was "18.90 yuan salt and vinegar lays stax at carrefour" with additions and some slight alteration of order after that. It's 7:50 am now, I'll be back this evening to expand on and explain the list below:
chin up bar
lunch with student, mother- bad advice re discount
picture taken suckers I'd have paid twice as much
18.90 yuan salt and vinegar lays stax at carrefour. And pear flavoured sausage. gross
two white guys feels good to say "man" and get a "man" right back
finding water, soap toilet paper. bakery area
cashier
picture taken
walking home
cold heavy
tired
bag of bread for dinner
laundry
initial chips
Okay, at 10:46 pm let's see about explaining the above list, eh?
Chin up bar is easy- on my way to the Roosevelt Center I spied a little purple parkette just behind the main street on my way towards work. Looks like a prime place for some chin ups when the weather gets less wintery.
I went for lunch, picking up some of the rice, water melon cup, and some sweet orange vegetable thing that mixed well with the rice. I had gotten myself situated when I saw one of the students at Web sitting by herself, so I picked up my jacket and backpack, crossed my fingers and picked up my tray of food (finger crossing was so I wouldn't spill my food, and no, I didn't actually cross my fingers) to join her. I'm sorry to say I can't think of her name at the moment, for a lot of people I still rely on the class list. She asked me why I waited so late to get food and I mentioned the discount I get after a certain time- I thought it was one, but I think I must have gone just before one. I was definitely confused because she didn't have any discount and there was only a few minutes between when she got her meal and I mine- she said she would see about the discount later. She has a three year old son, and my nephew is three now, so we talked about them. She says he's naughty, always jumping around from couch to couch and whatnot. She seems a lot older than me, but she can't really be that much older than me, can she? She's mentioned living in a village before, and that it was hard to live there. There was some injury on her left hand, middle finger- apparently from removing her wedding ring because she doesn't want to lose it when she's away from home. Anyways, she's very sweet and friendly, and she shared her fried mushrooms with me.
She asked about the discount, looks like I have a workers card that gets the discount, and she has a normal one. Set her up for a fall, didn't I? Whoops.
I needed some pictures for the medical check tomorrow, and Vicky said I could get it done by Carrefour. I looked all around the entrance, but couldn't find anything. I considered going back to Web for help, but had to make a good faith effort at figuring it out myself. The photo place (actually a Kodak store!) was on the first floor- Carrefour is mostly situated on the bottom level. But there is an entrance somewhere on the first floor, I guess I can't really cry foul here. It took a while to be helped, but eventually I got to point to D- two pics that looked vaguely passport like.
The photos cost me 30 yuan - going with that divide by 5 rule for Canadian dollars puts the price at half what I was expecting. As my list above points out: Suckers, I was expecting somewhere in the 60 yuan ballpark.
I decided to pick up the soap and toilet paper I needed at Carrefour, along with whatever else struck my fancy, but I immediately regretted the decision, because I had invested some time in knowing where things were in the Chinese Wal-Mart, but this place still had a totally foreign layout. Well, I needed to explore SOME place on my day off, and it was too cold to go on my promised journey towards the north.
I thought perhaps the cleaning supplies were near the baby stuff- wandering there first I compared the price of the diapers with white babies on them versus the ones with Chinese babies on them. I forget which was more expensive, and also I forget what I took it to mean, but I can tell you I was surprised by the result.
There are signs everywhere that leads to emergency exits, both suspended from the ceiling and with arrows in the floor that look like they would light up in the event of an emergency. I can tell you that none of these are helpful when, as was the case the first time I visited Carrefour, you want to escape and it isn't an emergency so much as you just want to leave. This time I found an emergency exit, but the placement didn't make sense, because just beside it the store went deeper... I looked around the corner to find that the emergency exit was just a door in a wall that almost immediately led to, as I could see stepping past the wall and looking at the bag of the "emergency exit" door, another emergency exit. Except the first emergency exit had a shopping cart behind it, partially obstructing the way. That's safe.
I wandered around for a long time, getting the lay of the land, comparing prices on things, phones in particular. I don't like the looks of the prices on the phones, I'm concerned about being able to afford one and getting internet. Things are adding up to a tight, frugal existence, as usual. But from what I see and remember Carrefour is cheaper than Chinese Wal-Mart.
The movator between levels has pictures on the walls nearby of happy smiling farmers and their produce. Nothing earthshaking there, but while all the farmers looked normal enough (maybe older than you'd see in most ads) there was one ad, with the farmer carrying potatoes, where the potatoes were just covered in mud. I hope that's mud.
Authentic or not, you'd never see that in the west. Those 'taters would get hosed down, sure enough. I was told today there is an association here of muddy=fresh. All I can say is, please be mud.
Upstairs here included kitchenware, electronics, and books. The English translation on the book signs here was ROUGH.
I took way too long to finally settle on the cheapest toilet paper anyways, and then I picked up 2 things of 4 soaps: taking a chance on "green tea and liquorice cool" soap, as well as picking up plain "anti-bacterial" soap for safety. I have high hopes for the liquorice coolness.
Riding back down the movator to the basement, main, level, and I'm staring at the western imports. Lays stax. Salt and Vinegar. As is so often the case with me, I stood there staring at them, deciding if I wanted to spend 18 yuan on them. That isn't even that bad in Canada, on the other hand, 20 yuan is a pretty nice meal at Food Bazzar... I ended up deciding I wanted, if nothing else, to see if they were different at all. In the basket.
Wandering over to the bakery area to try and balance the chips out with something sweet. I saw many too sweet candidates, or too much harder than I was looking for, or I wasn't in the mood for what was clearly animal crackers hold the animal. There were some close calls, I almost bought the soft bag of mystery baked good that ended up being, according to another label of these things at the other end of the bakery, "bread flavoured".
I have to take a break now, it's 11:35. I'm pretty definitely under the weather now. I'll wake up in the morning, hopefully back to 100% and finish this, with the events of today getting covered tomorrow evening. I'll be back soon.
Ugh. 4:36 am. I just dreamed that I was working as a flight attendant, and my plane slammed into the inside of a building, and I just had time to think "well, good-bye" before dying. And there's a car outside whose alarm... okay, maybe it's stopped now.
I, again, took a long time looking at everything in the bakery section. The Chinese bakery section is pretty big, with many different, and often unfamiliar, options. I ended up going for this 13.50 yuan bag of big twisty bread, figuring it was either sweet or a salty pretzel. It looked, and felt, soft though, so that was a plus.
The only thing left to pick up was water- but I hadn't seen any and I'd been all over the grocery store. I wandered the frozen food to the yogurt isle, where they were heavily shilling a product called "Pure Joy", a yogurt drink. Besides having a large area of product on the shelves, there were ads for it all across the tops of the displays, and two women were handing out samples. I grabbed one, and yup, it's a yogurt drink all right. Maybe slightly less drinkable than usual, since I only got about half the tiny cup before any more refused to drop into my mouth. I made another pass at a swig, got nothing, and rather than look desperate for Pure Joy gratefully handed the half full cup back to the attendant for disposal. I dislike wasting food.
Soon after that, I saw a couple of white guys and I leapt at the chance to ask someone "Hey man, do you know where the water is?" and the one said back "sorry man, this isn't my usual Carrefour, maybe try near the beverages?" and then they both walked off quickly enough that I almost felt like taking it personally. But it was good to hear a familiar vernacular.
I went over to the drinks, soft drinks soft drinks... this could be water?... looks at the packaging around it... ah, licquor. That was close. Well, it would probably have solved my sore throat problem right now. I followed the wall towards the cash register area and THERE was the water, all at the far registers. I grabbed two 4L jugs of water, because I'm ambitious like that, and went to a nearby register to a woman who seemed to be very encouraging of my ability to buy things from her despite the language gap. She was nice. I took my bag of bread, soap and imported chips (well la-dee-da), my toilet paper under one arm, and a jug of water in each hand, and made my escape.
The trip back to my apartment was rough. Cold and heavy. I stopped to give myself a break and throw some recycling into the trash... I'm kidding, they're actually good about having a recycling bin next to their trash bin, basically at all bus stops. They don't have flaps or anything, so it's way easier for someone laden down with groceries to grab his bag and chuck his recycleables in. I guess you can have a simpler bin system when you aren't invaded by raccoons.
Just before my apartment my ear bud slipped out, and I did my best to switch hands around to keep everything in the air as though the ground were hot lava while replacing the ear bud. The ground wasn't actually hot lava though, just thoroughly spit covered because anyone and everyone spits all the time here. Probably related to the air quality. Interesting. I spit a time or two myself, but never when someone is around, and I'd usually aim for somewhere unobtrusive, base of a tree, gutter, something like that. These guys don't care who's around or where they do it. On the other hand, I've seen people spit inside buildings in Canada before, so our hands aren't clean in this area either.
I made it back to my apartment- this exertion very likely exasperated my current sore throat. I was so so tired, I forget if I ate anything before falling asleep or not, but I did put my laundry on to wash (again, by fiddling with various buttons until it started) before very quickly falling asleep for a few hours. I had resigned myself to future laundry that was messed up by staying in the washer instead of draped over various things to dry, but I actually woke back up before too long, and got to draping.
I ate about a third of the bag of bread before I couldna eat no more. It was neutral verging on sweet (a win, I guess? I was looking for more sweet..) with what I've decided must be shredded coconut on it, instead of either straight sugar or salt. Brushed some crumbs off the bed. I opened the can of salt and vinegar chips and I really enjoyed that initial burst of flavour in the air, and in that first chip. Something familiar and pleasant. I'd have to check the can though, I don't think they were the freshest things on the block. They've got that seal on it, so maybe I'm crazy. Could probably go for some regular Lay's sal and vinegar for the purposes of getting that exact flavour. "But Isaac, you stupid idiot, Ms. Vicky's is the best". Enh, the kettle chip thing doesn't do it for me. It's fine, but doesn't bring the boys to the yard, so to speak.
And that's everything. 5:23 am. I should have a mug of water and go back to sleep before telling you about my now yesterday. It was a bit of a doozy.
Um, good night? Good morning?
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