—WARNING: This post contains graphic content that isn’t suitable for people with a weak stomach.—
So the kids went away with swine flu or whatever. I had a week off with nothing to do. I might have gone to Hong Kong, but I didn’t have my passport so I couldn’t. I don’t know how to order train tickets, though even if I wanted to, again, no passport. I couldn’t leave the province. I would have just tooled around the city a little bit. Boring. I worked on an illustration for a friend in Idaho. That got boring pretty fast too cause I was only moderately happy with it. I was sooooooo bored that whole time that I even filled in for a fellow teacher to teach a couple of his classes cause I had nothing to do. He had to go to the police station for a random screening. They asked him all kinds of questions that they had already asked us last time and overall he thought it was a rather pointless endeavor.
Anyway, what’s my next option?
Figure the buses out and go to Wal-Mart.
First thing is first, it’s hard to find what you’re actually looking for in China. I think there must be a bunch of laws about signage in the US. There’s so much overwhelming signage here that it’s hard to find the sign you’re looking for among all the rest of the signs. Because of this I missed it by about 3 or 4 stops. This put me maybe 2 miles away and I wasn’t really sure how to get back to it or even where it was. So I walked a couple blocks and picked up a taxi.
Here’s a bunch of construction I walked past. They were passing 12 foot poles up to the top by hand. Looked scary:
I was able to tell the taxi driver where to go by showing him this:
Here’s the street where the taxi dropped me off. It’s a really busy street full of people and shops and stuff. Lots of places to shop. He dropped me off at a random corner, told me to “go that way” I’ll find it.
I’ve noticed that China has tons and tons of clothing shops. Could be because I’ve gone past the factories where they actually make the clothes. It’s really bizarre, they look just like office buildings, but at night the lights are on inside and you can see tons of people sitting in there making garments.
Here are some alley ways that looked really neat:
At last! A three-story Wal-Mart! A Supercenter at that! That means it will have western food! I really miss the variety of food choices back home. I couldn’t wait to find things like cereal and pop-tarts and cheese!
The whole reason I wanted to go to Wal-Mart is because of my Wii. I brought it with but the transformer doesn’t work on these sockets, it’s for 110 volts, not 110-220. I need a new plug for my DS for the same reason. I was excited to go inside because I figured it would either look exactly the same as Wal-Marts back home or completely different. Turns out it was both:
Nothing screams “Wal-Mart” like a bin full of chicken feet:
Nothing screams “Wal-Mart” like a trough of live crab:
Nothing screams “Wal-Mart” like a pig carcass hanging on a meat hook:
I do appreciate the fact that they use every part of the animal. Absolutely nothing gets wasted.
Two more creepy and gross pictures that western eyes are definitely not used to can be found HERE and HERE.
Clearly in a bizarro Wal-Mart anything goes. Up is down, left is right, the world is topsy turvy. The familiar blue with a yellow smilie face has been replaced by red with yellow characters.
Oh by the way these are pigs ears:
Diana Chao says that she loved them when she was young. “They’re crunchy” is what she says. I ate one. I don’t need to eat another. I’m pretty sure one was enough. It’s exactly like you expect it to be. The taste itself is a little dirty. It tastes a little like the smell of a pig plus whatever seasonings are put on it. The real kicker is the texture.
Reach up to your ear right now and feel it with your fingers. Press and move the cartilage around underneath the skin just above your earlobe. Now imagine this in your mouth. It moves underneath the skin just like that when you chew it. So first you’re chewing through the leathery skin on the outside, then you’re chewing the cartilage inside (this is in one chomp). Remember, the skin is as thick as human skin. It’s hard to break the surface of it to get inside, and equally hard just to get it so the skin in a chewable state like any other food you put in your mouth. So every time you bite down the cartilage breaks and instead of having one hard lump moving underneath the skin you have two hard lumps moving underneath the skin. It’s like a sack of skin with semi-hard lumps moving underneath it every time you chew. If you have a boyfriend or girlfriend willing to put up with it, I suggest asking if you can put their ear in your mouth so you can have a truly immersive experience without having to actually have the full experience.
After this exercise I don’t think you ever need to try a pig’s ear. It’s fine. You don’t have to. Curiousity was burning in me when I was first offered one. I just couldn’t refuse because I was too curious. I don’t regret my decision because if I hadn’t eaten it I would have forever wondered what the heck a pig’s ear tastes like and would have kicked myself for not taking the opportunity to try one.
Oh also there’s still some hair on the ear sometimes, so imagine that as well.
Toy aisle!!
Even in China they still have the unguarded bikes that kids can use to be delinquents and ride around the store:
Here’s the cup aisle. They drink a lot of tea and water and stuff on the go. Everyone has water bottles of some kind:
Right across the aisle from the cups is the roach poison:
I finally found cereal. They had about 6 different flavors. They had Trix, Kellogg’s Frosted, Kellogg’s Chocolate Frosted, Corn Flakes, I think they had Cocoa Puffs, and they had Kellogg’s Not-Honey-Nut-Cheerios:
Rice:
Oh there’s the socks…
This is kind of a neat idea. It’s more compact cause you only use baskets and metal frames. A metal frame takes up much less horizontal space than a whole cart and you already have a bunch of vertical storage room set up for baskets so you might as well buy another hundred or so:
I ended up buying some vinegar soy sauce stuff for rice. They didn’t have any videogames whatsoever. They told me to go to the electronics district for that. They set things up in this city very oddly. There’s like a street that’s all about pets and pet supplies, there’s a street that has all the electronics, etc etc. You can’t just hope to find electronics at any store here. It’s like how broadway is just a series of theatres one after another but they do it for stores. This means I have to travel two hours to be able to buy a video game or something. I can’t just go to whatever store is nearby. It’s very strange. Very old-world, but this is a brand new 25 year old city. It was designed this way on purpose. Super annoying and inconvenient. I would assume that starting up an electronics store out where there isn’t an electronics store would make a booming business. That’s not how they work here though. They cluster everything. All the mechanics are right next door to eachother, the department stores are next door to eachother, etc. etc.
Also while I was at Wal-Mart I found some Skippy peanut butter. That was wonderful. I also found jelly/jam. They didn’t have grape or raspberry, but they had mulberry. Pretty decent tasting. It was all tucked away behind a column, I’m surprised I found it. I bought saltine crackers and that night I sat and watched The Office while eating peanut butter and jelly bites. It was wonderful.
The bus stop where I catch the bus back home was right next to the Shenzhen animation company:
I’ll see if I can get a tour at some point. The outside of their building has a brief history of animation and famous animators:
They include things such as the Smurfs. Here we see Cyclops Smurf meeting Mad-Eye Smurf:
Here’s some work from a nicely LiveTraced Minnesota native Charles Schulz:
Popeye fighting his classic arch nemesis: Evil Popeye:
Then I went home and I got to catch a glimpse of a couple of these:
They’re building gigantic power lines up on top of one of the mountains. I can see the switchbacks that the donkeys take from my room. They haul rocks as a foundation for the towers, then they walk back down. I get a little confused by it though because sometimes they’re hauling rocks up and sometimes they’re hauling rocks down. Either way it’s weird to see a donkey in the middle of the city.
While at Wal-Mart I was also looking to find a fancy looking box. Just a little cardboard box that looked nice. I was going to cut a hole in the top so that students could put their questions into it anonymously. I couldn’t find one. I did remember some options at the local grocery store however. They have a lot in the way of plastic tissue dispensers here. So I was going to go find one at Ren Ren Le (roughly translates to People People Mart). The clouds were really cool that day however. Most because there was going to be typhoon that night. The clouds were moving super super fast.
Here’s a video of how fast the clouds were moving past the mountain. I don’t know if this will work or not but here’s trying:
I thought it was pretty cool.
Here’s what the inside of a bus looks like btw. My school is one of the last stops so no one is ever on:
This is People People Mart. They have lots of these long escalator ramps in grocery and department stores:
They need them so you can put your cart on it and go up the escalator. All carts have wheels with little brakes on them. The wheels have grooves in them. The groves fit into the ridges of the escalator ramp pieces which makes the wheel fall a little bit and apply the brake. Once your cart is on one of these it will not move. It’s a really cool design. Very simple.
Note, I’m not in Wal-Mart:
This store is exactly the same as Wal-Mart but smaller and with slightly less selection. There are also a bunch of different clothing shops that pretend to be part of the same shop… but like… aren’t… :-/
It’s kind of like a mall but they don’t have like “This is Abercrombie! This is Gamestop! This is the Apple store!” It’s just there in these different sections with different sales girls. No walls in between stores, yet they’re all kind of competing with each other. Also, it’s really hard for me to find clothes here. It’s all for little Chinese guys. Also I can’t tell the difference between boy clothes and girl clothes. They don’t have them marked off in sections, they just kind of fade from one to the next. Poor example because this picture was taken in the makeup section. The decorations are because National Day is coming soon (their Independence Day but way more “important” if you will):
Getting on the bus:
Lastly, here’s a couple photos of my school at night after it rained a little. It’s about 8:00 and the students are still studying.
Different lightbulbs make different kinds of light. This makes the girl’s dormitory look a little like a Christmas tree:
Last night I talked to a student and they were telling me how unhappy they were because “Tomorrow is Monday… We must start school! I hate going to school.” The fact that she is telling me, a teacher, about how much she hates school I found to be a little cool. That means she must think I’m a pretty cool teacher. Either that or it was an underhanded dig on my class. I told her I hated going to school too but it’ll get better eventually.
I like that no matter the culture, kids still hate school. That’s funny to me.
