wu mart

What a day. I should say what a Meiguoren day, meaning today me and Lauren were at our American best...haha. We wandered over to Wu Mart to purchase a few necessary supplies for the upcoming Yunnan trip and we ended up spending a good portion of the day there. And yes, I said Wu Mart, not Wal-Mart...Google it, it's and up-and-coming competitor. As I've said before, Chinese superstores of the Wal-Mart genre are so hard to navigate because 1. I don't know that much in terms of Chinese characters, and 2. There is no discernible logic in the store floor plan and set-up. We were pushed to and fro in a MESS of Chinese people busy shopping before Spring Festival and New Year. It was worse than the week-before-Christmas shopping madness in the US. So many Chinese, so little space. And of course EVERYONE stared at us shamelessly. Oh yeah, and they also were very curious to see what we were buying, and I swear nearly everybody peered down into our cart as we passed. When I say everyone, I mean it; Wu Mart is a Chinese person store, and Meiguoren like me never go there, so we were certainly a spectacle. It's a little funny, a little awkward, but oh well.
So we found our way through the food sections and to an escalator...at first I was wondering how we were going to get our cart to the second floor, but I figured that out quick enough. The escalator at Wu Mart is like a normal escalator except that there are no steps, it's a flat Jetson-esque moving platform, only on a slope. Let me say this: steep escalators with no stairs are frightening enough, but with a wheeled cart, it's TERRIFYING. Lauren took a video on her camera of me and the cart on the escalator...it's pretty much hilarious. I will see if I can post it on here sometime.
After we made it upstairs, we were lost yet again. I should also add that in Wu Mart (like Walmart here), there are many displays with people standing there, verbally advertising the product and usually demonstrating how it works. This includes kitchen appliances, floor polishes, mops (yes they were using the mops), and cosmetics. The 'fancy' cosmetics counter featured Maybelline, Loreal, and Avon... kind of funny, and they were a lot more expensive than in the states. A LOT more expensive. Even weirder is that Avon is sold in the stores here, to begin with. But anyways, the makeup counters are like those you'd see at like Macy's at home, where the lady will show you how to put on the makeup and such. It's odd because it's like our equivalent of Walmart at home, and you do not get that kind of service there.
It's funny because no matter how much English we speak and how many times I say "Bu dong" (i don't understand), the Chinese people there will still keep talking to you in Chinese. I have picked up words like yes and no, I want, what is this, numbers, small and big, etc, so I can communicate to that extent but not much more than that. Gestures are useful here... like when we were trying to buy some antibacterial hand gel, we literally took Lauren's from her purse and put it on our hands to show them what it was. Of course they didn't have it after all that.
Amidst the confusion, Lauren happened to meet an old lady who spoke English very well for a Chinese person. She talked to us for awhile and it was really funny because she had been to Pennsylvania...I sincerely think that she is one of the only Zhongguoren (Chinese) here that has been to PA.
Then, after that lady we found a section labeled "imported foods" and it was wonderful products like SwissMiss hot cocoa and Snapple. There was a guy standing nearby and he started talking to us, kind of picking fun, saying "oh Meiguoren, ying-wen" and all that stuff, to which I said Dway (right, correct) and kept walking.
They give out food samples there just like at home, and we tried two different kinds of Chinese ice cream before deciding to purchase some Chinese "Good Humor" brand (Which, I tried later and it's HEAVENLY...at least, here it is).
After that we happened to stumble into to the "fresh foods" section. I don't know how I can convey this accurately enough to gross you out sufficiently: there is a long table in the middle of the floor that has some parchment paper or whatever laid upon it. On top of that paper are pieces of meat, arranged by type of course, literally just sitting on the paper, out in the air, no packaging or covering, and you can walk by them and just pick them up. How unclean does that sound to you? Lauren and I were baffled...first of all, what do you do when you want some meat, do you just pick up a steak with your bare hands off the table and throw it in your cart? What if you pick some meat up and then decide you don't want it? Do you just put it back down on the table? The potential for germs and disease is exponentially high. People literally walk by that meat and probably cough all over it or brush it accidentally... I was just completely at a loss. One bite of that meat and you'd be sure to have eColi or something wonderful like that.
Now to the end of my Wu Mart tale: check out. The lines at checkout are insane. It's just one mass of people pushing forward. Everyone waiting got a good long look at us and made sure to carefully study every single thing that was in our cart, as well as every inch of us. Sometimes if you stare back long enough the person will stop staring. Or I just started smiling and waving at the people that were really staring. That made them laugh when I waved. Hahaha. When you finally get up to the cashier, there's always problems, like, some random items that you had to purchase back in the specific department... there were no cash registers or cashiers back in said departments, so I don't know how I was supposed to purchase my permanent marker and white-out back in the office supply section. That happens a lot here, some things you have to buy in a separate place, and since I can't read enough Chinese, I always go to the register and get yelled at and I don't get to buy all of the things I needed to buy. How am I supposed to know I need to buy a marker in a separate area?
So that's that. On a final unrelated note, Lauren and I decided we'd go out the East Gate of campus tonight to see what restaurants were on the other side of campus, and wouldn't you know, after that long walk, the gate was locked. They locked us inside and other people out. So there was a bunch of Chinese students standing around looking really confused and inspecting the area, both inside and outside the gate. I felt like a trapped animal. Especially considering getting anywhere outside the dorm has already become a great challenge because they've started massive construction in the form of tearing up huge parts of the street. There are these huge ditches/trenches entirely surrounding our dorm right now because they're working on some underground pipes. I said to Lauren, "They are trying to keep us all in. They're quarantining us Meiguoren." I'm not kidding either, we're trapped kind of. We have to climb over these huge canyons in the streets and it's annoying/frightening. We're trapped on every side, too. Suspicious? I think so.