Our guide took us to Walmart in
On the way there, we saw lots of interesting things. This man and his family had huge sacks full of blue plastic grocery bags on a cart that he was pulling across a very busy street.
The woman with the yellow flag looked to be either a policewoman or a crossing guard of some sort. She looked much sassier than the other crossing guards...
The Walmart was underground, and was smaller than a Walmart back in the states. It still had the usual blue price signs except that they were in red, but I didn't see any of the "rollback" guys on them. Those wooden bead seat pads that you see in some people's cars in the states seem to be pretty popular here, and I saw a mannequin that one of the Walmart folks had dressed up in the beaded pads, so that it looked like a terra cotta warrior garbed in beaded pad armor.
Clothing sizes for children, at least, are done by height. This makes a lot more sense, as Kangnan is four but still is in 3T clothing. Being able to shop by his height made things a lot easier and saved us the time of having to try things on. Maddy found a very elegant traditional Chinese dress, and some Very Fancy Indeed shoes to go with her very elegant traditional Chinese dress.
We hit the grocery section, and saw a very large section dedicated solely to rice. Floor-to-ceiling rice. Amazing.
Flavored Pringles and Lays are fairly popular--they have prawn, cucumber, and seaweed. I've tried the cucumber and sniffed at the prawn flavor, but I'm not planning on even sniffing the seaweed flavor...
There was a huge fresh produce section, with dragon fruit, which is fairly popular in all of the buffets we've been to...
We were on our way out when we passed what I'll call the Protein Section. There was a display with what appeared to be ducks that had been plucked, cut in half from beak to bum, gutted, and dried. They were clearly bone-in ducks, of a brownish-red color that I'd never expect from a duck.
Farther on we came to the marine-based protein section, with a large live-protein section next to the dead protein on ice section. The live section had two different kinds of turtles, lots of fish (not all of these had made it through the day) including catfish, eels, flatfish and some very large toads. The toads were in a bin that was only about a foot high, and there were a LOT of toads in there, I wondered why they didn't jump out. They looked to be about as big around as a small tortilla, but really thick. Our guide said that most people didn't eat toad or turtles, and she indicated that she found it kind of gross. There was also jellyfish, squid, cuttlefish, fresh whole seaweed, and many other kinds of fish, and roly-poly fish heads (fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum!).
There were FIVE checkout counters in each checkout aisle, each one of them was very, very small. Notice the Haagen-Dazs freezer--Haagen-Dazs is really popular, although even more expensive than in the States.
On the way back to the hotel we stopped by KFC to get lunch to go. KFC in
That afternoon we discovered that if Kangnan is going to be able to function, he really, really needs to burn off some of his energy. Seriously. And often. Chaz walked him up and down 19 flights of stairs, which wore Chaz out, but only slightly took the edge off of Kangnan. But it was enough to get him to calm down and stop bouncing off the walls.
The kids played with the toys and puzzles that they got at Walmart...
We ate dinner at the hotel's buffet. Again. All of the dishes in the hot trays were labeled, but they were labeled in Chinese, so we had no idea what most the dishes were. I'm like the anti-foodie, so if something looked "funny" or had bones or eyes sticking out of anything, I gave it a wide berth.
That night the buffet had real french fries, and the kids went nuts for something that didn't need to be labeled. The buffet had an endearingly small dish of ketchup next to the french fries. It was really only enough ketchup for one healthy American kid's serving of fries, but we made do. I was surprised that there was ketchup at all, frankly. Typically for a 4-year-old boy, Kangnan spent more time under the table than *at* the table, so the kids and I walked up the 11 flights of stairs to our room after dinner so we could burn off some of his energy. At the 8th floor he indicated that he wanted me to pick him up. I wanted him to initiate physical contact, so there was no way that I was going to turn him down. He only weighs about 33 lbs, but those three flights were a bit stiff. Wouldn't you know it, once I got him up to the 11th floor, he wanted to be put down, and he ran to our room laughing and looking over his shoulder at me. I still wouldn't have turned him down even if I'd know he was putting me on.
More on Chinese drivers. The honking. Oh, the honking. The honking starts at around 6AM, goes non-stop (and I mean NON-STOP) all day and is *mostly* over by 11PM. Sometimes you'll wake up to honking at 3AM. I'd like to think that the honkers are being considerate and are not honking while people are trying to sleep, but I checked out the window at oh-dark-hundred and found that there is less honking because there are a lot fewer cars to be honked at.
I started to graph the average number of honks per minute for the various hours of the day that night while I lay in bed, trying to sleep. During the 11 o'clock hour, I took measurements for three straight minutes, there were, on average, 20 honks per minute. The next morning at 8AM, I attempted to count the honks per minute, but it was impossible--the honks were almost constant.
Can't stop laughiing!! Can't wait to see this boy with Master Lee and the Little Tigers!!
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