THE Shopping Experience

I think it's time to talk about one of the most important thins we do here in Beijing: shopping. Noooo, I don't mean shopping for clothes, shoes, socks or DVDs (although I will say something about this later), I'm talking about the supermarket.

Chinese supermarkets are great, almost like zoos. There are lots of different things incl. live fish, crabs and other stuff like seaweed. And then there is the range of things that we have never seen in our lives, hundreds of bottles with mysterious contents, vegetables that we have no clue what to do with and bakery products that may be sweet, sour, hot, neutral or all of the above. My personal favourite: little sour dough buns with candyfloss beef filling. Usually we buy some things that look strange and try what they are at home, about 1/3 of them we buy again.

The real experience are the people in the supermarket: yesterday a young man saw us in the oats isle and came in specifically to inspect our basket and then walked off disappointed. Of course, there are staff as well and plenty of them. Yesterday I made the mistake of wanting to buy some moisturiser for my hands. Having chosen the one next to the 'White Hands' one (presumably it contains bleach), I tried to pick the chosen one up. Oh no,instantly, a little Chinese woman sorted shouting at me, preventing me from even getting near it (this is a normal isle I'm talking about). She picked it up, put it in a blue plastic bag and wrote out a receipt (also blue) with the product number and the price. Then she turned around. So,... I presumed I had to go to one of the counters to pay, so I asked the next staff member (about 2 meters away) and she pointed me in the right direction. No one at the counter, but luckily a Chinese guy also wanted to buy something and started shouting until someone came. Then it turned out that the woman had written the wrong number on the paper, so I had to go back to her and she had to send another member of staff to come to the till with me to tell the woman the right number. And this was just for some moisturiser and before any food shopping!

A quick word about the other shopping: clothes etc. Basically, you go to the market and there are NO fixed prices. Depending on the seller's day you can pay anything from about 1-100 Euros. Still being eco-conscious I tried to avoid buying anything unneccessarily, but having accompanied my colleague and tried some boots for the winter, I can speak from limited experience. I tried on a pair of boots and they were ever so slightly too small with my normal socks. So the girl went off to get a bigger size, but returned with the same boots (claiming they were bigger), but asked me to take off my socks and put on the tighty skincoloured ones. I could still feel the warmth that my foot had left in the boot only minuted earlier. Needless to say, I did not purchase that day.

So, when our things finally arrive from Europe, I will put my purchased Max Mara coat (had it been a size smaller it would have been Gucci) in the wardrobe and finally put my proper winter coat on!