Sniff… Sniff… You Stink!!!

Showering… showering is different in China.  It’s even more different in Guangdong.  For most of China, most people shower at the end of the day, about once a week.  (Unless they are having biblical relations with a Chinese girl, which means that you shower first, I don’t know anything about that, so ask someone else, just a statement that I’ve been told numerous times).  Apparently if you shower often, it dries out your skin and is considered unhealthy.  In Guangdong, however, it’s hot and sticky, and you sweat all day, every day…the closer summer comes, the more you sweat, apparently you spend a great deal of the summer in a pool of your own sweat…gross.  So, most here shower every day, except the old men who generally shower 3 or 4 times a month…sometimes twice.  The difference is, though, that here you shower at night, instead of in the morning.  I do both as I don’t function well unless I shower in the morning, depending on how late I get up, on occasion.

I actually hate my shower, and my next place, the first thing I’ll check is how well the hot water system works, if I can put it on warm and not have the choice of either scalding myself or freezing.  Perhaps the summer here will change my outlook.

The mosquitoes here are insane.  You can’t do anything about them.  OFF doesn’t work, nothing works, everyone just deals with it, some put netting over their beds…these are the smart people, you should do the same.  I need to find out where to buy netting, and how to install it, along with what tools I need, and where to buy them as well.

Bedding is different in china.  You have a comforter and a base sheet over your rock hard mattress.  There are no sheets.  Even in the hotels, you’ll notice that you have a base sheet, but no actual sheets.  Additionally, the Chinese believe that showering and brushing your teeth before bed allows your body to actually relax and release toxins, so, it’s considered to be a good idea if you want a good night’s sleep.

Shopping.  Shopping sucks.  Everything you buy, you have to carry home.  There is a bus system that will get your stuff back for you, if you can figure out which of the 8 busses goes anywhere near your home.  You can also ask for help, and someone will carry all of your bags with you as far as you need to go.  If you have a Chinese girlfriend, the secret to shopping happiness, is to make sure that you purchase one more bag of stuff that makes it impossible to carry all the way home, so that you can take a cab.  The cab will probably be charging you the equivalent of $10 or less, so, it’s far cheaper.

Unfortunately for me, I now tend to think in kuai, so, it’s not all that helpful.  If you convert it to USD, it’s cheap.  $10 for a cab ride is not at all right, it’s actually closer to $6.  It seems expensive when you say that the cab charged you $35 kuai though.

Yesterday, we had to take back the rice cooker that I bought.  Apparently, I don’t know the difference between Taiwanese rice cookers and normal rice cookers, I can tell the difference now though.  I bought it for 299 RMB, and thought I had gotten a great deal.  It was supposed to be able to make rice, soup, and a couple of other things that I really like here, baozi, jiaozi, etc… jiaozi is dumplings, I don’t know the other translations, they’re only available from Chinese marketplaces anyway, we don’t have an equivalent.  Mei informed me that it was the wrong one, and that it was made for Taiwanese.  I asked her what the difference was, and she said that the food lacked flavor, “have you ever seen a Taiwanese restaurant in Shenzhen?”.  I replied that I hadn’t, but it wasn’t surprising as Taiwan isn’t a favourite place for China, due to their confusion over being their own country, when we all know that they are really Chinese.  She pointed out that there are Japanese places everywhere, so, I have to concede the point, chances are, Taiwanese food sucks, I don’t know, I’ve never tried it.  So, we took it back (you can’t do this in China with anything), and she told customer service that her moron American friend screwed up, and that she needed to get in store credit and get the right cooker.  They allowed the stupid American that priveledge, and we went shopping.  Today was the day that I was apparently thinking in RMB instead of USD, and you really need to think in both to understand what you’re really arguing about, and to know if it’s actually worth it.  We bought the right rice cooker, cost just under 100 RMB, then went in search of a wok.  As far as I can tell, there are around 1,000 different types of woks, but only four real differences, and that is how the heat is displaced on the wok.  The four systems that I see are:

1.       A flat place in the middle of the wok, on the underside is a spiral looking thing that is supposed to send the flames up the sides.

2.      A flat bottomed wok, you have to watch food at all times as it tends to burn – these are cheap and not worth it.

3.      Some sort of pattern inside the wok that allows the oil and vegetables to coat the inside of the wok, and continually keep things greased up.

4.      A spiral pattern on the bottom going all the way up for better heat distribution, the interior is completely rounded.

Everything except the really cheap stuff seems to be Teflon coated or some sort of non stick coating.  The wok we looked at was priced down from 809 RMB to 299 RMB and is the one that everyone wants.  It has a lid with a kickstand on it so that you don’t have to put it down flat on the counter, a rest for your spatula or whatever to rest on on top of the lid, spirals going up from the bottom to the top on the outside, and a very nicely finished inside.  We spent a good hour with salespeople getting “talked into it”, finally as a last resort, they gave us a 150 RMB soup pot.  Turns out that Mei has always wanted this wok, but she also wanted to have soup, so, held out until something free was offered. 

The store we were at, is called Carrefour, it’s very similar to the ultimate walmart or super-duper Target store.  It has a pile of random stuff in it, as well as food, every appliance known to man, including clothes driers (first time I’ve seen one…they’re not cheap), toys, random meat products, fish and fruit that I didn’t know existed, and everything else, it’s on two or three levels.

One of my pipes is now leaking in the bathroom, I think I’m actually going to have to call the landlord soon, as it seems to leak more and more water everyday…the cover holding everything together is getting a larger and larger crack….it bothers me that I find it only minorly curious, and I wonder when it’s going to burst.  Perhaps I should call a plumber and not deal with the landlord who always looks at me funny because I live here and don’t speak the language, he finds me to be very, very strange.  I find the looks to be disconcerting, it’s like I’ve lost face in his eyes because I’m white, when we all know that I don’t have face, so, he doesn’t know what to do with me.