Chaos at Carrefour
I am still a little bit out of sorts from this cold but for the most part I am better. Last night Alex and I went to a 3 or so hour long meeting on the hutongs project, oy. Alex left early which left me to sit and look at every single photo taken for this project. Don't get me wrong, I love looking at photos and these are especially interesting, but 3 hours of it gets a bit tiresome. I am looking forward to going on more trips throughout the city to take photos of hutongs. Hopefully next time it won't be so cold/windy/dusty.
Today I went to Carrefour for the first time and I don't think I will be going again anytime soon. It was my first time taking a taxi alone which I managed to do without getting lost, woohoo! Carrefour is like a Walmart (which I never went to in the states) in that it is one store that has everything and anything. They even have a grocery store downstairs. Among my list of things to get, I was looking for a yoga mat. Naturally I looked in the sports section but could not find one. So I did the daring and tried to ask someone in English, because the store caters to foreigners (although I didn't see many). Unfortunately I had around four Chinese guys trying to understand what I was asking for. I tried making all kinds of motions to show a yoga mat and eventually someone brought one from the back. It was pretty frustrating though and I felt like a complete idiot trying to play charades with these guys.
After nearly losing my mind in there I decided I had to leave but ofcourse the lines to checkout are ridiculously long. I went to a line that said "Credit Card" thinking they would take mine. Side note: Not sure if I mentioned this before, but little kids here wear these big bundled clothes that have a massive opening where their butt and such are. I guess they do this so that they can just squat and do their thing without taking off their pants. It's kind of weird though when you are at a grocery store and you see little baby butts showing. Anyway, while waiting in the longest line (not really longest, but the woman in front of me had an insane amount in her cart), I looked around to see if there were any shorter lines, but then I decided to just stick with it because I was exhausted and did not want to try and switch. When I got to the checkout, they could not take my credit card because it is a foreign credit card. Apparently they had a special line for foreign credit cards, what a fool I was! Oy. So they took me out of that line and to the foreign credit card line and all was right in the world.
Today I went to Carrefour for the first time and I don't think I will be going again anytime soon. It was my first time taking a taxi alone which I managed to do without getting lost, woohoo! Carrefour is like a Walmart (which I never went to in the states) in that it is one store that has everything and anything. They even have a grocery store downstairs. Among my list of things to get, I was looking for a yoga mat. Naturally I looked in the sports section but could not find one. So I did the daring and tried to ask someone in English, because the store caters to foreigners (although I didn't see many). Unfortunately I had around four Chinese guys trying to understand what I was asking for. I tried making all kinds of motions to show a yoga mat and eventually someone brought one from the back. It was pretty frustrating though and I felt like a complete idiot trying to play charades with these guys.
After nearly losing my mind in there I decided I had to leave but ofcourse the lines to checkout are ridiculously long. I went to a line that said "Credit Card" thinking they would take mine. Side note: Not sure if I mentioned this before, but little kids here wear these big bundled clothes that have a massive opening where their butt and such are. I guess they do this so that they can just squat and do their thing without taking off their pants. It's kind of weird though when you are at a grocery store and you see little baby butts showing. Anyway, while waiting in the longest line (not really longest, but the woman in front of me had an insane amount in her cart), I looked around to see if there were any shorter lines, but then I decided to just stick with it because I was exhausted and did not want to try and switch. When I got to the checkout, they could not take my credit card because it is a foreign credit card. Apparently they had a special line for foreign credit cards, what a fool I was! Oy. So they took me out of that line and to the foreign credit card line and all was right in the world.
posted by Ramune at
3/15/2006 11:05:00 PM
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