Shopping at Walmart

After settling down a little bit in the apartment, Janay offered to take us shopping. The closest superstore is – what a culture shock – Walmart, located in the large Wanda Plaza mall, one kilometer away. Inside that mall, you could really be in Chicago: lots of clothing store all around, a KFC, a MacDonald’s and a Starbuck’s, an IMAX theater, an official Apple resale store; you add all of these to the beautiful modernity of the Wanda Plaza mall and it’s undistinguishable from a brand new mall in the US.

All these names are well known to us, but it’s another story once you go inside. The English language is almost inexistent, so we relied heavily on Janay’s expertise, and patience. How would you compare different kind of shampoos, or laundry detergents? Sure, some products feature the “China Environmental Council” label, which makes them more environment-friendly than the ones who don’t have the label. We also recognize some brands; it makes us feel less lost and helps us narrow the choice.

The food part of the store is even more of an adventure. We never met all these dried food items before, or may be for a second in Chinatown in North America. How do you use them? And, what is that? This is the beginning of a fantastic culinary adventure for sure. We’ll have to try everything. There is the soy sauce aisle, the noodle aisle, the rice area, and half of the vegetables are foreign to us. Here we can recognize some dried shrimp; some cute turtles and huge, nasty frogs are hanging out in glass cages, alive. Oatmeal is to be found, and that is good news for our breakfast. Real milk is around too, not to be mistaken with milk that is not really milk – from the outside, we don’t see the difference. We packed some rice and noodles to survive the Chinese New Year.

True, we didn’t tell you, but we arrived the day before Chinese New Year’s Eve. This is comparable to the day before Christmas Eve in the western world, with almost every business closed and everybody in vacations for a week after New Year’s Eve. Surviving this was our short-term goal.