Adventures to Walmart. Yes, Walmart…sort of.

This past Saturday we were able to go to a Walmart in downtown Chungchun. There’s a bus stop not too far from the school’s entrance and one of Dave’s old students went with us and brought along a friend. They were going to help us navigate and negotiate our cell phone deals. (By the way their cell phone plans work much differently than ours. Here, you buy a phone, then buy a phone number separately, and you buy minutes and texts. The phone numbers are different prices depending on the numbers you want in them. The more 4’s you have in your number the cheaper it is, the more 8’s you have in your number the more expensive it is. 8 is one of the lucky numbers here. “Su” and “Su” are the words for “4” and “die”…. 4 is an unlucky number.)

After taking a standing, hour-long bus ride with 60-70 other Chinese (a normal load, actually had Chinese room for about 20 more – we had American room for about 30 of them to get off), we arrived in Changchun. We must have hit the ritz area as there was a Gucci store and a Louis Vuitton store. Never saw them before in my life… I took pictures. They also had Nike, Jordan, Adidas stores too. We zigzagged and backtracked around the city to try and get two other phones we had unlocked for use in China, but no luck. We splurged and ate at KFC (second western food of the trip).

Then, I heard a series of words I never thought I would ever hear in my life as we walked into a mall/department store area, “Yeah, Walmart is upstairs.” … WHAT?! It turns out their Walmart is different from our walmart. Walmart, and the food department (which I don’t think believes in packaging meet, but instead just sticking it out there and letting you pick) was on the second floor and then you took an escalator up to the third floor where everything else was. I learned even more that the way we think is differently and that it extends as to what is logical to put next to each other in Walmart. We found backpacks in 3 different parts of the store, one of which was between the sports equipment and the music. They also put lamps across from the travel luggage. Needless to say, we did a lot of wondering. I felt bad for the two students who went with us because we just walked from one side of the store to the other. We would collect one thing like a wash cloth that’s with the scrub brushes thinking that there wasn’t a sponge, then go to the other side of the camping supplies and find air fresheners and sponges and pick up a sponge instead. Two hours later, we walked out with 3 bags pretty full and ready to sit down. One cool fact though was that there shopping cards are 4-wheel steering – which means you can drift your car around the turns from one aisle to another, which I did, until you hit someone else’s cart – bad idea.

In training, they told us that everything just takes longer than we expect in China. Everything takes longer, is a bigger deal, and will wear you out faster. They said you’ll go to the grocery store and when you come back, you’ll want to take a nap and people back home won’t understand. I laughed at the time, but I was so ready to crash when we got back. We left at 10am and got back just about 5pm. Whew. It was a good day.

I walked around taking pictures of all the different displays of meat for 5-7 min...until the smell got too much.

Not chicken wings! - Each of those is a claw from...something. The claw was about the size of my hand. Delicious.