Yay! Walmart! and The Best Mall Ever

If you're from Texas, you might not like it very much here. Everything's very cute and, well, small. I ordered a pot of coffee from a restaurant in Shenzhen expecting a NY-sized pot that would really wake me up. Apparently a "pot" contains two 6oz cups of coffee. And the cups are 6oz-sized. It's ridiculous. And boy, is coffee expensive here. That pot, if I remember correctly, cost around 60 yuen (one cup alone was around 38 yuen) - not that much by NY standards, but let me tell you what my lunch cost today for perspective. I went to a relatively expensive restaurant and had dumplings (15 for 15 yuen), a huge plate of fried rice (22 yuen) and bubble tea (28 yuen). Drinks in general are expensive in restaurants. My friend's mineral water was 10 yuen in the restaurant - the same bottle that set us back 3 yuen for two this morning at the newsstand. The subway is 2 yuen - it doesn't make much sense to me.

Anyway, back to sizes. The size of the dishes of food in restaurants is huge, while the size of the drinking glasses are small.

Check out the size of my shopping cart (a 1.5 liter bottle of water is in there for scale) and shopping bag from Walmart. The Walmart I visited in Nanjing is nothing like any other Walmart I've seen. First of all, it's in a mall. Also check out the "food sample" bins. I thought it was another cool-looking trash can at first.... I also found a real cassette!



How fresh is your fish?...


Mmmmm... tasty. Bring your own fork!




I also went to an underground shopping mall... and can I say sensory overload?! I stood, mesmerized, by the entrance (in the subway), unsure of what to do next. "This must be what it's like to be hypnotized," I thought. Flashing lights, neon lights, lights on the floor, dazzling window displays that attract women like flies to a zapper... and even when all the clothes in the store are ugly, you find yourself wanting to go in...


Cutest trash can ever. It's also tiny, like many other things.


This last picture shows what I saw before I briefly considered taking up religion again - duct tape holding the overhead console on an airplane together. I looked to see if there was duct tape on the wing, too. There wasn't. So I decided to snooze through the flight. That way, I wouldn't be aware of any parts that may rattle or fall off. But first, I had to remind the people next to me about that movie... the one where the plane starts falling apart in midair... haha.