Bear begs for potato chips at Zoo

If I was the bear, I'd want the girl to fall in, and eat her instead! Or at least that bird hopping around...

Street food, Nanjing style.

Pretty tasty, actually. When I bit into it, I realized that the stuff that looked like chicken wasn't, and the dark green stuff was seaweed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic-XIRdnWjM

She did not just do that........

I thought I was all culture shocked-out until yesterday and again today. Now, I think I mentioned that the women in boutiques can look at you and judge your size, and sometimes they measure your waist with their hands. If they don't have your size in stock (read: anything over a Chinese "medium", which is an American "XS" in most boutiques - if you're lucky you'll get an American "M" labeled "XL") they shoo you away. Ok, sometimes they do give you an apologetic look.

So I went shopping for underwear, and expected the same thing. But apparently the women in Nanjing must like their ..... shall I say prosthetics?.... so the store assistant proceeded to... you won't believe it... thoroughly grope me to find out my "real" size! I kid you not! It was so quick and so unexpected that I didn't have time to faint. :D

Naturally I scrambled off to the changing room, which thankfully had a lock. So she bangs on the door and my friend tells me she's trying to get my attention. I opened the door (clearly I didn't learn my lesson) and she tried to come in to "adjust" me. No, thank you, Miss, I'll pass on shopping today.

Unfortunately, I like giving the benefit of the doubt, and I went to another boutique today. Same thing. The assistant had a measuring tape, so I felt "safe" but alas, she too was a groper. I must conclude that this is the way they do things here - and I'm staying far away from those boutiques!

More miniatures and more wierd food

You know those really tiny Skittles? Well, those are regular size around here. And don't count on getting a bigger cup for your iced coffee - they use the same size cup as for hot coffee, and it has less coffee in the cup to make room for the ice. Even the coffee in the grocery store is smaller - 210mL! Who ever heard of such a thing? Where's my 16 oz wake-up call? No wonder I'm always sleeping...

Gum for scale...


Kiddie-sized coffee....


And check out the yogurt - nail polish for scale.

Kiddie-sized!


There's all the fast food you can eat here - KFC (they call it "keep fat coming"), Mickey D's, Papa John's, Pizza Hut, etc. But the food they serve is different. Check out the orange pie. There's a taro pie (or something else that's purple) too...

I feel an urge to buy more pepto......

I wonder what those chunks are made of....

Mirror cake

mmmm.... tasty. green stuff plus orange stuff plus sticky stuff plus chewy stuff...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0CVQkxgCJg

Sooo.... what's for lunch?

Fried ice cream with cucumber and tomatoes. Never had it before, and not sure I will again.

Fruit salad with ranch dressing.... Not too bad, actually.


Food on the go - little rice things.

Fruit salad with orange mayo-stuff. So gross, I had to try it.


Jiaozi. You can never go wrong with dumplings, right?



Somehow, I thought I'd know what to expect from the food here. But it varies. Generally, I have no idea what I'm eating, and let's just say that a whole box of pepto was not enough.....

Some of the food is awesome, though. The combinations are a bit strange, like ranch or thousand island dressing on fruit salad, and cucumbers and tomatoes to accompany fried ice cream. Or corn and peas on pizza. Stuff like that makes me stick to the Chinese food. I just say "Wo yao yige, yige, yige - bu yao bing, xiexie" (pointing to pictures with no english words). "I'll have one of that green thing, that mushy thing, and that purple thing in a glass - no ice, thanks".

So I figured out that cucumber juice is pretty good, taro ice cream and mung bean ice cream are awesome, cocktails generally suck - especially with no ice, and don't ever get the clear jelly thing. And oh yeah - never, ever, drink the water or have ice. Ever.

And I'm getting the hang of haggling. You can haggle for just about anything, unless it's in a store like Walmart, a restaurant, or a government-owned store. One of the first expressions our tour guide taught us is "tai gue le!" (too expensive!) and yesterday, our professor officially taught us how to haggle in Mandarin. haha. Usually on mornings, i visit the same newsstand outside the language center, say "wo yao mai liang binde kuang quan shui" and i really do get two mineral waters for 3 yuen! It took him a couple days to understand my poor pronunciation and horrible grammar, though :D

Some interesting expressions:

shuaige = good looking guy
qing wa = ugly boy (literally "please vomit" but used to mean "frog")
mein'u = good looking girl
kong long = ugly girl (literally "dinosaur").
wo za ni = I'll smash you!
qing rang yi xia! = please move it! / please get out of the way! (I use that alot. heheh).

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.