Could Have Left My Sunglasses at Home

Was waiting for a sunnier day to take more pictures, but I would have been waiting for a while.

Really wish I’d learned more characters before coming here – being illiterate is not fun. I often maddeningly can work out some really mundane things (ads) while missing the main point of something important (bus directions/schedules). And there are huge gaps in my Chinese vocabulary. Yesterday when I was buying groceries, I didn’t know the protocol of getting your fruit and vegetables weighed and tagged at the back of the store before bringing it to the till at the front of the store, and had no idea what the cashier was trying to tell me. We did eventually find a way to make me understand, so I took my 圣女果 (grape tomatoes) and 四会沙糖桔 (little oranges) about a kilometer to the back of the store for the scale and sticker.

Getting around is becoming a bit easier – a cab fare here is about the same as bus fare at home; buses are one or two kuai and convenient if you are going around the main areas and traveling before eight or so at night. I can’t figure out why some bus rides cost one kuai and some cost two. My roommate fills me in that it costs two kuai to ride the supposedly air conditioned buses. Yes, double the fare for a/c in January.

Spent today on food (6.5 kuai to the dollar): 25 kuai for some not very hot not very chocolate, in a Westerner themed café. 1.5 kuai for some really good dou hua. (The vendor carries two big baskets, one filled with soft fresh tofu and one with fixings. You get a dish of tofu with chili sesame oil, those crunchy beans, chopped green onions, and soy sauce that warms you up from the inside out.) 3 kuai for some spicy fried potatoes at a kind of fast food place (little salty, and could have been fresher, but tingly spicy with Sichuan pepper.) 2 kuai for 2 amazing, freshly grilled xinjiang style lamb skewers. 18 kuai for a zombie lemon tart at starbucks, (pastry about the texture and flavour of particle board) and 12 kuai for tea at same.