Getting Settled

Have I only been here a week?! Hardly feels that short of a time. The lot of us were talking it over and the general consensus is that it feels as though a month has passed. The only noticeable difference is that none of us can speak enough Mandarin to get us slapped. We can order a few dishes (from notes), ask for our bill, and ask for the price on something only to have it written out on a calculator. Hmmm…new stories. So many to tell. I suppose I’ll go with the most exciting one first. It involves a lovely little store called RT Mart. RT Mart is the most convenient convenience store ever. To give you all a picture, if WalMart procreated with a CVS and raised the offspring in Beijing, the result would be RT Mart. And now that we’ve got a bit of background, it’s onwards and upwards to the main event:

6:30. Wednesday 2 September 2009. It’s only our second day in this utterly foreign country. My three suitemates and I had all woken early after a 19:30 bedtime the previous evening, and decided we could use a few things at RT Mart. We’d visited the night before, but were in a small rush to really move in and get slightly settled, so hadn’t purchased much. After a miniature excursion in the wrong direction, we set off on the correct bearing. It’s 7:15. The main street outside our dormitory was busy, but people somewhat obey the traffic laws, so the crossing wasn’t too difficult. We easily made our way to the glorious store itself, and strode inside. It was surprisingly busy for it being only 7:25, but we don’t take much notice. Suddenly, just as we reached the escalators (flat conveyor belts at a ~20° angle) to the first floor, Chinese starts spilling over the in-store PA announcing one word we understood: promotion (that’s a sale for those of you Stateside). Diminutive, graying women and middle-aged men start flooding the store. Bedlam ensued. All four of us began being shoved out of the way for carts and baskets and entrances. We made our way upstairs, drinking in the chaos and indulging in the accompanying rush. As we entered the main portion on the second floor, the situation became even worse. Chinese men and women were shouting and bellowing at cashiers, each other, and even products (true story). I waded through the stature-deprived crowd toward a large stack of dish/hand towels (I needed a towel and wasn’t going to attempt to find a real one without knowing Chinese in this hotpot of insanity) and grabbed four nice, yellow-striped towels. Then it was back across the rushing river of Shanghaiites to grab some shampoo (forgot mine; yes, Mother, I know you pointed it out). Once more into the fray. This time we got to ride the current through the Tetris-style locking in of carts to the back of the upstairs to find surge protectors (they act doubly as power converters). No problem there. A nice man even showed us some that were on sale and had two in one package. Now we had to pay. The problem with that is that one can only purchase certain things upstairs. In order to buy most things, one must journey to the first floor and go through one of the 30 lines (that are always full). We looked ahead of us at the maelstrom and found the cause of all this mayhem: a sale on…I kid you not…rice. Ten-pound bags of rice for 10 quai or something ridiculous. Honestly worthy of an evacuation style rush, but surprising for the unpredictable predictability of it all. Go figure. Anyway, we (too) politely pushed our way through the crowd toward the downstairs escalators. They were packed. We made it on with a relative few problems (we did stop to consider the extremely cheap beer for a moment, enraging those behind us. Whoops). The bottom of the escalators was a scene unseen by any man in the West since 1964 when John, Paul, George and Ringo were causing every girl between the ages of 15 and 26 to pass out cold on sight. Arguments erupting over the tiniest bump or protocol infraction. Even I was dragged into the fray. Due to one of the aforementioned altercations in front of me, I was unable to disembark from the escalator in a rapid enough fashion to please the lady behind me. Now, I’m not a big guy, but I’m built like a Scot, and don’t move easily, especially at the physical behest of the generally petite population. However, this 4’ 7”, 82 pound woman managed to hit me with her cart strongly enough to knock me into a display stand and knock the phone I was holding out of my hand and onto the tiled floor. Say hello to a cracked outer screen for the duration of the trip :/. The eventful portion of the story ends here. We made it out alive. The checkout line was a cross between a fracas and a melee. We returned back to our dormitory around 8:10 or so, ready to face the day ahead.

Later that day, we took care of a few logistical things such as phones for the rest of the group and the finding of a wonderful Mediterranean/Chinese crossover place that served up a tasty lunch for dirt cheap.

That’s all for this post, but there will be more very soon. Promise.

Stay Classy, America,

Topher