Since Jessica returned from visiting her family early in the year, I have gotten a lot of requests to just provide some thoughts in general. Plus, I have gotten several requests to show people around the world the stuff that I have to do day in and day out. In typical fashion, I plan on just keeping this as sarcastic as possible. You certainly won’t be getting any deep thoughts or anything like that out of me here. Most likely I will just focus on the random and absolutely pointless. I will probably spend most of my time focusing on the things that just make us laugh over here instead of the real cultural stuff that Jessica puts up on the other blog. For all of you Facebook people, I will load a lot more pictures into there that I will on the blog as we can actually get access to Facebook anywhere in China…but alas not Blogger. There is no telling what type of mayhem would occur if the government here would open up Blogger. Weird country sometimes, but I will get into that I am sure in subsequent posts.
I hardly know where to begin. Today alone was filled with exposing our boys to gambling and cricket fighting, squirrels with obvious mental issues, fish heads being pushed around the floor of the local grocery store and various other adventures. I think that I will focus instead of snacks. Yep, that is right. After a couple of weeks of having company stay with us and a week off from work where we did something almost every day, Jessica and I chose to just have a night in at the apartment and not really do anything. We ordered dinner from a restaurant that has become one of our favorites over here. Later on though, I decided that I just wanted junk food. Pretzels, chips, cookies…whatever. A quick survey of the cabinets yielded nothing, so I headed across the street to the local equivalent of Wal-Mart. I head off to the aisle where the potato chips are located in search for my favorite chips over here…Lay’s Stax. Basically, they are just like Pringles…except for the flavors. Oh yes my friends, today I discovered that the land of salt and vinegar, BBQ, sour cream and onion are all long behind us. Tonight, my options were “tomato,” “crispy prawn”, “green cucumber,” “black pepper rib eyed steak,” and “finger licking braised pork.” I can hardly imagine a better selection of flavors. One problem though was that I could not find “authentic original flavor”. Yep, just plain old potato chips. Finally, after searching high and low, I found this island in the middle of nowhere that had two or three cans of them set up in some pointless display. Of course realizing that the display was pointless, I just reached up and took it apart to the point that I could get the chips that I wanted and walked away with my container of chips.
There was another customer there that also thought that the display was rather ridiculous as they walked away from their cart and came over to me waving a finger at me and talking in a very excited tone. I didn’t understand a word that they were saying, but obviously they were very happy with me because they followed me all of the way back to the international foods area where I was going to pick up a bag of pretzels. The person was also nice enough to grab some of the employees at the store that were close by and explain to them how the display didn’t make sense. They even went so far as to grab the chips out of my hand and act out all of the work that I had to go through just to get the chips in the first place. Though I certainly appreciate this persons excitement, it was wearing off quickly now because they had just taken the potato chips that I had to work so hard to get right out of my hands. Tiring of the celebrity status that I had now attained given that a crowd was starting to gather, I just politely said ‘excuse me’, grabbed my chips and headed on my way to the check-out counter. The things that you have to go through just to get junk food. It’s easier just eating all of the healthy stuff that we have back home.
Oh well, the chips were great. I enjoyed every one of them. In case you are wondering about the random nature of the display, they were nestled in neatly with Maxwell House coffee and Lipton green tea, which has stacks of Oreo and some Chinese brand cookies on top of them. The only flavor of chips that were in the display were original and green cucumber, and they were in the clothing area. This was of course the first place that I would have ever thought of to look at for snack food.
Pretty much, that is an absolutely pointless story, and you just wasted 7 minutes of your life reading it. I will have to see if I can dig up the pictures that we took of introducing the boys to cricket fighting and will get those up.
