"i'll have some of...that"

My grandparents’ new apartment is literally right next to a Westernized supermarket, which is kind of hit-or-miss. As Lena thankfully warned me ahead of time, they don’t sell deodorant. But they do sell four mint-covered Oreos (ohmygodsogood) for 7 kuai = one dollar = some people’s hourly wage. I am really lazy, so here are some pictures that take up lots of space and make my job easy. (By the standard of a picture = a thousand words, this post is more than six thousand words long. Imagine if we could do that on papers.)


This is the market in front of the old apartment. See that red thing spinning around in the middle? It’s actually a plastic bag attached to this motorized string. The plastic bag spins around to scare away flies. Each stand has one. The Chinese will invent everything.



Amphibians. They’re what’s for dinner. (In case you were wondering, frog is much tastier than turtle. It’s kind of like a chewy chicken, with slimier skin. Mmm.)


We really do like our rice.


Modern “grocery stores” are basically department stores. (Walmart has one floor that’s a supermarket, and another floor of other goods.) They sell everything, from ergonomic car seat pads (some of you know what I’m talking about) to computers to gems like this. The text reads, “Have a boty and the happy wondog toming cat.” Super-cool!

Completely irrelevant:

Boy in blue stripes: “Hold up, baby, my room is that way. Baby! Don’t go…”