In a garage....buying what you say??????

Angst of the moment:
Feeling like my feet are going to fly out from under me with every step I take. No my friends, I am not referring to an ice skating experience or one involving alcohol, rather one of daily life of recent at home here in Shenzhen. So, for the 180 days a year that it doesn't rain in this city, marble sidewalks are completely fine, even breathtakingly trendy. However, for the other half of the year when it rains, pedestrians are at the mercy of their footwear. I blame this feeling that I am going to fall all of the time partly on the type of pavement, and equally on my favourite people in the country, the spitters. Their saliva on the sidewalk makes the rainy marble that much more slick.....so if I break my back, neck, front teeth...again, arm, knee, or any other part of my body, I will completely blame those individuals who expectorate all over public space.

Ok, enough of that...Friday evening and Saturday were quite, no totally amusing by all standards. Friday's entertainment was due to an east meets west phenomenon. My three girl friends and I decided to walk around the city a bit after our TEFL meeting at 2 on Friday. We ended up at the Mix shopping mall, the largest and swankiest mall in Shenzhen with AMAZING kong tiao (AC) and 5 floors of high-end shops (one store has the new ipod nano....I'm not gonna lie - it was love at first sight) and an ice-skating rink on the 4th, yes the 4th floor. I'm thinking that is just to prove the intellectual prowess of Chinese engineers or something; they could not have possibly done it the easy way by situating the rink on the ground floor. Anyway besides a thai restaurant, an italian restaurant and Starbucks in this mall, there is a Taco Bell Grande, the only place in town for Mexican food. Now, despite the striking similarity in its name to Taco Bell, the fast food restaurant in the US, this is not a fast food joint. It is a formal eating establishment where all of the waiters and waitresses sport sombreros. However, these sombreros are very strange looking.....the part that goes on top of the head is very very tall and pointy, and a usual sombrero has a very wide brim, but these do not. It's hard to look at these chinese women in sombreros and not laugh....they look ridiculous. Dinner was good....tortilla soup was really good - however, I have a sneaking suspicion that pieces of sausage (think the taste and consistency of stuff on a pizza) aren't really supposed to be in tortilla soup. Oh well. What really cracked me up about the evening was that two Chinese ladies in tiny black mini-skirts and skimpy little shiny sleeveless tops come and sit down adjacent to us and ordered dinner. I'm engrossed in conversation at our table and then I happen to glance over in the direction of the ladies and I notice that the 'look at me' outfit that one of them was wearing was now covered in a monster-sized Mexican ponco-blanket deal (think Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa). I am unsure if the uh, poncho, was for purposes of warmth or that maybe that is how the restaurant makes people who have birthdays there feel special, like the cardboard crown at Burger King. Who knows, or cares, it was hilarious.

Saturday was a day of pampering for us ladies. We all stayed at my apt. Friday and watched Must Love Dogs on dvd and then crashed early. Saturday we got up and decided to venture down to the train station in Luohu....where there is a 5 story market that all peoples from HK go to buy cheap stuff and have stuff made. I managed to get all of us down there without any troubles....yah! Our goals for the day were to get cheap manicures and pedicures and maybe a hairwash. As soon as we get into the bottom floor of the market we see a nail place. I ask the woman how much it costs for a manicure and pedicure and she tells me 60 for both. I laugh and tell her where I live I can get it for 30. Speaking Chinese helps, and soon we were all sitting in a row getting our nails and toes done for 30 kuai. There was only one nail person in the shop when we arrived, but no more than three minutes later, four other nail ladies (and one nail fella just for effect) arrive with their tool boxes and stools....amazing how quickly the forces can be rounded up. I hadn't had a pedicure or manicure since my senior year in hs, so this was fun. The shop owner kept talking to me in Chinese and kept trying to get us to have more treatments...nail buffing, foot scraping, foot massage. I almost went for the foot massage, but there was a guy across from us getting one....and i swear the massager was beating the snot out of his foot; maybe I'm strange but that doesn't seem relaxing to me. In just over an hour we were clipped, filed and painted and on our way back into the market. It was quickly decided that for 3.50 US, we could indulge in this activity once every two weeks, nice!

The other goal of the day was a hair wash. These are common here and Meredith's boyfriend had one the other day for 10 kuai, so we were thinking that was quite a deal too. Plus, he got waaaay more than he bargained for. He has really curly/wirey hair the kinda sticks out about 5 inches from his head in a very curly fashion. Well, the man washes his hair and gives him a great scalp massage and then starts to blow-dry and straighten Aaron's hair. Aaron doesn't speak Chinese and so the beautician was unable to understand that he didn't want his hair straightened. In less than 15 minutes, Aaron's hair went from wet and curly to straight and his coif was shaped like a Q-tip! Hahaha, China,china. Welp, Saturday we didn't hairwash, but in leiu of that experience we had another fabulous one.

We were walking around being followed by people trying to coax us into their shops (when 100 stores sell all of the same things in one place, advertising via annoying people who grab you is apparently a key and winning strategy). Well, Mere wanted to buy a dvd player and a man showed her is card that said "electronic equipment trade" and so I immediately think, ok this a man dealing in stolen goods, great. We follow him to shop nearby....ha, nearby. It was all of the way on the other side of the market; he'd been following us forever. We get to a stall where the garage door is down, so the man escorting us knocks and the door is lifted a crack, a hand emerges with a key and then the door goes down again. We follow the man to the next stall where golf clubs are being sold and he ushers us all in, then pulls the garage door down. I'm thinking super, we're trapped in a stall and might die. He pulls out four stools and makes us sit down and then produces large binders of dvd covers. He's a counterfeit dvd salesman, and dealer of stolen electronics and golf clubs. We look through the books just to humor him, but he's actually got great movies....really really new ones and lots of boxed tv series sets. I ask him how much a movie is and one man says 15 kuai, so we get up to leave. I can buy ones for 5 on the street in dongmen. I tell him this. They're all patronizing me now b/c i speak chinese - oh, miss, your chinese is soooo good, you are sooooo pretty, etc. I tell him i'd like to see one of the movies b/c he claims that they're actually dvd9s (ones that will play in US players) and he says oh no, no worries, you make a list first and then we show you. So the four of us come up with 8 dvds and then I happen to see the West Wing season 5 in one of the pictures. I'm surprise b/c it doesn't come out in the US until Dec. so I ask to see that too. As soon as we tell the young guy that that is all the we want, he stands up, picks up a walkie talkie and starts rattling off our list to someone on the other end. Then some guy nudges him and he remembers something. The young guy gets a stool, stands on it and moves one of the ceiling tiles in the roof, rustles around in the ceiling and produces my West Wing series 5. He replaces the ceiling and then gives me the dvds. They aren't copies, they're originals from HK, certified stolen property. Five minutes later, three knocks are heard on the garage door, it is lifted about 6 inches and voila, there are our movies. We end up getting them for 8 kuai each b/c sure enough, they are dvd9s. I got my West Wing Season 5 for about $9 US....not bad considering it'll be 50 dollars when it comes out in America. One of the guys at the store, after talking with me for awhile in Chinese asked if I would teach him English since I am an English teacher. I told him I would come back next month and if he still wanted lessons, it'd be 150kuai/hr (a fair price). He said he'd wait for me, hahaa.

See what you all are missing in America; come live here where stories flow like water.

Random thought: when i come back to America I'm going to need a peanut gallery to continually stroke my ego. Reason? Well here, when I am not being stared at, I'm being told that I'm beautiful, that I should be a model, that my language skills are amazing, that I look like Kirsten Dunst, that I'm smart (b/c I taught at Beijing University for three weeks, ha) etc. I have a feeling that well is going to dry up as soon as I return stateside. I wonder if some laowai (foreigners) stay here just b/c they feel like a big fish in a small pond.