In Shanghai, Day 4
Today is my first weekend in Shanghai. Luckily, I just got back from shopping, it’s pouring outside now. It’s been raining every night. I started my day early and left the guest house before eight. I was walking towards the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park with no destination in mind. Okay, fine, I was trying to see how far the subway was by walking, but I never got that far because I kept on turning into side streets that had more stores. I need a sign on my head that says, “I don’t speak Mandarin.” It gets tiring telling every salesperson that I don’t speak Mandarin in Mandarin when they start telling me how great their new products are. I think I should enter a store and start spewing English. There weren’t a lot of cool stores but I eventually hit a bunch of food places. There were so many options for lunch but I decided to stop at a Korean place to have some spicy tofu/vegetable soup with rice. My stomach is still holding up. No mishaps so far.
I finally decided that it was time to take a cab to the Jīnqiáo Carrefour–because my legs were getting tired. It’s like a French Wal-Mart, it’s pretty popular among the teachers at SMIC. The Carrefour is huge. The biggest store I can think of is Costco and this Carrefour is definitely larger than Costco. Costco is roomy with a lot of space to maneuver your shopping cart, but not at this Carrefour. They have a little imported foods section where you can get stuff like Kraft Mac & Cheese, dried pasta, pesto, Japanese Glico curry pastes, and Korean hot chili pastes. I went to go buy a hair dryer because it’s kind of hard to put my hair in a ponytail when it’s so short. I bought a bright yellow Panasonic one for ¥89. The saleswoman that helped me didn’t speak English so she was comparing the Panasonic hair dryers for me by point at the different number of settings/speeds and pointing at “Cool” on the box—as in cool air, not “Gnarly, Dude!” cool.
