My Chinese Grocery Experience

So tonight after a nice American dinner at Pizza Hut, I went with Effie, another mother to Carrefour, which is like a French Wal-Mart in China. How confusing. Effie by the way is Chinese so you would expect this could help us to get our mission accomplished. Megan needed some food mainly and Effie needed a bunch of things for her daughter. Well this was no small task. The aisles were set up on random diagonals, and the walls instead of being flat and straight across they were jagged and on an angle.

As we are walking throughout the store, Effie stops and asks the people where the items are that we need and some of them had no clue and others where semi-helpful. The biggest issue we found was that you have to pay for certain items in that section, but not everything, so at one point some girl comes running after me and taps my back which scared me half to death. Then in another aisle after having walked around for a while, this other girl starts to pull Effie's shopping cart back to the section to pay for just certain items. Meanwhile, you still have to go through the regular checkout at the end for the rest of the items. So confusing.

And then getting out of this place was an adventure in itself. We were following the exit signs but that only brought us to something that I can only imagine read emergency exit only since it was taped across the 2 doors and had the circle with the line through it. Then she asked some security guy and he told us through the KFC. Well it turns out what he meant was go to the KFC and turn right. Then keep on walking to the escalator which was broken of course. After making it to the street, we still had to regain our bearings and find our way back to the hotel. It's only like a 5-10 min walk at most, but there are no traffic signals, and crosswalks are there for looks. It's survival of the fittest when crossing a street here. Traffic stops for no one. And there was a cop just yards away. As many people drive in this area, just as many if not more take bus 11, which according to our tour guide is their feet. Probably some Chinese inside joke, but I can go with it. Another random fact we learned today: Chongqing is approximately the size of Austria.

Of course this was my second grocery store attempt. There is a department store across the street from the hotel and it has clothes, makeup (L'Oreal and Olay have counters like Clinque does in the states...so weird) perfume, fast food, and a grocery store. That time I was dragging people to aisles and pointing at pictures and making gestures. It worked, but I'm sure they all thought I was nuts.

On another note, today was the official adoption and Megan has legally become a DeMeo family member. We have some video for when we get home and hopefully tomorrow I can get all the pictures up and organized so there will be an album of what we have taken so far.