stuff mart adventure

i went with R & A to stuff mart on saturday to buy...stuff! well, i went to buy yarn and crochet needles, but combined we bought a lot of stuff: notebooks, pencil sharpeners, files, envelopes, magnets, clothes hamper... other things i saw: clothes, doilies, lace....and now that i'm writing this i can't think of what things i saw. i saw too many things to remember them. R bought a giant piece of plastic to cover tables with. we saw many many different rolls of plastic, different thicknesses, different qualities. one guy he talked to was selling him on the fact that a particular roll of plastic didn't smell like others.

then we walked up and down aisles and up down stairs for quite awhile trying to find crochet needles. this is why i can't remember anything i saw--i saw waaaay more things that i've ever seen the other two times i went to stuff mart. we found a yarn lady and she was trying to sell me her yarn, and R was trying to get her to tell him if she had crochet needles when we didn't know how to say "crochet" (although i think he knew how to say needle). finally she understood that i wanted to crochet, not knit like the things that were on her display. but she kept trying to sell me her yarn by telling me it would be beautiful to crochet with. finally she told us where we could find crochet needles--"up stairs and to the back left." we got up there and didn't find any crochet needles. "up stairs and to the left" are pretty vague directions in a giant warehouse with many aisles in all directions. so we resorted to walking up and down in between the warehouses on the walkways that went over the streets on the second floor because R remembered seeing crochet needles at a stall along one of those walkways once. and he was right! finally we found them. the sizes ranged from medium-small to very very very small. the biggest size they had was ok for me though, so i got those. then we found another lady who was selling many different kinds of yarn and i was able to get enough different colors to make scarves with (this is for a once a week class i'll be teaching). it took some doing though. the good ones were all way up above this lady's head on shelves, and she was shorter than me. so R ended up going behind the counter and standing on another shelf and taking packages of yarn down for me until the lady stopped him because she thought i wasn't going to buy them all (but i was). they had this whole conversation back there that i didn't understand about the yarn, about the price of the yarn, and who knows what else. so R and A bartered for me and i got seven packages of yarn with 5 skeins each for about $43. not bad! i don't know what the quality of the finished scarves will be, but we shall see.

i was very impressed with R & A's chinese that day. they've been here for 2 years, and i hope that my chinese is a little bit as good as theirs by that long! i really really want to start chinese lessons.... i hope it's able to happen soon. supposedly sometime this month, but i feel like it won't really start until october because of the schedule of the lady who is going to be our tutor, so that's too bad. the language barrier is starting to bother me...as long as i'm improving, even one word every now and then, i'm fine. but since i've been here it's been very slow going with no one in particular to teach me or to actually practice with. so yes, i'll be very glad when the actual chinese lessons start.