more stuff mart adventures

wow...so charis and i went to stuff mart today, the first time in a long time. we went to get clothes for charis that she needed before the trip she is going on to somewhere way in northern china where they are going to stay in yurts. and i figured i could get some things too.

in case you forgot, stuff mart is the place with many (eight or so) giant warehouses, 3 floors each, and their are rows and rows of vendors with little shops selling things--everything...seriously. that's why it's called stuff mart. (alissa, this is where i will take you to get real chinese things to take back if you want.) =) our main mission today was clothes though. there are three buildings with the entire first floor being clothes. i'm bad at estimating, but that's at least 100 little shops. so we're just walking up and down peering into the stalls, looking for the types of clothes that charis needs. i don't even know how many stores we went into. i don't know if i can tell this story in a good way because it's so jumbled in my mind. we talked with a lot of people IN CHINESE. well, we tried. i used more chinese today than i have in quite awhile though. it's nice to go places that i'm actually forced to use it.

we also worked on bargaining. we need to continue to work on that... the first place we bought things, we got 78% of the original price; the second time we got 75%; and the third time we got 56%. so i guess we're getting better. in one place, two other girls that were there told us they got a better deal than we did! i'm sure they did. bargaining makes me feel guilty though, i think that's why i'm not good at it yet. when i'm bargaining, i think, really the price isn't that bad, if i was buying this in america, it would not be an expensive price, so it's ok, i don't need to continue to negotiate, i don't really need to start with that low of a price... but then i turn out to be wrong, especially on the last two when the person seemed to insist on a higher price, but then they actually came down. bargaining is an art. it's expected. you cannot be wishy-washy and unsure of what you want when you are bargaining, otherwise you will just accept the first or second slightly lower price that they offer. repeat multiple times a price less than 50% of what they originally said. then keep saying no. offer something slightly higher, but not too much higher. actually, i don't really know. i'm still trying to figure this out. but i am becoming good at understanding numbers! except for the people who say 4 and 10 almost exactly the same way and i can't tell the difference because they aren't pronouncing it correctly! the people who have grown up in my city can't pronounce the difference between the "s" sound and the "sh" sound, so when 4 is "si" and 10 is "shi", it makes it kind of hard to tell.

anyway, there were a lot of interesting cultural exchanges today, but i will just relate one. charis was trying on some shorts in a somewhat bigger store. while she was trying them on, i was talking with the lady who was helping us. or rather, she was talking to me. (it's interesting that there were several people today who just kept speaking very fast chinese to us, maybe because we said a few things that made them think we know a lot of chinese, i don't know. but then even after we looked at them very intently, trying to understand, but not really...just guessing, and not really responding because we didn't understand, they still kept talking. also, i think we've gotten good at making certain sounds that makes it sound like we understand...hahaha. well, i'd rather they keep talking to us than not! to one lady, i said, "she talks very fast" when i meant to say "you are talking too fast"...ha... anyway, this lady, the one i was originally talking about, was one of those people. i figured out she was asking where we were from, so i told her america. she paused and appeared to be thinking, and then said very dramatically and like she was pretty surprised, a very long sentence, but i understood the main words and her gestures were clear. she basically said, "i thought american people were fat, but you two or so thin!" so i told her (at least i think i did), that not all american people are fat. but it's pretty interesting...there is a much higher percentage of overweight people in america. there is definitely a lack of larger size clothing in china, while you can find it in abundance in the US. but here you can go have clothes made for a very reasonable price to fit your measurements exactly and design whatever you want, or have them make something like something you already have. in the US, you can't really do that without spending an awful lot of money, as far as i know.

anyway, that is my rambling version of today's stuff mart adventure.