William Chow's Personal Web Page

The year is 2006.

China Round 2

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Today we are going to make a second attempt at getting those jade bead pieces for my co-worker. Well, at least today she was in her store. We at first couldn't find little bead pieces so I was picking out a necklace. Ami decided to buy my sister one too. When we go to pay for it, she didn't want our money. You see, Ami took care of their son when he was younger. I guess she was just repaying her. Well, she wanted to give us a bracelet too. She goes on to give me a belt buckle. It is only after sitting down, I saw a tray of bead pieces. It was basically parts of necklaces and bracelets. Exactly what I was looking for. So I took a few pieces of that into a bag.

Ami and her began chatting for awhile I guess about many things so I sat down on a chair and waited. I guess she was also asking about me too, since I think she remembers me. I did buy a big jade MJ set from her last year. Anyway, I slipped a 100 Yuan bill into my hand and folded it into a small square. I waited for an opporunity to slip it on to a shelf or into one of the display cases. An old lady came into the store, so everyone's attention was turned to her, so that gave me a chance to slip it on to her shelf. Then I prompted Ami to leave. I couldn't help to give her something for what she has given us. I am sure it was a few hundred yuan worth of merchandise but I feel her store is very small and she probably doesn't make that much from such sales. I could be wrong and the profit from jade sales are high. See in my later report when I went to get my eyeglasses.

Our next destination is to the medicine store to buy mouthwash. Apparently, things like mouthwash you can't buy at a grocery store, you have to go to a medical store to buy it. I get this stuff which has no nice flavour like mint. This stuff has the colour of urine and stings like a son of a bitch. But at least I know the alcohol is cleaning the open canker sore. I also bought something for this bug bite like thing I got on my leg. I usually tear the thing open and bleed out the poisons and such. Well, she bought this thing which looks like green jello to spread onto the wound. It happens to be a form of lidocaine, which belongs to the family of medicines called local anesthetics. When it is applied to the skin, it produces pain relief by blocking the signals at the nerve endings in the skin. Lidocaine is available only with your doctor's prescription. Hmmm.. Judging by how well this stuff works, I should bring more bottles of it home. I applied some and after one day it dried a whole section of skin away from the bite area. It was good that we bought it, because in a later incident, Alexanderia got a bug bite right on her nose. We applied some of this stuff, and it was gone in a day.

We headed down to Carre Four to buy some more jars of Italian Pasta sauce. It is then I noticed that the sign was actually written wrong. It was written "Ltalian" which means that mixed up that upper case "I" with an "L". I wrote a comment card for them to fix it.

While looking at the foreign food section, I noticed under the USA section, they were having a sale on Snapple Pink Lemonade. A bottle was 15 yuan ($2.10 Cdn) marked down to 10 yuan, which is $1.20. Hey, that is a bit cheaper than what you buy it for at 7-11 or Subway. So I picked up two bottles of the stuff.

The Experimental Chinese Food Of The Day is:
Hong Le's "Internet Snack"

Alright, apart from the sexy looking female warrior on the box, there isn't really much which tells us what constitues an internet snack. It does contain lots of vitamins like A,B's,C, E, and even things like Beta Carotene, iron and zinc. Now, doesn't this sound like cereal? Well, I wouldn't complain if it tasted like Count Dracula or Honey Comb or Trix or even Corn Flakes.

The only cool gimmick about this crap is that it has an "@" symbol on every square. However, this stuff goes the extra mile to taste like sand. It goes into your mouth and as soon as you bite into it, the cube distinigrates into powder. This power is dry and will turn to mush with your salvia. It does taste like dry fine sand. It crunches a bit and has the lingering taste of sesame. The smell, actually reminds of a certain dog biscuit... Hmmm... wait a minute...