Five ways Wal-mart in China is way different (and way more intense) than at home

by Catherine Bodry on

Faced with errands for unrelated items – body lotion, slippers, yogurt – I decided that today I needed some one-stop shopping. Visiting individual shops and bargaining down the price of each item would take me an afternoon.

So where do you head for one-stop shopping in Kunming, China? Wal-mart, of course.

The “supercenter” was pointed out to me earlier in the week by a local who, when I asked him about a sign reading “Kundu Night Market,” told me that the Wal-mart was the new market, and that Kundu was now just bars and discos. “But watch out for pickpockets at Wal-mart,” he added.

I didn’t feel good about it (though I joked to myself about “shopping locally” — hey, everything was made in China, right?), but I knew I couldn’t handle running around town in the cold, bargaining for a bottle of inexpensive lotion and pair of $1.25 slippers.

What ensued was an overstimulating experience that was probably far worse than bargaining away a chilly afternoon. Following are five observations I made on the differences between Wal-mart in China and the U.S., though I’m sure there are many more.1. Food products. Of course the food is different; that’s a given. But it’s the piles of small fish (sardines? krill? I wish I knew) with blank eyes staring up at the ceiling, and sausages hanging in the open air next to what appears to be the leg of some four-legged animal that make me do a double-take. Nothing is packaged and there is a thick smell of raw meat and fish. It’s not at all like the sanitary, scent-free shopping experience of home.

2. Salespeople. It seemed as though there were nearly as many staff as there were shoppers. Employees reorganized clothing bins and swept the floor. But most present were the staff who hovered at every stack of shampoo or home appliance display, handing out samples, yelling out prices, and demonstrating the fabulous capabilities of vacuum cleaners. These folks almost gave the store a market feel: individuals hawking different goods. I wondered if they worked on commission.

3. The crowds. I’m a person who craves stimulation, and even I was over-stimulated to the point of biting my lip to keep from screaming. The crowds on a Wednesday afternoon at Wal-mart were worse than any day-after-Thanksgiving-Christmas-shopping rush imaginable. I felt like a football player dodging other players on the field as I shopped, occasionally getting rammed into. Standing in “line” at the registers took more patience than surely even Buddha had cultivated. Shoppers banged me in the back of my knees with their baskets, pressed against me, shoved in front of me, and made me sweat.

4. Personal body space. In China the concept of a “personal bubble” is considerably smaller than mine, and this lack of space seems to be translated into shopping areas. The aisles are narrow, and shelves are crammed with products. Even the ceilings in the three-story building were low, pushing the illusion of air to breathe into the minuses.

5. No shopping bags. I doubt it’s because Wal-mart is super eco-conscious, but I noticed right before it was finally my turn at the register that the tidy plastic-bagging system usually in place was absent; customers brought their own bags. I quickly snatched a bright red reusable bag for around $.50, which had Wal-mart’s name in bold letters printed across it.

Lost? Phone a friend (or get an iPhone)

by Catherine Bodry on

I’m new in town. There are no mountains to establish my location. Roads don’t follow a tidy grid. Pedestrian and motorbike thoroughfares duck under highway overpasses, with nearly a dozen outlets – or so it seems.

So, walking back to my hostel one night I got lost.

Since it was late I jumped into a cab, thinking I could let the driver know when and where to turn. That was a good idea, until it became very clear that I was clueless. Not only could I not pronounce the street my hostel was on, I had no idea how to get to it. After backtracking until we were back where we started, I paid the apologetic cabbie and started walking again, testing each pedestrian outlet in the underpass until they all began to look the same.

While we’ve probably all experienced being lost in a foreign city, I had walked this particular route a half dozen times already and gotten lost in the underpass just as many times.

After my tenth surfacing and multiple attempts to “ask the audience,” I decided to use my “phone a friend” option. I called mostly because I was frustrated and a little freaked out at this point, map-less and language-less, and wandering around in the dark of an unfamiliar city.

Phoning my friend advanced me to the next level, however. I knew the name of the street I came from as well as my hostel. My friend looked it all up, and with a little Google map action, was able to talk me home.

“Turn west at Xichang,” he would say.

“If I’m walking ‘down’ on the map, is that left or right on Xichang?” I would respond.

If I ever had doubt that there is an iPhone-shaped hole in my life, this experience overpowered it. Until I can afford one, however, at least I know that friends are standing by with laptops and Google maps — and it doesn’t matter where in the world they are.

Read more about my life in China here.

Gadlinks for Wednesday 11.18.09

by Brenda Yun on

We’re halfway through November. For those of you living in the northern hemisphere, if you haven’t felt winter yet, you will soon! Here in Hawaii, winter is rainier but the waves are bigger and better. I guess that goes for most parts of the world: the weather may stink, but there’s always a bright side. Here are some semi-bright travel reads for today’s installment of Gadlinks. Enjoy!

‘Til tomorrow, have a great evening!

More Gadlinks HERE.

Gadling’s 13 stranger than strange sites for Friday the 13th

by Jamie Rhein on

Happy Friday the 13th! Tributed to being an unlucky day thanks to wives tales, religion and mythology, this is a day when people might think about altering their travel plans. The thought is, why push your luck? Franklin D. Roosevelt was one such person. He never traveled on the 13th. He even died on April 12, 1945. That, my friends, was on a Thursday. That is kind of strange, no?

In honor of a day that’s associated with strangeness, here is Gadling’s list of 13 top stranger than strange sites from around the world. They are not in any order of strangeness. You decide which one ought to be number one. All of them are places we’ve either been to, written about or both.

Even though this is photo is of a Friday the 13th in February, it fits the theme.

1. Baked Bean Museum of Excellence, Port Talbot, Wales

Perhaps a museum dedicated entirely to baked beans is not that strange. (Oh, come on. Of course it is.) What’s more strange than the shelves of 200 items attributed to baked beans is the owner, Captain Beany. In a benevolent strange sort of way, he is baked bean colored–kind of. Plus, he wears a cape. If you go to the museum, you’ll get a certificate saying you were there.

2. Berkeley Pit, Butte, Montana

The Berkeley Pit is strange enough that it was once the subject of a Daily Show segment. This enormous body of toxic water–7,000 ft. long, 5,600 ft. wide and 1,600 ft. deep in Butte, Montana is a result of the town’s copper mining history. Now a tourist attraction as well as a Superfund site, a good look only costs $2. How toxic is the water, you wonder? How toxic does this sound? Back in 1995, a flock of snow geese migrating from Canada landed on the water and died. Scads of them, as in 342 or more.

3. Checkpoint Charlie and Maurmuseum, Berlin, Germany

Even though the Berlin Wall is no more, the museum that started out in a two-room apartment near “Checkpoint C,” the most famous gate in the wall that once stood between East and West Germany, is still there. Check Point Charlie is where foreigners and diplomats were allowed to cross between the two Berlins.

The private museum tells about the history of the Berlin Wall and what went on at the checkpoint. The strangeness comes from the idea that an Iron Curtain existed –and the feeling one gets while reading about the various stories of people’s escape attempts-some successful, and many not. I was there before the Berlin Wall came down. Some of those stories still give me the creeps.

4. Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky.

Even though I’ve passed the billboard to this museum many a time, I haven’t gone here–yet. This museum is dedicated to the idea that the creation story as written in Genesis is word for word true. What about dinosaurs, you ask? Well, according to some of the museum’s exhibits, dinosaurs and people walked the earth at the same time. As strange as this museum may seem, it is no rinky dink establishment, but one of those museums with state of the art interactive displays.

5. Hall of Horns, Buckhorn Museum & Saloon, San Antonio, Texas

Although there are more than one oddball section of this attraction in San Antonio, Texas, one of them stands out as the strangest– the Hall of Horns at the Buckhorn Museum. Even though it’s been years since I bellied up to the bar in the saloon for a Lone Star beer here, I can’t get the images of walls filled with trophy mounts out of my head. There are 1,200 of them from 520 different species. This horn collecting started back in 1881 when the bar first opened. People could bring in antlers for a free shot. My favorite for strangeness in this museum isn’t a mounted trophy, though. It’s the chair made entirely out of horns that looks strangely comfortable.

6. Haunted Prison, Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania

Another gives-a-person -the creeps place is this 1880s prison camp. Set up as a penal settlement and a timber station in 1830, prisoners from Britain were shipped here. This historic site is made up of old houses, cell blocks and even an autopsy room that visitors can wander through. Although Mike attests to its super creepiness, he also pronounces it super cool.

7. The Heidelberg Project, Detroit, Michigan

“Brightly-painted doors, shopping carts, shoes, telephones, old signs, tires, scrap metal, and rusted appliances form a surreal landscape of discarded relics from people’s lives” create an alternative version of abandoned neighborhoods in Detroit. Conceptualized by Tyree Guyton and created by children and artists in the neighborhood, this outdoor art project is Katie’s version of strange. What’s also strange is that people who don’t like it have set the project on fire from time to time. What’s not strange is that whenever a section is burned, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, art is added to it to transform blight into beauty once more.

8. House on the Rock, Spring Green, Wisconsin

The House in the Rock is one of those sites that is almost beyond words. Scott does a fine job encapsulating in this Gadling post why this creation of Alex Jordan’s is one of the strangest places he’s been. As Scott explains it, every inch of this place is filled with something to gawk at and wonder about on a do-it-yourself kind of tour. From what Scott describes, it sounds like each area of the multi-faceted building is bursting with all things wild and wonderful. I’m wondering about that “car with a heart shaped spa tub, towing a pyramid filled with elephants.” Scott snapped a picture of it. Yep, it’s strange alright.

9. Longwan Shaman Amusement Park, Changchun city, China

This park may not be any stranger than any other amusement park except that it has the world’s largest penis. Don’t you think this is a strange centerpiece for an amusement park? According to what Willy found out, the structure celebrates the area’s shamanistic culture. I guess that’s as a good a reason as any to have a 30-ft phallus made out of steel and straw.

10. Mao Zedong’s Tomb, Beijing, China

At Tienanmen Square, inside a mausoleum situated so you can’t miss it, is a crystal coffin similar to what Sleeping Beauty had while she awaited her prince. Inside the coffin, looking totally unkissable, lies Chairman Mao Zedong. If a “pickled” former head of state available for public viewing isn’t stranger than strange, than what is? Along with Mao’s dead body that looks as if it’s shrunk over the years so that his head seems out of proportion to the rest of him–seriously, he doesn’t look right regardless of the fact that he’s dead–the timbre of the experience adds to the oddness. There’s no talking, no stopping, and no moving out of the single file. The scene is one where creepy organ music would be fitting. (I’ve seen Ho Chi Minh as well, but Mao looks stranger–and so was the experience.)

11. Museum of Broken Relationships, Croatia

This is not a museum you have to go to Croatia to see. Broken relationships may be coming to you. This traveling show, created in Croatia, was last seen at Singapore’s Fringe Festival. Featuring items from people who have suffered from a broken hearts, the collection is a mishmash of love letters and objects from relationships that turned into sad, sad, tales of loss. One of the strangest items on display is a leg prosthesis that was donated by a war veteran. He had the misfortune of falling in love with his physiotherapist.

12. Museum of Forensic Medicine, Bangkok, Thailand

Located in Siriraj Hospital, this museum gets high marks for pairing the ick factor with strangeness. What will you see if you go to this museum? “Elephantiasis testicles, severed heads, Cyclops babies, murder weapons, blood-stained clothing, hanged corpses” etc., etc, etc.

13. North Korea

If you haven’t read Gadling alumni Neil’s posts on his travels to North Korea, do. Neil’s whole trip was filled with strangeness. Because Neil is not that strange, I’m assuming that the strangeness came from the country. If you’re in doubt about this, please read Sean’s open letter to Dear Leader Leader, Kim Jong. In addition to having one of the strangest world leaders, North Korea has Traffic Girls. Armed with white anklets, whistles and batons, these women whom Neil found fetching direct Pyongyang’s few automobiles.

For more Friday the 13th lore check out this article in The Valdosta Daily Times. That’s where I found out about FDR.

Burping and slurping: All the stuff you can do in China that you can’t do back home

by Catherine Bodry on

It doesn’t take long for me to adjust to the manners of China – the spitting, the ear-cleaning, the belching. While some folks are aghast at the bodily -function decibels reached (and indeed, the Chinese government is trying to curb some of the habits, with a campaign — in Shanghai, at least — encouraging citizens to “be more civilized”), I view the experience as complete and utter freedom.

Gone is the pretense that I’m not actually stuffing my face. Gone is pretending that I’m just itching my nose. I can’t belch really loud, but I can try. I’m a total spitter, which drives my friends crazy, but here I fit right in!

The biggest issue with some of these habits is that they’re not very sanitary, which is why I carry hand sanitizer around with me. And true, I do get grossed out whenever I come across a huge glob of phlegm on the sidewalk, which is pretty much every other step. And I still am surprised when a tiny old lady lets out a huge, liquid belch.

But oh the freedom and joy of being able to let loose from the constraints of my culture – and without doing it the usual American way of getting totally wasted. There are limitations, though. A sign in my hostel informs guests that “anyone who defecates in the shower will be fined 100 yuan and kicked out immediately!”

I guess I’m not totally free….