Back on the Air

We do realize that the blog was left at a very strange point on the last posting, but our internet shut itself down and we have only  just reestablished connection.

In short, after James got home he promptly came down with some sort of gastroenteritis and was extremely exhausted.  We spent the weekend relaxing.  Things started to look a little better yesterday.  To celebrate our first healthy evening back together as a family, we walked to a Korean pizza place whose slogan is "Love for Women"!  It sounds pretty creepy, but apparently it is supposed to refer to letting Mom have a night off.  This is a picture of our leftover box.

No sooner has James come home than I am leaving.  I will be going with another MCCer to Sichuan Province from May 10-15.  For those of you who do not know the ins and outs of Chinese geography (which was me before coming here) I enclose a map.  I'm not entirely sure what the trip involves yet, but I'll know more when I return!  The day before I leave we will celebrate our 5th anniversary.  

I have found myself in need of a few T-shirts, and I happened to find myself in Walmart on Monday.  As a side note, I generally feel the same disgust for the western corporations that are gradually taking over foreign economies as most people, but they happen to sell the cheapest diapers.  When I was there I saw a huge bin of light cotton T-shirt for 9 yuan each (money jargon - 1 yuan = 1 kwai = 1 RMB).  So I set about digging through to see if there was anything I fancied.  I found that there were two impediments to easy selection.  One was predictable, one was not!

The predictable one was that all of the T-shirts had strange, nonsensical English written on them.  I have figured out why there is an epidemic of Chinese girls wearing cutesy shirts with really strange English written on them.  They are the cheapest ones available!  I passed over "The Rooster Soft", "I feel tingles when I touch your heart", "Find Everything You Need" (I'm a one-stop shop!), "Goober Growing Maze Export", "Pistaa!" and more.  I realize most people can't read these shirts (which is why you see them everywhere) but I can.  I've also come to the conclusion that Walmart is playing some kind cruel joke, since their merchandizers back in New York are clearly able to read English.  

The surprising impediment was that almost all the shirts were XXXL, or XXL!  Not only is Walmart playing a cruel joke, they are also experiencing country confusion.  I haven't seen a single Chinese person with a BMI over 30!  There are a few with love handles, but nowhere near an XXXL!  I thought that maybe this is why the T-shirts were so cheap, so out of curiosity I looked at the sizes of other clothes.  Once again, the same thing!  The smallest I could find were a few Mediums.  I earned the strange distinction of shopping in the little girls department in China.  But even there things were far too frilly for my tastes!