wandernut

Last week in Muji, I bought a King-sized bedsheet (it had a K sticker on it, can’t go wrong there) and two little bundles of what I thought were pillowcases. Turned out they were bolster cases. The labels were all in Chinese and Japanese. How the hell was I supposed to know?

I was at the Tesco supermarket today and bought a bottol of Dettol shower gel (it even came with a free refill packet). Only when I got home, I came to realise upon closer inspection of the packaging, that I bought a bottle of handwash. It was a BIG bottle of handwash too (hence the mistake of thinking it’s shower gel). I should have noticed the obvious ‘手’ (hand) word. Arrrrggghh! A word I actually know but didn’t see!

So. I should stop being a dumb ass.
Or stick to the 3 supermarkets with English labels along with the Chinese ones.
- City Supermarket: an expensive expat place, with limited choices in terms of veges and meat
- Freshmart (Jiaoguang): expensive clean, fresh meat and even more expensive organic vegetables (all their vegetables are labeled organic, hmmm)
- Carrefour on Xietu Lu: lots of variety for both meat and vege, all fresh, at reasonable prices, but the crowd and the queues are insane

Tesco back home in KL has a good layout and pretty good variety, but the one here on Zhenning Lu is rather messy and limited. And an English-owned supermarket with no English labels? Shame on you, Tesco!

And well, yeah. Shame on me for not knowing more Chinese.
我很可怜的！

So this morning, I went running with CY at Century Park, a pretty good park I must say, good landscaping and well maintained. We had to pay 10 yuan to enter though, which was strange, but apparently this was because the lotus flowers were in full bloom, and many photographers were there taking pictures on the lake. It takes 5km to complete a full loop, and while the air in this part of Shanghai is surprisingly clean, some fertilising work was being done at one section of the park and it really stank of chemicals and manure. Ugh. Anyway, the Nike 10km Human Race on August 31 will be held here, and we were surprised to see that the KM markers and Nike booths were already up.

After our run we went to the wet market near our place on Wukang Rd. We were very impressed by the variety, not to mention that it was reasonably clean. Not wet and stinky like some the wet markets back home. Even the fish and meat sections!

Maybe tomorrow I will muster up the courage to buy veges and fruits from here, despite not knowing how to ’say’ what I want. I’ll probably just point.

CY bought some ingredients and we went back to her place to make chicken stock from scratch and cook a creamy mushroom risotto with it. All this while watching episodes of a TVB HK drama series “Forensic Heroes”- a total CSI rip-off with corny story lines (complete with the copycat HIV scare story in CSI:NY), fake props and bad editing. Hahaha! Despite its lameness and lack of originality, it’s almost too easy to get hooked. That’s the funny thing about TVB. You can’t watch just one episode. We probably finished 5 in that one sitting (while cooking and eating). OMG. Is this what aunty-dom is like? Hahahaha!