11/19/07

The snow is coming down quickly. We’ve gotten 2-3 inches in the last 2 hours, and the Chinese here call this “zhong xue” or “middle snow”, meaning that this is an average snow storm. I think the South Carolinians would have classified this as a full out snow blizzard.

Yesterday, I went to pick out a new table and four chairs, because the current one in my apartment is shaky. My mobility coordinator had given me a name and address, so I assumed I was going to a furniture store. When the taxi driver stopped and I looked around, he told me, “This is section 1, that is section 2, and farther down is section 3.” It was an entire street of stores that were 6-7 floors high that carried furniture. I found my way to the second floor of section 2 and came across an entire warehouse floor representing a flea market where individual sellers offered hundreds of different models, sizes, and colors of tables and chairs. Within minutes, my eyes blurred and my head hurt. How are people able to make a choice amidst all the chaos?

Since we were already culture shocked, my friend and I headed from furniture street straight to San Hao street to buy a new laptop for him. San Hao is better characterized as male heaven: imagine hundreds of large and small Best Buys lined up for blocks. Once he picked the model that he wanted, buying the laptop required bargaining in several shops for the base price and trying to get extras like a mouse and laptop bag. After visiting a few shops and getting a feel for the price range, he handed over a stack of RMB bills, and we waited while the laptop was delivered from a random warehouse located outside the shop. When we got everything, we realized that the operating system was in Chinese, and we asked for English software. The saleswoman sent one of her guys across the street, where he bought a pirated copy of XP and installed it for us. We then asked for English drivers, so they walked us with the laptop across the street to another shop, where they downloaded all the drivers within minutes onto a CD for us. You know you’re in China when you buy a laptop from an official IBM dealer, and they give you get pirated operating system drivers.