Waste not, Walmart

Not sure if this is a good statement, a bad one or even fairly neutral, but I finally saw “Frozen.” I’d tried to see it in three different countries and failed miserably. This week, I borrowed a copy and watched it twice so far.

My latest Netflix movie was “The Descendants,” which I also saw this week. That one went totally under my radar (as do most these days) but it was well worth it. Sometimes the “suggested viewing” stuff works out well.

I really don’t know much of what is in theaters these days. I do know I’m not a big summer movie buff, so I don’t think I’m missing much now. But my Netflix queue is running low, and even though I only get one every six weeks or so, I do need to figure out what to add to it.

“Honeysuckle Rose” is up next, and I’ve also borrowed “Dallas Buyer’s Club.”

Probably won’t have time for a lot of movies coming up, because this next week is pretty booked and my travels start this weekend. My first destination is Guilin, which will be my first foray into China. It’s about an hour’s flight.

I’m traveling with a colleague so I hope that works out well. There is some apprehension. I’m really not used to traveling with people. This trip was originally planned to accompany her, but then she didn’t buy the plane ticket after I did and I’d given up on her coming along; she finally bought a ticket last week and now I’ve had to change my reservations, which were made in the 6-8 weeks where I thought I was going alone.

The tourist reviews from the city are pretty fantastic, though, so it should be nice. And inchallah, my camera will work. For whatever reason, I have terrible luck with camera batteries. My Canon point-and-shoot just sucks them dry.

I still have a week of work to go through before the first trip, though. And it could be a doozy. Last week was pretty chill because my supervisor was gone but toward the end some projects came down the pipe that I wasn’t able to start because I needed more information. When that starts trickling in, I’ll be swamped in paperwork.

There’s always lots of that, in the real or e-kind. We keep printers busy, if not happy.

As I was trying to crank out something or another, someone else tried to print and the little thing made an awful noise. The guy came and tried to fix it, then called another guy over there to jigger with it. (“Hey, you fixed this last time; can you come look it again?”)

The other guy came over and I heard under-the-breath mutterings and then the first guy left the scene, saying he wasn’t able to help. The second guy made a lot of noise and then abandoned ship, too.

When I finished my stuff, I got up and walked over. I opened the hood, popped the toner cartridge out and pulled out a jammed piece of paper.

From his desk, Guy No. 2’s jaw dropped. “How did you do that?” I said I’d just pulled it out. “I had no idea you could do that.”

Seriously? How do you not know this?

I swear, I work with people who are at genius level but have virtually no common sense sometimes. Another time at a different copier, a higher-pay-grade-than-me person came to me, saying it’d stopped and she didn’t know why. I said look at the display; it tells you explicitly what to do and even gives you pictures. Still, she was baffled.

So I walked in and looked at the screen, which said something like, “Maximum capacity in left tray – empty to resume copying,” and showed a light blinking in the spot where the paper comes out. Sure enough, about 50 photocopies were sitting there. I picked them up, handed them to her and the copier started happily spitting more stuff out.

I couldn’t even look at her and disguise my disgust at the utter brainlessness of the move and just walked out. She’s really a very bright person and very sweet too, but oh, man, this kind of stuff happens all the time with her and about 70 percent of my colleagues.

And while I don’t work with Walmart, I’ve learned that their mail delivery, while completely awesome in the way I can order LifeSavers, is as inane and wasteful as any governmental agency.

Shipping is free for orders over $50, which means every order’s relatively large. My normal order consists of things like garlic powder, the aforementioned LifeSavers and the like (although no more cookies with frosting; I’ve learned that one.) I can also get health and beauty items like toothpaste.

And due to the whole import-export thing, sometimes it’s cheaper to get stuff from Walmart than it is locally, which is weird because the stuff is made in China.

And on a shipment of $50, Walmart will usually ship in multiple packages, because that can be a lot of stuff. Not all of their shipping choices are eco-friendly, though.

I do understand breaking up grocery items and non-grocery items, such as shipping the batteries I’d ordered (not lithium!) from the cans of hash. But those came in a small little padded envelope, which kind of made sense.

Last week, though, I got the coveted “You’ve got a package!” email from my colleagues in the mailroom and ran up to claim a box that was about twice the size of an ordinary shoebox. When I picked it up, it couldn’t have weighed more than a single insole of one shoe.

It was my loofah sponge. A $60 order placed through Walmart, and they sent the $2.22 sponge in its own box. And quite a large box, at that.

And of course, upon inspection of the loofah, I realized it had traveled all that way in luxury conditions (I even got some packets of air) to come back to China.

Reaching out

Been really busy lately, both at work at not at work.

This past weekend, I went to a little furniture market that’s about two hours away by bus. (It’s only 15 kilometers from Macau.) 

I didn’t buy anything but hadn’t expected to, so it’s not like I was disappointed. And lunch was fabulous.

  

Eating Chinese-style is a great thing. Essentially, the menus here are made up of completely separate dishes: meat, veggie, rice, noodles. Some, like fried rice, has multiple ingredients, but for the most part, it’s one or two items.

Ordering Chinese-style means that one person orders for the whole table but everyone gets a dish. When the dishes arrive, they’re all placed on this lazy Susan and everyone digs into however much stuff they want. You can sample everything, gorge yourself on one dish or completely turn up your nose at others. It’s a fantastic way to eat.

Really, the whole lazy Susan thing should be brought to America. We’d fight over it, I’m sure, but it’s a much more convenient method of passing this or that all the way across. 

And there’s so much food! When the group went into whatever restaurant it was, it was a group of six people. We sat down, looked at the menus and ordered just as I saw two more of the bigger group walk by. I waved them down and they joined us. Not five minutes later, two more wandered by and we got them in, too.

Thank God! We’d been stuffing ourselves for several dishes when I suddenly realized that all that food had been intended to serve six people, not the 10 we wound up with. It was just so much food.

On Friday, I’d had another big meal out, this time as part of an outreach program. It was my originally schedule movie night (the one I show outdoors on a monthly basis) but instead of doing that, I got tapped to attend the women’s power dinner featuring one of the basketball people.

I don’t know how long this had been in the works, but the PR people here had been trying to get a basketball clinic going and bring in an NBA somebody for it. I’ve no idea who the NBA somebody was, but turns out, they also got a WNBA player. And the WNBA is one of the things I covered back in my time as a sportswriter. 

So when I saw the notes on it, I commented to the PR guy that I’d covered the league and he immediately invited me to the dinner. I got to be somewhat of a facilitator, which was a bit unexpected. 

Morocco is not like China as far as time goes. This dinner was scheduled to start at 6:30. In Morocco, that means 7:15. In China, that means 6:05. So I got stuck in a room with women I did not know as my other two colleagues went to pick up the guest of honor.

I did fairly well, though. Fortunately, they spoke English, which I hadn’t counted on. We were really having a great discussion when Taj McWilliams-Franklin arrived, and it continued through the dinner.

Taj (named after Mahal, a fact of which I’d been unaware until that evening; ditto for her middle name, which, since she didn’t seem to share often I won’t list) was a great centerpiece to the meeting. Just a gregarious, honest person who definitely enjoyed what she did.

Until I did the research on her for the intro, I had no idea she wound up playing for Detroit after my departure. One of her two league championships was with Detroit, even. Had no idea. 

She was also from Augusta, Georgia, so we chatted about that, too, along with grits, chopsticks, germs and all kinds of other weird topics. It really was a fun evening. (And I get to collect OT for it, go figure.)

Headed out, she, my two colleagues and I were the last to leave the restaurant. It was on the sixth floor or something like that, and when we got down to the lower floor, there was some large party of locals who had gathered for a photo.

I turned to Taj and said, “Photobomb.” And she did not hesitate. Just ran in, with this huge smile, ran into the photo, linking arms with the surprised (and much shorter) person on the end. Hilarity and flashbulbs ensued.

They LOVED it. Even had it been someone who didn’t happen to be a 6-foot-2 muscular black woman, they still would have loved it. Heck, I have people stopping me to take pictures with me, and I was not a six-time WNBA All-Star. I just am American with red hair. That’s enough.

There’s no way the people knew who she was, but even without that knowledge, Taj gave that group of people a story they will still tell their grandkids.

Different perspectives

Remember “The Giving Tree”? Shel Silverstein’s fantastic kids’ book that chronicles a tree that loved a boy.

In Morocco, I used it in my advanced English class at camp, spending a week talking about it and then putting on a little play that made my country director cry.

I translated it and told it to my favorite girls in Midelt, even though we didn’t have an English class.

So here, as I’m trying to help a local staff member improve her written English, I thought this would be a good project. I took out all the articles and had her fill them in, then asked a few question about the story, asking her to write out her answers.

One of the questions was to write her opinion of the moral of the story. I was, of course, expecting something like “selfless love” or “mother-child relationship” or something like that.

Instead, in very broken written English, it was something like “It is possible to ask for so much that you run out of things” I was completely baffled as to how that could be anyone’s takeaway, but no matter how else I phrased it, I got answers suggesting that the tree had completely run out of things to offer to make her boy happy.

I said what about offering just a place to rest, but she didn’t consider that anything. I queried what made the tree happy and pointed out that she never asked anything of the boy. She countered, saying she had asked something of the boy – to have him play on her swing and climb on her branches.

I’d never make it as a teacher, where you have to completely think on your feet. I mean, I was just floored that this intelligent adult could completely miss – and dismiss – the entire premise behind the story.

She insisted that parents were not put on earth to give things to their children and that no parent should try to make their kids happy.

She even had a son – not even a year old -- and I asked if she would be willing to sacrifice for him. Nope.

My only assumption is that this must just be cultural difference somehow. It was not the same in Morocco, though. I remember telling Nora the story and asking her what she thought it meant. I could see her pondering it for a minute, and then her eyes lit up and she said, “Mama!”

So it really blew me away that it didn’t translate here.

Something to show for it

The world is upside down. For the second time in two weeks, I’ve gotten out and about in Guangzhou. And have spent massive money.

Last week, I went to this little artsy area that had some cool crafts, including handmade belts, bags and bracelets. Although I’d never heard of it, a colleague who lives in my apartment complex had and took me. I told several people at work and it seems everyone has heard of it.

It seemed a simple place to get to, only three metro stops away, so on Saturday evening, I went with someone who is working here temporarily. And got horribly lost. I really thought it was just one street from the metro, but I was really off somewhere.

With absolutely no language skills, I have a hard time asking directions. Fortunately, I’d brought a map that had the Chinese writing and, after asking about 15 people along the way, we got to the place.

After visiting just one store, the skies opened and we had a huge thunderstorm. Before it got too heavy, we did make it to the leather store that I’d earmarked and I spent way too much money on a belt and two bracelets. The first treats for me since I’ve arrived! I finally have something to show for eight months in Guangzhou.

Today, we also visited Shamian Island, which is a fairly small island (as in, you can walk around it in maybe half an hour) that, from what I understand, used to house a bunch of the consulate generals in the city. We saw old ones from Britain, the U.S. and India, among others. We also saw some people swimming in the river, which I thought was disgusting. There were cement stairs to get in the brown water and you could just see all the trash.

The area was really great for walking and my colleague bought a bunch of stuff. I couldn’t believe it, but she was knocking some names off her list and was really thrilled with her purchases. I got a magnet.

As an aside on that, probably half the multitude of magnets that I own are made in China. It was really weird to buy a magnet for China. I got one with the Canton Tower, which I see outside my bathroom and bedroom windows.

It’s 100 stories high and you can pay to go up to the top. There’s also a “horizontal ferris wheel” where you get in this little bubble car around the top portion and get a view of the city.

No thank you. Heights are not my thing.

I did, however, meet my colleague at her hotel, which is next door to mine. I takes up floors 70 to 100 of a building, so it’s as high as the Canton Tower. And meandering up to the 70^th floor, where the hotel lobby is, is free. There is also a bar or something on the 99^th floor. I'll have to do that later.

When I met my colleague, I went on up to the 70^th floor and snapped a few photos. It’s always overcast here – clouds, fog or pollution, but the view was still pretty phenomenal.