I Woke Up Like This

SUNDAY, AUGUST 31, 2014

         Our church is from 10AM-1PM so we left at about 9:15AM because the taxi ride is about a half hour. I looked friggen hot, but that’s beside the point.

         Church here is on the second level of a hotel in some conference room. Apparently last week there were only 11 people in the congregation, but today there were about 140. There are 100+ YSA who came in from our program, ILP (people from BYU who are teaching English), Flagship, and then some other group.

         After church a group of us (Sammy, Garett, Seth, Jordan, Taylor, Michael, and I) all needed to go to Walmart so we got on the subway to go there and everyone else got off at different stops to go home. The subway was PACKED. It hadn’t really hit me how populated China is, but on the subway you can totally tell. Everyone was so close to each other and it was crazy hot. Also some creep pulled up  my skirt so that was disgusting and frightening. (Side note: I’m thinking about starting a blog called Being Sexually Assaulted in China because it has become a habit of these people--more examples available upon request).

         We got off at our stop and landed in the downtown metropolis of Nanjing. It is the coolest downtown I have ever been to. So many stores. They have anything you would ever want. People kept on staring at me. First they’d look at my hair, then they would look at my shoes to see if I was wearing heels, then they’d just stand there and check me out.

         So Walmart here is in a huge sky scrapper. The first floor is all the food and then all the bedding and other stuff is on the second. People continued to stare and walk closely behind me and take my picture, but I mean who blames them. I woke up like this.

     When Sammy and I  were looking at shampoo and conditioner and stuff people were standing around and then I saw multiple people look at what I bought and then once I walked away they ran up and bought the same things for themselves. Then when we were looking at laundry detergent this lady who worked there came up to me and was like “you should buy this one it’s really good!” (in Chinese) so I was like sure whatever I don’t care. And once I grabbed it she ran over to her friend and was like “Oh my gosh the American girl bought my product!” and was freaking out. Classic China.

         We walked around and found all of our stuff. The place was packed and crazy, but had everything we needed so that was good. As soon as we got our stuff we went back downstairs to the check out. There are these escalator type things that go really slowly, but let you take your carts up and down. So all along the sides of the “escalator” there are a bunch of merchandise. But basically it was full of condoms. Literally, buckets upon buckets of condoms. And then the checkout lines had piles of condoms and pregnancy tests. We figure all of it is because of the One Child Policy, but still it was pretty funny. The checkout line maybe took an hour to get through because everyone and their dog are sitting around waiting to be served. For having a billion plus people in their country China does some things pretty inefficiently (don't even get me started on their awful airport security system). 

         Pictures of our room. Notice the one bed. That would be because I sleep on the floor. Also, there are bars on the window so people don't scale the side of the building and steal all of your personal possessions.