Don't Shop On Sunday

This is a continuation in the series of ‘interesting things that we learned in our first week in China’….

Don’t shop on Sunday

Steph and I ventured to Carrefour Sunday afternoon to try to finish off the shopping we had started on Saturday but had given up part way through -between the kids and the heat and the Chinese characters, just couldn’t finish on Saturday … this was another one of our bad ideas… right up there with wanting to buy furniture instead of letting the landlord pick it out.

Sunday night is the night at least a large % of the local population decides to go shopping. Carrefour was NUTS. This was the first time I really felt like the people who told me ‘there are a lot of people in Shanghai’ were actually right. We have not spent much time on the Puxi side of the river, which I understand is more crowded, but it could not have been much more crowded than this grocery store… And when I say grocery store, imagine a Fred Meyer, or Kroger on steroids.

Slight diversion: Insert near death experience here…. Just about driven off the road by a bus that decided for no apparent reason it just had to change lanes, ignoring the fact that our minivan was occupying the current location of its desire. Holy Crap!

Now back to our regularly scheduled program… Joe will be changing his underpants immediately upon arrival at home…

Evidently the only thing that surpasses the crush of people in Carrefour on the weekend is on the third Tuesday of the month, which is ‘fresh egg Tuesday’. One of the people we have met says that the local Chinese people will line up out the door for their chance to buy fresh eggs.