Grab a couple of things at Home Depot on your way home...

Thursday night was Chirstmas tree night. Stephanie found what a friend of our calls 'a proper Christmas tree' from a company here in Shanghai. I have to admit it's better than the local trees, and an artifical tree is just so hard for us coming from the Northwest where we cut down our own tree, and before that, growing up in Ohio, we always had a real tree that my grandad hauled out of the woods. All that being said, it was still almost $70 USD! Another proof point that in Shanghai, you can find everything you can find anywhere else, just at a price!

So the $70 investment made, we were set to trim the Christmas tree. Just one problem - many of the ornaments that we bought since we arrived did not have hooks. And Steph needed some tape to put some things up, and we agree to hang some lights in the girls bedroom, requiring some nails, or fastening mechanism of some sort.

No problem, there is a B&Q, which is the Chinese version of Home Depot, just a couple of blocks away... I should have no problem picking up what we needed.

As with most blog posts about China, when I open with 'should be no problem'... well you can imagine.

Luckily I brought the Chinese/English dictionary with me. I knew no one at B&Q speaks English, and we needed to get this tree trimmed in time for the girls to get to bed at a decent hour!

I walk up to the first person I see and already having plotted out my strategy, I show him the word from the dictionary for 'wire'. The plan is to buy some metal wire and make my own hooks for the ornaments. Unfortunately he takes me to the 'electrical wire section'. When I try to explain in English that this isn't what I am looking for, he decides to take out a piece of paper and write it in Chinese characters! I am always amazed and a little frustrated at this... if I can't speak Chinese, you think I can read it? But then I imagine this guy thinking, if you know I can't speak English and you are using a dictionary, when it's the wrong thing, you expect me to understand English when you try to describe it in more detail?

So I then am struck with a stroke of genuis - I look up the word for 'metal' and 'string' thinking that 'metal string' will surely explain perfectly what I am looking for! He nods his head and takes me to a section with string and rope. I show him the words again, emphasizing 'metal'. He nods his head more vigourously this time and marches off in another direction... Surely we are making progress! He takes me right to the chain section. I kind of laugh, thinking "well, this is pretty close to 'metal string'".

Giving up on the 'metal string' I decide to ask him about tape - asking being me looking it up in the dictonary and pointing. Since he was originally convinced that I was looking for something electrical, he takes me to electrical tape. Not quite what I was looking for! I tried to look up the work for 'clear' or 'scotch' to add to tape (since that worked so well with 'metal string') but couldn't get it right... so I gave up. Luckily I happened to walk by some packing tape - by complete accident, which is what Steph was looking for.

I was able to 'save Christmas' by stopping by the sports store and getting fishing line to use in place of hooks on the ornaments.

Much of being in China is accepting that everything takes longer to do than you expect, and at the end of the day, you have to get creative and compromise!

Here is the finished product.