The Fight

I was pumped for my first shopping experience. I just needed to get a couple basic things for my apartment plus some groceries but it was my first trip out into the city. We headed to Tesco, which is only about a quarter of a mile walk from our apartment. As we walked inside, we realized it was a complete mad house! Courtney (my roommate) said that she had never seen it so busy, and we put it to the fact that Spring Festival (or Chinese New Year as we know it) was approaching. We ventured in regardless, but I almost wish that we would have turned around.

So let me set this up for you… within the Tesco shopping center, there are other restaurants and boutiques that line the parameter. There is one entrance into the actual store. First you have to grab a cart (they are all located outside the entrance), and then you can either go through a metal detector with guards to enter in the first floor of mostly groceries and food, or you can take an escalator to the upstairs of mostly household, cloths, and hygiene stuff. If you want to go upstairs, you have to go first, because once you enter on to the first floor, you would have to pay for everything, then come back out of the store, and reenter the second floor. However, if you start upstairs, you can then take the escalator down stairs and continue shopping or proceed to the registers – I know, I know, it is a really stupid set up!

The shopping carts are horrible! They may look like normal shopping carts, but I like to call them Tokyo Drift shopping carts because the wheels move in all directions. So I’ll just be strolling along with my shopping cart moving forward, and someone will bump into my cart (as usual) and all the sudden, my cart is in the next isle. And turning corners in a hurry – forget about it! I hate the carts! Oh, and the escalator looks like a conveyor belt. There are not any steps; it is just a flat hill so you can take your cart upstairs.

So anyway, back to the experience… there were more people in this grocery store than I have ever seen at a concert in my life. Can you imagine? And it is very Chinese. We use that term a lot! There are stores, bars and areas of the city that are known to be expat locations and they have a ton of foreigners, but Qibao is not one of them, and neither is Tesco. We are usually the only foreigners anywhere we go in Qibao.

So here we are trying to fight our way through the crowds of people to find things that we needed with a shopping cart. After about an hour at Tesco, I was ready to go and we had not even made it down stairs to the groceries yet. I decided that I would rather save that experience for another time. I was too irritated and hot to fight through another floor of people, so we just headed to the check out down stairs. Remember how I told you that people are inconsiderate, rude and disrespectful? This was when it all came together for me. Down by the check out, there were not lines of people but herds of people shoving their way to the checkout counter. When in China, do as the Chinese… so we found a good area, and pushed our cart right in.

We held our own, and after about 30 minutes of herding with the others, we were only about 4 people behind a register. The checkout lanes look line normal checkout lanes, but there is only enough room for one cart to fit through at a time (it is really tiny), and there are metal bars that divide two separate checkout lanes. In front of us, there was one guy at the register, then a girl with a cart and two individual people with a handful of stuff that were all pushing to get in next. Although the girl with the cart was really shoving, the guy made it in first, then the other girl was pushing her way in to get in next. The girl with the cart was definitely not going to let that happen, so when the girl managed to get her body in front of the girl’s cart, the other girl began shoving her cart into the other girl – crushing her up against the metal railing divider. They both began screaming and yelling at one another in Chinese. I don’t understand Chinese, but I could promise you that they were not talking about the weather.

We stood back and watched, laughing at the absolute ridiculousness that was happening right in front of us. They continued to push and shove and yell for several minutes, and the girl with the cart was not about to give up. As soon as some free space opened up on the conveyor belt, the first girl threw her stuff up there while the other girl continued to repeatedly shove her cart into her back. Then she jumped in front of her cart and threw the other girls stuff on the floor and began putting her stuff on the belt. We were pretty sure at this point, they were going to start pulling hair and bitch slapping, but they didn’t. They kept screaming and yelling until they both left. The first girl managed to check out first, but I am not really sure how, but the girl with the cart did not stop bitching, even after the other girl left.

Somewhere in the time that we were distracted by the girl fight, some Chinese man had managed to shove his way next to me and eventually in front of our cart. It is absolutely ridiculous that people could be waiting for an hour, and then someone can just walk up and right ahead of them without a guilty conscious. He was even trying to shove his elbow into me to push me back. Although I can hold my own, it is also just not worth it to me to fight and scream in the grocery store.

So after the entertainment left, the rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. We spent over 900 Yuan! It sounds like a lot, but really, it is only just a little over $100 USD, and when you think about all the stuff we got, it was a steal. We got a comforter, sheets and a duvet, blankets, pillows, towels, some bathroom stuff, kitchen stuff, hangers, a couple heating blankets, some chips, water, propel, etc. I know, a steal right? Then we loaded everything into bags and began the walk home. When you go shopping, you have to bring your own bags otherwise you have to pay like 5 Yuan per plastic bag – rip off!