Ten Thousand Water Bottles

I recently had the joy of shopping in China with a couple of the other foreign language teachers; Kirstie from Britain who is teaching English, and Ruud from the Netherlands who is coaching football (Soccer.) Kirstie was leading our trio as she knew were the shops were, and our adventure started at one of the massive malls of Shijiazhuang.

I say one of the massive malls. Really, there isn't any other kind here. Every one of the four malls I've visited thus far has been at least 4 stories, and two of them contain movie theaters. And there are at over a dozen such malls just in this city, which has only been on the map for ~70 years. To give you an idea of these scale, the mall down the road from me, known as the White Mall, is perhaps twice as large as the FSK minus the department stores, and it's still bigger if you include them. The one across the street from the White Mall (Theses malls are a stone's throw from each other) is a bit larger, and has a supermarket in the basement that is only a bit smaller than the Weis outside of Middletown.

On this trip, we were not at the White Mall, or its neighbor, we were at... the name escapes me. It sounded like a poor imitation of some English word. But, I'll call it the Blue Mall for now. The Blue Mall is a slightly more vertical mall than the ones near me, and it managed to set aside an entire floor for restaurants. Above the restaurant level there is a fountain, an ice-skating rink and a theater. All on the the top floor, 5 stories off the ground. The architecture was rather impressive.

Kirstie and I rendezvoused with Ruud and got lunch at a Subway in the foothills of the behemoth. The menu and food were just like you would expect in the states, which is something I'm finding to be common of western franchise restaurants. However, they do make odd changes to the menu sometimes. The day before this shopping trip, I found myself eating a Mcdonalds double-patty'ed bacon burger. With salad dressing on it. If it weren't for the dressing it would have been a great burger. So, though some places and items are the same, do not assume that they always cook to Western tastes.

After Subway, Kirstie told us there was a pretty cool gift market and a Walmart nearby. Since I was interested in market and Ruud and I both needed stuff from Walmart, we decided to visit both.

However, between us and the market, there was a street where there is nothing but stores, and those stores sell nothing but water bottles. Nothing but water bottles. Tens of thousands of water bottles. It was quite a sight for the first ten stores, but after fifteen I began questioning the reality of the situation. How could these shops stay in business, when they were crammed in, shoulders touching, selling the same product? Why didn't anyone on that street sell something else, like perhaps lunch boxes to go with the bottles? Why was this altar to the great diety of all water vessels here in the first place? Did a dozen merchants decide that, due to some freak economic phenomenon, water bottles were the most profitable product to put on the market, but only if they all went all in? No one may know. Maybe it's just an ancient tradition that every merchant on that block must sell water bottles. And they did have an impressive gamut different styles of water bottles; metal ones, plastic ones, wooded ones, gold ones. Some looked like expensive vacuum sealed gold-plated thermoses, others were translucent colored plastic that would probably shatter if they were too full when they got dropped. But, in spite of this diverse spectrum that fully explored all possible extant water bottles, some shops still sold the same bottles!

After passing the amazing water bottle street, we arrived at the market. I mostly planned on looking about and window shopping, and this was the perfect place to do it. A lot of the shops sold art and decorative pieces, which were the perfect combination of cool to look at, but never tempting enough to buy. There were some amazing pieces in that place, like large glass spheres, some at least a foot in diameter, that were hollow and painted on the inside. The Chinese take on a ship in a bottle, and no less beautiful. There were large wall 3D paintings; carved sculptures that portrayed traditional Chinese scenery, such as gardens and ancient battles, which were made to be mounted on one's wall. I plan to go back to that place to buy some souvenirs, and I'll get some pictures then. There was also a shop that sold nothing but lighters, so I got a cool flameless one for about 4 dollars. It uses a Lithium battery and the same Nicrome wire that you'll find in a toaster to act as a lighter, so it's TSA safe. Here's to hoping that cheap lithium battery doesn't turn the flameless lighter into a very flame-ful lighter when it's in my pocket. (Don't freak out, I did dismantle the device and made sure everything was secure. I don't expect to come back with any burns.)

After the market, we went to the Walmart to get some real shopping done. I was a bit surprised that this Walmart was laid out differently, and bore signs with very different designs from the ones at home (Other than the Chinese characters, of course.) I sort of assumed, due to their franchise nature, that all Walmarts would be extremely similar. Also, of course, their stock was very different.  For example, they have live fish in tanks. And they sell, just like every other store in this area, no other soda but Coke, Sprite and the Pepsi equivalents. Oh, and Fanta: Orange and Grape. No Root Beer, Mountain Dew or Dr. Pepper.

At this point, I'm starting to lose hope that there is any Mountain Dew in this country. I used to drink a bottle nearly every day, including the day I caught my plane, and now I have to go cold turkey. Unless there's some kind of foreign market that imports 'exotic' beverages, like a soda other than Coke, I may not have another Dew for the next 3.75 months. I hope I don't go into withdrawal or something.

We finished at Walmart without catching sight of whatever the Chinese equivalent is to "the people of Walmart," and took a cab back to the school. Just like any self respecting cab in China, it had no seatbelts and the cabby was not shy of his phone while driving.

I've never shopped in a city before and I'd say my first time wasn't a bad experience. But I think there is something tragic to it: for all those thousands of water bottles, there was no Mountain Dew to fill them with.

P.S. I did actually take a couple very short videos, which you can see in this gallery.