Ummmmm..Forbidden City or Walmart Superstore?

Wal-Mart Superstore it is! Ok I know what you're thinking but I gotta take it slow and my friend at the front desk said it's a 10 minute walk, precisely two lefts and a right before super human bridge over freeway-like 'city street' to my destination. So off I went, money belt and all.

Call me ignorant but I never thought that tall buildings that in my part of the world are either apartments or offices could house stores. But that's the way it is here. After a Pizza Hut and KFC I found my Wal-Mart Superstore--Beijing style. Oh but wait...I manage to get lost anyways. I walked into the store under the Wal-Mart sign and after going up 7 sets of escalators I thought to myself that there is NO way Wal-Mart could be so different here. As I took the elevator down to save time the purple hat-ed yellow jacket-ed (I mean is that really necessary? It's humiliating) woman could not tell me were I could find Wal-Mart. She did keep on repeating something in Chinese though and on a side-note I have decided to carry a notepad around with me to write down these common phrases that the nice people use to try and communicate with me so I can look them up later. But I digress, the front door guy signaled that Wal-Mart was around back with his white Mickey Mouse gloves.

Around the corner I attempted for the second time to find Wal-Mart...I saw a doorway covered with a blanket one uses to wrap up household goods before moving them below a Wal-Mart sign with people coming in and out but was not convinced that could actually be the customer entrance...I mean do I really have to have that brush my arms, coat, hair!? So around one more corner I went until I realized that yes, it was blanket time. After dealing with the blanket I entered a little platform with lockers and people selling Wal-Mart credit cards---what I had come for was down an escalator and in he largest basement I have ever seen.

Now as a student of Industrial and Labor Relations I was somewhat eager to 'study' the labor practices in a China Wal-Mart of all places...need I say more?

Anyways, I puttered around a little with my grocery list. As expected, everything was in Chinese and I basically choose products that resembled those I am familiar with assuming consumer goods coloring is a universal language??? Little did I know that I was purchasing green tea toothpaste--argh. Overall the trip was successful, I was able to cook in my little kitchen tonight and now I feel better that I'm not going to starve but still have a good chance of becoming a skinny b#%(&.