Another week down....

It occurred to me about about noon today that my weekend, such as it is, starts a little later than most people's weekends do back home. I finished working in Dr. Wang's clinic today, Saturday, at about 12:15 or so. That's about 9:15 PDT on Friday, so most of you actually finished up your weeks before I did.

On the other hand, I have about two hours for lunch and Thursday afternoon off. Plus a two-minute walking commute. I'm not complaining.

Anyway, today was my last day in that clinic. I'll be going to a different clinic on Monday, working with someone else. While there weren't any teary goodbyes, I was bid a warm farewell, with an invitation to come back and chat, and was told that I'm a good guy, and will make a good doctor. Like I said, I'm not complaining.

In a previous post -- maybe even my last post -- I think I might have implied that Tianjin is provincial, or something like that. It's not, not at all... last night I went downtown to hit an import-heavy grocery store (more on that later), and got a good look at the main drag. It's a solid kilometer of neon lights, advertisements, and music, almost exactly what I imagined a shopping district in a major Asian city would be. Out here in the Nankai district, the western part of Tianjin... well, the construction and feel is kind of Western Addition (of San Francisco) -- large multiunit apartments, lots of storefronts, and not a little grubby. It's not bad at all -- but it was all I had seen of Tianjin. It does major-urban-downtown pretty well, too. One block off that main street, the side streets were just this side of the hutong I stayed in in Beijing, but since that was where all the restaurants were, I imagine that it's a cost-of-doing-business thing. Well, all the restaurants except for McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and KFC.

So why, you may be wondering, was I downtown trying to find an import-heavy grocery store? Well....

Part of it was pure curiousity, to be sure. But I've also found out that the water here completely destroys the lather I get when I want to shave. (For those of you who don't know, I wet-shave -- use a brush to put lather on my face. I've done it on and off since my mom's father passed away, and started again for pretty-much-keeps back in February.) I'll be building the lather in the bowl, add a couple of drops -- drops! -- of water, and suddenly the lather just breaks down and disappears. So I have to add more shaving lotion to the mix, and I'm using about twice as much as I'm used to. So I don't think I'm going to make it home before I run out of shaving cream -- that's the point. Anyway, I looked at Carrefour, and they only have foam-in-a-can. So I thought I'd look somewhere else.

没有。 (Meiyou, "do not have", a near-universal term for tough luck while shopping.) In fact, the place at Isetan didn't have any shaving cream at all. Several kinds of razor cartridges, facial products for men and women from four countries (US, Japan, Germany, and the UK), but nothing to lubricate a blade while it slides across your face.

There are some good bits coming from this. The first, most practical bit was the realization that men and barbers (the Venn diagram doesn't overlap completely) have been building lather with plain ol' soap for a long time, and I could probably manage that on my own. The other thing was that I got a good look at prices for some stuff in a supermarket that would compare favorably with a scaled-down Whole Foods. And what did I see? Chocolate -- decent chocolate, not Lotte -- starts at about 20元 per ounce, so a standard chocolate bar would be about $5 or $6. I could have gotten "Jamaican Blue Mountain" coffee (I don't trust anyone's claim to that label, just as I don't trust "Kona" -- both origins sell more than 100% of the actual capacity of the regions to produce) for 300元 per half-kilo, about $45. A pint of Haagen-Dagzs ice cream was 114元 -- an expensive splurge at more than ten bucks, to be sure. And a bottle of Veuve Clicquot was 836元, over $120.

I bought a little chocolate, just for grins.

On the other hand, pregnancy tests (right next to the razors, I couldn't miss them) were 15元, a little over two bucks, and the condoms (both American and Japanese brands) worked out to about 50 cents each, always in packages of 12 for some reason. (There's a joke here about Germans and the EU, which I won't repeat.) Guess there are priorities, and then there are priorities.

Anyway, I'm in the process of putting together another photo posting -- should be ready tomorrow sometime. Take care -- and for those who are the praying or "good thoughts" types, please do so for my friend Lizz. She's in the market for a new kidney again, and I'd really like her to find one soon.