I might be on the obsessive side of organization and efficiency, but these concepts don’t seem to exist at all in this country. Making a straight line is a feat in itself. Going to places like the bank and the post office turn a 5 minute procedure into a one hour ordeal. Each month I send money home. I have a snazzy little card with all my information saved on it so the transfer should essentially be flawless. Instead, it takes 7 girls all huddled around the computer for 30 minute minimum each time I go in because, somehow, they forget the entire process of making an international transfer from month to month. There’s no organization. No one person who always knows what to do. Nothing is written down. It’s a learn as you go process…every. single. month. So then, I needed to go to the post office. Because we have to do all these basic everyday errands with a Chinese person, this is something that needs to be planned a few days in advance. Another teacher and I both needed to send something over the ocean so we thought we’d be efficient and ask our school administrative person to help us go together. Now, we blatantly told her that we needed to go to the post office, and for whatever reason, she kept thinking we needed to go to the bank. In all fairness, the bank is called Postal Savings Bank of China, but we explained that we did not need to deal with money, but with a letter. How difficult could this be?
At the last minute, Joyce wasn’t free to go with us, so we asked our friend, Jim, to help us. He happily agreed, but upon leaving, he realized he didn’t know where the post office was. How do you not know where the post office is? Although I don’t send things through the post office often, I still know where it is! He thought there was one within a 10 minute bus ride, but he called someone to confirm. We took the bus and as we stepped off, Brandon and I both looked at each other, afraid that we were indeed walking toward the Postal Savings Bank of China. Hesitantly, we asked Jim if he understood what we needed to do. Now, with Joyce, her level of English was most likely the issue, but not with Jim. We attempted to ask him, “if you needed to send a letter to say, Taizhou, where would you go?” He didn’t know the answer. He had never been to the post office in China, nor had he ever needed to send anything. This was unbelievable to me. Honestly.
We arrive at the Postal Savings Bank of China and he goes in to find out if this is in fact where we can send something. Yes, it was, but he then informed us that it would take 30 days to arrive in the US. What? I’m not sending my house, or a large box, I’m sending a letter to cancel my bank account in France. This is honestly one piece of paper with 2 lines on it saying, ‘close my account, please and thank you’. Brandon and I have both received packages from home while we’ve been here and it takes approximately 10 days, so why on earth would it take 30 days to send a letter? We asked for other options and we were told that it would cost 4RMB ($0.50) to send the letter and have it arrive in a month, or we could spend 200RMB ($28.00) to have to arrive in 5-7 days. WHAT? It goes from $0.50 to $28? There’s no in between? There’s no $5 option? Is one arriving in the US via fighter jet and the other via tug boat? What is going on here? Because neither one of us cared that much about what we were sending, we took the lesser option. Then, I needed to buy an envelope. Now, the school I work in didn’t have any envelopes, but just that wasn’t enough. I had to buy an envelope at the post office that isn’t even the proper size for a standard piece of paper, and then that doesn’t have a strip to close the damn thing. No “lick here” yucky glue strip, no pull off sticky stuff, nothing. I addressed the envelope and then realized I needed stamps. To send my letter to France, I needed 4 huge stamps. Don’t you have a standard stamp good for all basic letters? Oh hell no, that’d be way to efficient. Then, the stamps don’t have any sticky stuff on them either. I asked Jim, “um? How do I close this envelope? And how do I put these stamps on here?” He then walked me over to a plastic bottle of glue with two paint brushes sticking out the top; this scene honestly took me back to my kindergarten art class in which we used elmer’s glue to assemble all our creations. He informed me that this glue was made from rice, as is everything in China, and this is what we needed to properly stick and shut and secure our envelopes and stamps. He painted the glue onto the envelope to close it and onto the stamps to stick them onto the envelope, and we dropped our letters into the postal box. This entire process of mailing a letter to the bank took me over an hour.
Then, I returned to the school for the girls to help me with my search for red underwear. To fill you in, the Chinese New Year is always celebrated toward the end of January and the beginning of February. Because they go by the lunar calendar, this date is always changing. With each year, they attribute an animal to the year. In 1987, when I was born, it was the year of the rabbit. The lunar calendar is on a 12-year cycle, and as I will be 24 this year, it will now again be the year of the rabbit in a week or so. My Chinese teacher, who is one year older than me, told me that I need to wear red throughout the entire next year in order to scare away all the bad luck. I need to invest in red underwear, red bras, red socks, some special red bracelet, and red long underwear to wear during the winter months. Okay, interesting, but what are the odds that I’d be in China the year that it’s actually “my” year. Sure, I’ll buy some red undergarments, this’ll be fun! And so the shopping began. I had under 2 weeks to find all these red things before it was officially new year’s when I then needed to be wearing these garments on a daily basis. I first went to the “western” stores. Although they had the style of undergarments I’d typically buy, they didn’t have any red. So then I went to the Chinese department store. Although they had red everywhere, it’s all the old lady, see through, tacky lace, up to your bellybutton underwear. No freakin’ way. I’ll take a year of bad luck before I wear that stuff. Then, I finally find some underwear that I could tolerate, that is red, but that is a style I’ve never worn in my life and won’t start now. Complaining about the style may seem a bit on the pouty side but we all know, men and women alike, how terrible your day is when you have uncomfortable underwear on. So yes, I’m being a little picky because this is not a special day we’re talking about, this is a special year! When I finally found some underwear that were the style I wanted, the Chinese girls told me there was a website that I should order from that would be much cheaper and would have a larger selection of sizes. So, day 3 of the underwear search started as soon as I got back from the post office. Yuki helped me get onto this website to see what they had. As we found a couple options, we were trying to guess what size I would need, and as XL was the largest option, we put that hoping it’d be okay. I really didn’t know but XL in China is not XL at home, so I took the biggest I could get. Then, we scroll down a bit and I see a bunch of numbers that I know are talking about sizes even though I can’t read the Chinese with them. I find one column with the standard US pant sizes, one column with the European sizes, and one column with the typical S, M, L, XL sizes. I find the 8-10/40/L line and run my finger across the line of numbers to find that my size in China is 4XL. I died laughing, there must be a mistake. I know I need the large sizes in China, but 4XL? I can’t order from this site either; the biggest they had was XL. XL is the biggest I’ve ever seen in China. Yuki looked at me like I was insane; she couldn’t believe this is the size that I needed. I assured her, this is my size in the US, this is my size in Europe, therefore, this is apparently my size in China.
As a side note, I thought to myself, often in the US, girls go shopping as a kind of therapy. You go shopping when you’re bored, when you’re sad/depressed, when you’re happy, basically whenever you possibly can, but it’s always a happy time of the day. If you are the person that goes shopping for a little therapy session, for the love of God, don’t come to China. Thank goodness I don’t shop when I’m in a depressed mood because if I did, I think the issue with these sizes would turn me from depressed to downright suicidal before I could make it out the door at a dead sprint.
So much effort in one afternoon to send a letter and buy some damn underwear. You know how long it would take me to take care of these two errands in the US? 20 minutes, tops. And that’s if I stopped to fill up with gas on my way from the post office to Target. I finally gave up and typed in Victoriassecret.com. International Shipping? You bet. America, thank you. Thank you for being modern, technologically savvy, efficient, and properly sized.
Undiscovered Sunsets 