So the party continues and by party I mean being stuck inside the apartment. Maybe it’s still too early to say this but so far this hasn’t been so bad! Maybe it’s just because we spent nearly 8 weeks travelling/living mostly in hotels, but I haven’t felt as stuck/shut in as I thought I would. Then again we are managing to stay pretty busy. As Katy mentioned in the Day 3 diary, I’ve got my Warhammer models to build…which I’m running out of….oh no. Ah-ha…well I’m sure new ones will be here soon!
Ha-ha yesss, I’ve been wanting to build up my Battle Sisters army for awhile and…wait a second…
It’s okay, this happens all the time. Welcome to the magical world of Taobao. Where you can buy just about anything for nothing/a reasonable price. In addition you get the fun/joy of never really knowing when it will show up! It could arrive the day you ordered it, oooor in the case of Christmas wrapping paper, 3 months too late.
Generally Taobao is pretty great, you can even track shipments in the online shopping version of Facebook Stalking. You know, when you message someone, and it reads ‘Seen’ or ‘Read’. Then the person who has clearly seen your message chooses to not respond for 1 hour to 2 months? Yeah Taobao deliveries are kind of like that. Still it does have cool features like being able to search by image. While I was in Canada looking at some Warhammer to buy I was curious to see if it would be much cheaper to buy in China. So I took a picture with my phone
searched and wallah, the website found me dozens of examples of the product I wanted…it was oddly enough cheaper to buy a model kit produced in the UK and then shipped all the way to China than it was to buy it in Canada (About 35% cheaper or 92 CAD in Canada VS 61 in China…even strange it would have cost about 66 CAD in the UK.) I know what your thinking. Everythings made in China, especially pieces of plastic. You are mostly correct, but I can tell you from personal experience that one of the many reasons Warhammer miniatures are so expensive, is because they are sculpted, designed, produced and even packaged in Nottingham (Lenton Lane, under ground).
Wait no below that room. IN THE UNDERGROUND!
Ha-ha, yeah…I miss Warhammer World…but anywho back to Taobao. Taobao is a bit of a tricky thing to get your head around at first. To navigate it easily you need to probably be using Google Chrome which will automatically translate the Chinese characters to…MOSTLY accurate English.
You then need to generally not even bother using english words to search for things. I know some expats keep a word document loaded with key phrases, I personally just use Google Translate or…in a pinch…Bing Translate, to turn my english words into Chinese characters. This isn’t perfect however, as a lot of things do not directly translate. For example if you are looking for a Battle Sister Squad, you ain’t going to find much. If you however type in, Fighting Nun Team Together you’ll get some characters which give you what your looking for.
Another problem caused by Taobao and the preference towards online shopping is that there really aren’t any big department stores like Walmart…except of course for Walmart. Which is in China. In fact if you can be bothered there are plenty of store chains out here which vaguely or very much reflect what you may call a ‘big box store’ in North America. However they are not particularly common. There are H and M’s, but due to the scale and size of Hangzhou it makes going out clothing shopping a bit more of a hassle. Yes you can get a cab ride to a Western style clothing store and find prices around the same if not a bit more expensive than you would at Old Navy, but you’ll soon find it’s the only store within 2 miles. China has shopping malls, LOTS OF SHOPPING MALLS, but they aren’t…like the malls your used to in the West, they largely function as a place to hang out and look at expensive brands and be seen looking at them, almost like a giant multi-floor 34th street. So…if you want a pair of shoes, a shirt, a novelty set of giant Mickey Mouse gloves, your really best off doing as most Chinese do and ordering it off of Taobao. Naturally the immediate problem here is that you can’t try on the clothing and often sizes here vary wildly. A small in one shop is a large in another, principally because you damn American’s keep making sizes bigger and much of the products on Taobao are also shipped wholesale to Europe, USA, Australia etc. Consequently you may order a medium expecting it to follow Chinese measurements (More like a small in Canada or XS Small in the USA) and getting a new set of single piece pajamas because it’s a medium shirt meant for distribution in Texas (Everythings bigger there). Still the price is often ludicrously low and return policy is pretty good as well.
Any who, the quarantine trudges on. Me and Katy continue to teach remotely. This has felt a bit more real and tactile lately since we’re actually teaching classes daily. I’m actually finding this to be a great relief/distraction. I had really missed teaching and though this is a much more limited way of doing it wherein I am basically talking at 60 students for much of the time, it’s also really nice to never be interrupted as their microphones are generally muted. Right now I’m really looking forward to getting back in the classroom though, it’s a lot harder to be physically re-enacting historical events on a webcam. I have only two classes a day but it certainly helps fill the time a bit.
As Katy highlighted in the last blog post, we’ve had a bit of difficulty with getting things delivered up here. I think there is a system put in place. There are shelving units each with stickers on them to indicate an apartment under quarantine. In theory people delivering things should leave stuff on a shelf with our name and we then contact the building manager to take these things up to us (We are usually notified upon delivery). However I think the delivery drivers are probably facing all kinds of systems that some just leave stuff on the floor by the gate, which is not usually checked. So you know…fuuuun.
In other news I think Hector may have been very tired as he slept for 16 hours or from 2pm to 7:30am. He seems really happy now though. So that’s good. We attempted to take down the barrier of his crib today, but that didn’t go well. Somehow we lost the low level guard and so we will need to just get him a new bed. Good thing I’ve worked out how to use Taobao!
See below pictures I took on one of the first days we were back. Usually you can’t see quite this far. Wish I could go up to the roof and take photos from there, one of the best parts of living up atop of a apartment tower is the views!v
The Hopkins of Hangzhou 