Chapter 30: Shopping & Words
Our usual supermarket didn’t have the things I needed to make the next round of soup and the special cream, so I decided to venture further down into the more local areas of the Walled City.
It’s hard to describe exactly what was different about this area - was it the old men with little birds in cages who sat by the side of the road shouting at each other, or the traditional music that wafted around the area? Or maybe it was the way that all the stores only had labels in handwritten Chinese and most people seemed to do their shopping by talking directly to the shop keeper.
On the one hand, I liked the atmosphere, it felt homey in a way I’d never quite felt before, but on the other, how on earth was I going to find these ingredients?!
So, I decided to do the most logical thing: pick a shop at random and see how far I can get tourist-style.
The shop looked mostly like the others with a little god of business out the front with a fresh offering of mandarins, and rows upon rows of open topped bags with all kinds of dry... things inside. I suppose they were probably all different kinds of edible herbs and plants or something, but they were so numerous and my knowledge so narrow at that point in time that I couldn’t honestly say either way.
Between two of the rows was a skinny woman refilling one of the bags. I figured someone younger would probably have better English since they probably graduated school not too long ago, so I walked toward and got out my notebook. It was a little red thing that you said I could use.
"Hi," I said, "Do you have this?"
I turned the open book to show her the words you’d written in it.
She looked at me, looked at the book, then looked at me again, then waved a hand. The answer was ’no’.
"Alright, thank you," I said with a smile and walked to the next shop.
Four shops later, I came to the conclusion that either these shops were just as limited in their selection as the ones upstairs or there was something wrong with how I was going about this. Surely it shouldn’t be this hard, right?