Grocery Stores are Largely the Same

There is a three-floor grocery store called E-Mart that we've visited to pick up staples like alcohol, chips, and tp during our time here (we realized shortly after our first purchase that the apartment refills our tp, so we still have 19 of the 20 rolls we purchased in early March). This second floor, where the entrance is, contains the non-edible things like clothing and linens, toys, and household tools.

Upstairs pretty much has only electronic items, mostly appliances. Refrigerators, microwaves, heaters, and things like cell phones and MP3 players. Like most of the other places that sell electronics, this floor is a grid of brand-centric vendor stands, each manned with a few salesmen each. The stands are usually squarish, measuring ten by ten square feet, stuffed with products and a surrounded by a glass showcase separating you from the vendors themselves. Its eerie up here, mostly because its almost always empty. It's usually 2 salesmen to every customer. I've never spent longer than twenty seconds on this floor.

Downstairs has everything that Safeway might have, except for all the familiar products. It's a huge floor. It looks like equal parts WalMart, Costco, and Albertsons. Albertsons because of all the live sea-animals, which I'll get to momentarily.

I've spent a lot of time down here. You could basically divide the floor into six sections. Drinkables, Junk Food, Cosmetics/Cleaning, Foreign Food (hilarious), Meats, and Cooking Tools (drinkware, pots, ricemakers, etc.).

All of the alcohol is the same stuff you find in America, and its about the same price (as California that is, it's generally cheaper than in Washington). All the expensive wine you can buy is from France and Northern California. Or, for about 1/10th of the price, you can buy Chinese wine. We haven't bought much wine, but have gone through our share of scotch and rum for whatever reason. We buy a lot of beer too, but usually from the convenience stores. Its about 50 cents (US) for a 600ml bottle (one and a half cans) of TsingTao, which is the Budweiser of China.

The cosmetics corner is pretty normal too, except that I can't read anything, so I have to look at what the people on the bottle are doing with the product to judge what it does. We searched for fifteen minutes trying to find dishwasher detergent the other day. Apparently there aren't a lot of dishwashers in China, so that's why this stuff may not be so easy to get ahold of. Oh, and the dove body wash we got smells like dirty chemicals.

The foreign food section contains mostly boxes of crackers and crappy spaghetti, so that's where we spend most of our time.

One of the craziest areas is definitely the meat section. Here, you can buy whole (dehydrated, I think) chickens, or pigs lets that look like they were sliced straight off the hip. There is a section with various aquarium-sized tanks of fish, frogs, snakes, and other things that you can presumably pick up (either alive or dead, I'm not sure how it works) and cook for dinner.

I don't know if the frogs are sedated, but for some reason they don't jump out of the enclosure. Pictures below (chicken, frogs, turtles, snakes).