Tai Tai - that is apparently what women like me are called. A Tai Tai, roughly translated as "lady", is the term locals use to describe the non-working female spouse of the expatriate male businessman. It is, I believe, not supposed to be an insult, but I think it carries with it some insulting connotations.
It is difficult to describe what a Tai Tai does with her time. I have mentioned in previous blogs that it takes a long time to do everything. Let's say I need to go to the grocery store. Clearly, I need the driver because I will have frozen and refrigerated items as well as more than I could possibly carry. So I drop the kids off at the bus stop and wait around the house until the driver returns from taking Jeff to work. This could be 9:30, 10:00, sometimes even later depending on the traffic. The driver arrives and we head off to the Carrefour. Jeff, who has never been prone to road rage, says that being in Carrefour produces road rage in him. It is extremely crowded, very loud with lots of random voices and noises - non-stop stimuli - nothing makes sense ala layout of the store. There is the shock value of seeing the raw chicken parts, unwrapped and uncovered sitting in a pile in a big bin. I realize you take them home, wash them, and cook them but something about them being open to the air with thousands of germy people passing by and ... uck, you get the picture.
The Carrefour is like the Walmart Superstore where you can shop for groceries and many electronics and household goods. So before venturing into the grocery section I may wander over to purchase an iron or a rice steamer. Though it is one big store, I must take the ticket or sometimes even the box over to a special counter where I pay and receive the official stamped receipt (the Chinese really like their stamps). I then return to the sales clerk with the stamped receipt and she gives me my item - no bag. The item then goes in my cart and stays in there - for all to see - while I continue shopping.
Once I have managed to acquire 80% of what was on my list (that is about as good as it gets thus far before the pounding headache sets in), I head to the checkout lanes. There are perhaps 30 lanes, but I have never seen more than 10 - at peak - open. There are never any less than 4 people ahead of you in line and inevitably there is much conversation about an item or two with each person. I am not sure what takes place in these conversations. Once I purchased a baseball cap for Sarah. Apparently the bar code wouldn't scan so the cashier called someone to do a price check. It took three additional clerks and paragraphs worth of conversation. The 'group'went to the hat section, stared at the wall, had some conversation, came back, looked at the hat again, oh! that one!, went back over to the hat section (once again without taking the hat with them but trusting their already proven faulty memory), finally returning with a price. This is a usual occurence. By the time I get home and put everything away, it is easily 1:30. In two hours Max is due to arrive at the bus stop and given what you now know, it is too risky to venture off on another errand.
I keep thinking this is because I am new, but my more seasoned friends here tell me no, that this is the way it is here and to accept it.
One other acronym for today: BYOTP - bring your own toilet paper. There is no toilet paper in most public bathrooms so you need to remember to always carry kleenex with you. Bummer if you forget. But sometimes they have a tissue vending machine and if you have the correct change, you're in luck.
