Appropriate Housewares and Arab Candy

Yesterday once again was a mixture of the mundane and the bizarre. Mundane because my main goal was to make it to Ikea, bizarre because of the adventures that brought me there. I had got this idea of going to Ikea because of a little text message sent my by my landlady's daughter. They had obviously furnished the apartment entirely from there, right down to the odd red sofa. And, feeling a little frustrated with the consumer possibilities around here, I thought, why not? You have to realize this was the first text message I had ever received in Chinese. It seemed to give directions for how to get there: you take the #944 bus. What it actually said was "Take 944 route Gongjiao get to Yijia get off." At the bus-stop, I had looked very hard at the sign, which lists all the stops. There was no Yijia stop, which made sense because after some pondering it was clear that Yijia is the Chinese word for Ikea. (It's a cute translation, by the way, because it means "Appropriate Household" but also with maybe a slight implication of "Bargain Household." And it sounds reasonably like Ikea as well.) But there was a Gongjiao stop. Now Gongjiao also means "public transportation," which I had assumed is what it meant in this context--"Take public transportation route 944 to Ikea"--but seeing the Gongjiao stop I thought, huh, that's what she meant: take route 944 to Gongjiao. So I, er, did that.

It was my first time on public transportation here. This is how it works: the bus is actually staffed by two people, a driver, and a ticket taker. The ticket taker has a sharp eye for who gets on the bus and after they get on she asks each person where he or she is going, tells them how much it will cost, and sells them a ticket. If you ask, she will also tell you where to get off. This considerably increases the speed of each stop, since there's no waiting for people to pay one by one. Of course in the U.S. they could never afford it--the cost of labor is too high to pay two people to do a job one person could do. But here… well, 'nuff said.

In Chicago, the buses run in straight lines, each one along a certain major street, so if you want to go north and then west, you take the northbound bus along the street you're on, then get off at the appropriate corner and transfer to the westbound bus. Not so with the 944, which took a route resembling Ariadne's thread through the minotaur's maze. We went through so many parts of town I can barely remember any of them. And then we got out to the sticks. Well, Ikea in Chicago is in some distant suburb, so how should I know? There was in fact a big complex with blue and yellow flags, some distance before the stop at which I was instructed to get off. I didn't SEE a sign saying Ikea or Yijia, but maybe I missed it.

I got off the bus. A sand-choked street. Some grim official buildings, some people vending miserable-looking street-food. Cracked paving stones. Very smelly garbage cans. I asked an official-looking person if there was an Yijia around here? Blank look. A place that sells housewares? He pointed vaguely further on down the street. I walked for a bit. On my left, a manicured complex behind a fence. On my right, across the street, some very sad looking shops selling cigarettes, alcohol, hardware. I walked for a ways, but it just felt really unpromising. Dust and sand blowing everywhere. Buildings interspersed with demolition rubble, sometimes whole fields of it. Why be so quick to knock things down if they were just going to leave it like that? It was a disheartening scene, enlivened only by one, wonderful sighting, as follows:

I may have mentioned here, or elsewhere, the wonderful tricycle trailers they have here? They're all clearly quite ancient, but they're everywhere. I regularly see laboring cyclists pulling 8 or 9 desktop computer boxes, or boxes of laptops stacked up higher than their heads, on these rusty old things. Not to mention, of course, boxes of produce, and numerous other miscellaneous items. I love the tricycle trailers. But out in the sticks I saw...a tricycle truck. I kid you not, it was an ordinary sort of truck (you know, motorized, with a steering wheel), but it had only three wheels, one in the front and two in the back. I had never seen anything like it before in my whole life, and it practically made the whole transportation mishap worthwhile. Ah, if only I could have snapped a picture of that.

I turned around and went back to the big complex. As near as I could tell, it was a gigantic "fashion school," all new and shiny and deserted. But definitely not an Ikea. There was a security guard by the gate, and I asked him. He said something to the effect that, No, you are in the completely wrong part of town. So I asked where the bus-stop for the 944 was, feeling ready to admit defeat. (Bus-stops out this far were barely marked.) Then as I was trudging toward there, a taxi came by and slowed questioningly. Why not? I was so ready to get out of there. So I hailed him in the way I had seen Chinese people do, not heil Hitler style like in the U.S., but extending the arm palm down and curling the fingers back toward oneself repeatedly in a beckoning gesture.

The taxi stopped right away and I climbed in. He had at least heard of Yijia. He said it would be less ambiguous if I said Yijia jiaju (Ikea home furnishings), and said it was extremely far away. I asked how much it would cost. He did some mental calculations and said, about 60 RMB. Hey, $7.50 to get out of this dusty dead-end? I was hot and thirsty and discouraged, and it didn't seem like too much to pay.

It was indeed a very long way. He was a chatty cab driver, though I occasionally had trouble understanding him. I found out about him that he was from nearby the area I had been in. It turned out to be a truly distant suburb, out beyond the fifth ring road. He asked me how I came to be there, and I explained as best I could the misunderstanding I had had, about my friend's text message. He was a bit vague on the concept of text message, possibly because I didn't know the Chinese word for it, possibly because he didn't use them himself? I'm not sure how well I managed to explain, but he got it enough to say that I had got on the right bus all right, but had gone in exactly the wrong direction.

May I add, as a general exhortation to anyone giving directions to someone in a city new to them: in addition to the bus number, mention the direction and the name of the stop as well!

The cab driver also said that next time I am trying to go somewhere I should mention to the ticket person where I want to go. "Just saying one sentence more, you would have avoided so much trouble!" he grumbled. I owned that this was true. Alternatively, I could have just gone to their website, which, though it doesn't have directions, at least has a map, which would have shown me the general area. Well, education is expensive, as mom always says.

The taxi also wanted to know if there were taxis in the U.S. I said there were, mostly in major cities. Small towns might have one or two, I said, but they're so expensive that one rarely uses them. I didn't mention that ALL cabs in the U.S. are expensive compared to here!

That being said, the meter passed 60 and kept right on going. I was a bit worried, but $8, $12, whatever, it was so much more comfortable in the cab than on the bus, since I did not have to worry about my destination or whether I would get a seat. When we finally did reach Ikea, however, it turns out we had negotiated a fixed fare of 60 RMB. In fact, when I only had a 100 bill and a 50, he readily accepted 50 and change. I guess he couldn't break a hundred maybe. The whole thing flustered him a bit. Perhaps he had expected me to bargain at the beginning, and was now feeling bad that I hadn't tried to talk down the price at all. Or perhaps he was feeling bad about my bus disaster. An honest, small-town sort of guy, clearly. I think a slicker driver used to confused foreigners would have happily accepted my hundred.

In any case, there I was. The Ikea is brand new in Beijing, as you will know if you looked at their website: opened 2006. Half of it was still under construction, but they had considerately opened the other half. And the place was MOBBED. Foreigners were there, yes, more than I had seen anywhere else in Beijing so far. But they were a drop in the bucket compared to the Chinese people jostling along, packing the aisles, mostly marveling at how classy things were and how expensive.

At home, Ikea has a connotation of cool but also not expensive. And the Beijing Ikea was, from my perspective, cheaper than the U.S. one by a factor of two (or so). An ice-tray I had got in the U.S. for $2, for example, was about 8 RMB (=$1). But in line with my factor of two buying power conversion hypothesis, everything seemed to strike my Chinese fellow customers as quite overpriced. I hypothesize that, from their reactions, it seemed like a $4 ice-tray, not a $1 ice-tray. A better example was a very wonderful laundry hamper, which I debated for a long time. I need a laundry hamper, having no real closet or place to put dirty clothes. They had some very lame ones for something like 40 RMB (ugly and plasticky), and this one wonderful one, with a wooden frame and a sturdy linen basket in soothing olive and cream color, for 100 RMB. I stood debating the extravagance for a long time. But I REALLY liked it, and it's something I would use every day--not to mention being totally visible at all times, given that my studio is only one big room. While I was standing there considering it, some Chinese people came by and looked at it too. They reacted to the price tag with exclamations of horror--who could possibly pay so much for something like that!? And so on. I suppose if I had found a real Chinese housewares store, I would have got some much better deals. But there was something very home-like about being in the Ikea, comforting after all my adventures. Oh, and yes, I did buy the extravagant laundry hamper. A whole $12.50, most self-indulgent. (The real thing is even better than the picture.)

Probably my most important Ikea purchase was a rolling office chair. I had been using one of the kitchen chairs at the desk, and it was horrible. No doubt purchased at Ikea also--Ikea has some pretty rickety stuff. In any case, the aluminum legs were somehow not perfectly aligned, so every time I sat down there was this feeling that the legs were about to collapse, or were getting more and more strained. Given how much time I spend sitting at my desk, this was a terrible annoyance. I managed an on-sale office chair for about $20. It's a cheap on, but much more comfortable than the lousy kitchen chair. I guess Chinese people maybe aren't so into rolling office chairs? or maybe just not as home furnishings? Because the selection was very small and very few of them were padded (and instead were made of molded plastic). Go figure.

Oh, and I also found some nice sheets. They don't sell package sheet-sets, but by the individual piece. So I got a fitted and some pillow-cases in a nice midnight blue. Some natural instinct of parsimony prevented me from getting another fitted sheet to replace the awful lavender one I got the day before. I don't know--the lavender sheet is part of my history, and besides, it's kind of funny. I mean, amusingly ugly, much like a shower curtain I once had while I was living in Boston. I had bought the shower curtain thinking it was a blue and green geometric pattern. Instead, in turned out to be a blue and green geometric pattern overlaid with big black and grey cartoon pictures of tools, hammers and wrenches and such. One of the ugliest shower curtains I have ever owned, but I kept it because it for its humor value.

Anyway, with these and various other small purchases which I would like to show you but I can't because I still have no camera, I went through the check-out (the first place I've seen that takes credit card, but unfortunately I didn't have my credit card on me and paid cash like everyone else). They charge you for plastic shopping bags, so I just stuck the small stuff in my backpack. In fact, a nominal charge for shopping bags is a darn good idea. I think if stores did that, people would be much more likely to bring and use their own bags, reducing waste considerably.

The office chair box was big and heavy, so rather than schlep it down the street in search of a bus-stop, I decided to just take a cab again to home. The cab driver on the way in had pointed out the incredibly long line of cabs waiting at the Ikea cab-stand. It was about two blocks long. I'd said to him, "You're not going to wait in that line, are you." He laughed. "Where do I have the time to do that?!" I felt actually rather bad to have taken him so far off his home turf. I hope he really was ripping me off, by his lights, so that it would make it worth his while.

The cab driver who took me home was not talkative. He sat inside a little one-person cage around the driver's seat, which made him look rather pathetic. I suppose it must be for his protection, but still. I was a little apprehensive about being able to tell him the address, and it was not entirely easy. First I tried the street name and apartment complex name (there isn't really a number). Blank look. Then I said it was near Beida. That got us going. The southwest corner of Beida, I added. And then when we got to the bridge I recognized, I said it was south of the bridge. He looked askance. (Beida is north of the bridge.) So I pulled out my handy map book and pointed to the place. He peered at it through the bars, and after a hesitation agreed it was south of the bridge. And we got there fine, didn't even overshoot it, given how distinctive the complex is.

Then I spent some time putting together my new furniture. The office chair was particularly challenging, but I felt rather pleased that it all came together so well. (Thank goodness for my handy little keychain screwdriver set.) I mean, I'm sitting in it now and it hasn't come crashing apart yet. The seat-height adjustor even works!

So that was pretty much the part of my day that was worth mentioning, except that I also got cheated by an Arab candy-seller.* The Arab candy-sellers have these huge fascinating cake-like concoctions (I mean, the size of an entire tricycle-trailer bed), wrapped in plastic and topped with dried fruit. I had seen several, but seeing one along my route yesterday morning, I decided to try to have a taste. I just want a little, I insisted, just a taste. But seeing I was a conspicuous (and probably rich) American, he cut off a considerable slap and wouldn't make it any smaller, and unlike most food around here, it wasn't ridiculously cheap. In fact, the slab he cut (sold by weight) turned out to be about $5. I really didn't want $5 worth of Arab candy (I'm pretty sure it is some kind of halva). I wanted $1 worth of Arab candy. The guy in front of me had got $1 worth of Arab candy. But I was stuck with $5 worth or nothing and facing the vendor's ire (seeing as once he cut it off he couldn't sell cut pieces, he exclaimed). So with considerable irritation and protest I forked over the money. I guess I shouldn't really say I was cheated, since I did get a horrific amount of halva. But it's sort of like the grapes--a completely impossible quantity!

It turned out to be okay-tasting, not excessively sweet, primarily composed (I think) of sesame paste and cashews. It's probably pretty proteinaceous, if high in fat, and rich enough that I can't eat more than a little square at a time. A good way to solve sweet-tooth cravings (of which I've had much fewer here), and to fill of the little appetite wholes left by a steady diet of unfamiliar things. But it doesn't taste as good as it would have if the transaction had gone the way I wanted. Maybe that's silly.

Oh, a final thing. Did I express puzzlement at the night-time fruit vendors on the campus? How silly of me. Now that the students are back, it all becomes clear. Around 9 PM, they go out to the bathhouses for their evening wash and come out, hair all damp and faces shining. I guess this is when their thoughts turn to the pleasures of eating some nice juicy fruit, because the fruit vendors do a brisk business!


* You might ask what made me think he was an Arab candy seller, and am I yielding to racial prejudice and so on? Well, he wasn't Chinese. Most of the times I have seen this candy sold, it was being sold outside a building with Arabic writing on it. And the candy itself had a very Middle-Eastern taste. This isn't proof that he was an Arab, but that is my best guess.