Monthly Archives: May 2007

Notes From a Chinese Walmart

Posted on by

Sam Walton ...Made in China

Sam Walton ...Made in China

I’m sure Sam Walton is spinning in his grave. The man who billed his store as “All-American, and American Made” now has a huge business in China, with All-Chinese made products.

We’re in Kunming, the capitol of Yunnan Province in the South-west of China, and our room is right around the corner from Yunnan’s first Walmart …how could we resist?

I have to say, our trip to Walmart was eerie, everything is exactly the same, except better. There’s someone at the from door to greet you, there are those silly Walmart “happy faces” on all the store advertisements. The workers wear the same uniforms, only the vests have the Walmart slogans in Chinese charaters.

The two biggest differences: Walmart workers here are all in a union (albeit a union that demands they work even harder, longer and more cheaply than even their American counterparts), and all the food at this Walmart was completely fresh – We have now been to a Walmart that has a bakery on the premises, a butcher that lets you pick out your own cuts of meat, and fruits and vegetables that don’t look like crap. Amazing, we owe it all to you Sam!

Fresh, Really Fresh

Posted on by

Can I Have You For Dinner

Can I Have You For Dinner

One thing you can’t say about Chinese food is that it isn’t fresh, no frozen peas need apply. As a way of demonstrating let me relate something that happened to LeeAnne and I just the other day on the way back to our room:

It was a fine Sunday afternoon, we were walking down a busy street when a “FLAP!” a fish jumps in our way. We were walking past a restaurant that was so keen to demonstrate how fresh their food was, they let the ingredients meet you at the door. In this case a rather large fish jumped out of the kiddy pool he was being kept in to kind of say to us – “Come on in, this place is great! Really, you should try the chicken!”

Fish are not the only things waiting for you at the door of many places – ducks, chicken, snakes, rabbits, hermit crabs. If you had it as a childhood pet, you can have it for dinner here in China. Meats are not the only thing that’s super-fresh, the fruit and veg you have here will probably have been up on a tree or in the ground not that long ago. The Chinese will not tolerate food that isn’t fresh.

Which is great for us, as we have very weak Chinese language skills we can just walk up to a lot of places and point at what we want and shake our heads at what we don’t want. Green peppers – nod, onions – nod. Eel – head-shake, pigeon – head-shake. We’re making it work.

Early Reflections on China

Posted on by

Beverage, Pastry, Why Not Both

Beverage, Pastry, Why Not Both

So we’ve been in China for almost two weeks now and I have to say, sometimes I need to remind myself we’re in the Third World. After two months in India, being here is …refreshing.

Let’s say nothing of the fact that everything runs on time, let’s not mention how there are clean streets and sidewalks to walk on, we don’t need to discuss how when you get in a cab, you don’t feel as though you are putting your life in the cabbies hands.

From what we’ve seen, and granted we’ve only been here a little while, and all of that time has been in the more prosperous South, China has it’s story straight. The buses here are better than any buses we’ve been on during our whole trip (and way better than Greyhound), the trains are better than any other trains we’ve been on, the roads are (when paved) awesome.

China is like the opposite of India in almost every way. At times I felt like everything in India was hard, except finding vegetarian food. In China, that’s the only hard thing, everything else is easy. And I don’t even speak the language here!

In short, if this place is still considered the “developing world”, the developed world had better watch out!

Now, some people have kind of dogged on us because we’ve come to China. Words like “Authoritrian”, “Repressive” and “Free Tibet” have been used. Some of these words we agree with ourselves. But we wanted to find out first hand what things were like, and so we’re here. Besides, if you have an iPod, own a laptop, or have bought an article of clothing in the past several years, it was probably made here.