Freakish

Here’s a thing. And not a Chinese one.

There is a British company (whom I shan’t name since becoming aware of the scary power of Google to watch my every word much more assiduously than any Chinese Big Brother could ever do) which specialises in making boots for women with ‘large or slim calves’. In other words, a shop for freaks, like me.

They’ve only been going a few years, and when I heard about them I got very excited. Fantastic, I thought – I won't feel like a freak any more! No more utterly humiliating shoe-shopping experiences in which I’m reduced to tears by having a helpful but ever-so-slightly patronising girl get every pair of boots off the shelf in the shop for me, and then having to buy a pair I don’t like that much because they’re the only ones I can fit over my fat legs. These ‘large or slim calves’ people claim to have ‘21 different calf fittings’. They also do shoes for wide feet (yes, you guessed it, that’s me as well). Great! They’re a touch more expensive than the average but that’s fine with me, that’s a service I’ll pay for, I thought.

To put this in perspective you need to appreciate the difficulties I have with shopping in China. Now I’m not huge (well, I’m getting huger at the moment, but that’s different!). Curvy, perhaps. But not vast. But Chinese women are all SO skinny that if I want to buy any clothes here - except in the western shops in Shanghai - I have to get the biggest size there is, and even then sometimes it doesn’t fit me. I’ve never bought anything in XXXL before in my life, but that’s often what I count as here. Very often they don’t even have XXXL, and shake their heads apologetically while looking me up and down in a manner which says unmistakably, ‘God, we didn’t know people as fat as you even existed’.

What with this, and the fact that my immigration medical classified me as ‘obese’, don’t forget (as I never shall, grrr), I’ve been heard to protest wailingly that I must be the Fattest Person in China (FPIC). Peter tries to make me feel better by pointing out any fat girls we spot, with a nudge and an ‘FPIC alert!’. There aren’t many, but if you hang around Macdonald’s long enough you’re bound to see one or two.

Unfortunately, even if I could speak Chinese, you can’t exactly walk up to someone and say, ‘Excuse me, you look like a bit of a porker. Would you mind telling me where you bought the vast tent you’re wearing?’ So I haven’t bought many clothes. Don’t even get me started on the bras. Most of the offerings are gnat-bite size. Seriously I think it must be illegal in China to sell anything bigger than a C cup. Even in the maternity section of M&S they don't go above D. Online ordering from the UK is the way to go for me.

Shoes are just impossible for me here, of course, and it was for this reason that I went to the aforementioned ‘large & slim calves’ emporium in Edinburgh. I’d seen on their website that they did a fleece-lined boot which struck me as ideal for Harbin. It was summer when we left the UK so I couldn’t get winter boots then, so had to wait until we were visiting at Christmas before I could try them on. They don't carry stock in the shop so you have to select the ones you want and then they get them in from their warehouse. So they measured my ‘obese’ calf, and found a pair of the fleecy ones I was after which fitted me no problem.

‘Oh’, said the girl, checking her computer. ‘I’m afraid these aren’t currently in stock in your size combination. We’ll have to make them for you. It’ll be four to eight weeks, I’m afraid, with the Christmas break and everything.’

This was on December 22nd. Guess when they turned up? Last Wednesday. That’s March 4th. I make that more than 11 weeks. The company were very attentive and communication was great. They emailed me at least once a month to tell me the boots weren’t ready yet, and cajoled me with increasing desperation to ‘make an alternative selection from our website’. Eventually they apologetically announced – without me even complaining or anything - that they’d give me 10% off and free delivery, which seeing as it was to China was pretty good of them, thereby saving me about £30. Finally they told me which week the boots would be dispatched, and indeed they were.

Seriously though, eleven weeks? To make one pair of boots? What on earth?? The boots are very nice; they don't fit me now, of course, with my ankles all puffed up with pregnancy, but I won't need them in Shanghai and they should be ok for the autumn.

But what’s all this about ‘my size combination’? My feet are quite an average size once you ignore the width factor, which these guys take into account anyway. Where are your 21 different calf fittings? What’s going on? I'd been hoping for a self-esteem boost but I couldn't have failed more miserably.

Not only am I the Fattest Person in China. I'm officially too freakish for the freak shop.

Yes

There is not a banana to be had, anywhere in Harbin.

Not since before Chinese New Year – about three or four weeks. Not in our usual large supermarket, not in the other smaller supermarket where I fought someone for the last bunch the other week, not in the corner-shop type place downstairs from our flat. Two weeks ago we even went for a meal in a posh hotel and I ordered banoffee pie for pudding (I know, I know), and was told apologetically that they couldn’t do it, and now I see why.

What’s all that about then?

I know they’ve got an extremely long way to come – not the most right-on of fruits from a food miles perspective, I grant you – but that’s never seemed to be a problem here before. Is there a worldwide shortage? Did we miss banana day or something?

It’s very distressing. I can’t think of more than about a day that’s elapsed in the last five years without me eating at least one banana. They’re a staple element of mine and Peter’s diets, so much so that we both tend to carry an EB (Emergency Banana) with us at all times.

We can get apples, pears, kiwi fruit, strawberries.

But yes, we have none.

I don’t feel like singing about it. But just in case you do…..

Death by salesman

You never know what’s going to happen next around here.

On Saturday, we were just getting ready to go out when there was a ring at the doorbell. The screen on our video entry phone (on of the many ridiculous and quite unnecessary mod cons with which our flat is equipped) showed the peaked cap of one of the security guards, peering over a large package. Behind him another figure could be seen, apparently carrying a large pile of boxes.

Mystified, as we weren’t expecting any kind of delivery, Peter let him in. On arrival at the door he profferred one of the boxes and launched into an explanation.

‘Sorry’, said Peter in Chinese, ‘I don’t speak Chinese’.

Ignoring this (as they usually do), the guard continued handing over the package. He showed a list with all the flat numbers, several of which had signatures next to them. It became apparent we too were meant to sign for our box. There was much smiling and joviality. This, it seemed, was a free New Year gift for each flat, from whom we know not, but Peter signed and thanked him and off he went, quite happy.

What do you think it was? Drink? Hardly likely. Sweets? Sadly not. It was – and you’ll all be sorry you’re missing out, I’m sure – ‘Quick Frozen Glutinous Corn’. In other words, corn on the cob. At least 10 of them, loose, in a box. Every home should have one – and if you live here, it seems every home will bloomin’ well get one, whether it likes it or not.

Anyway, having started thus, our day proceeded to get weirder and weirder. We’d decided to go to the main shopping area in the city centre where there are three shopping centres side by side which we’d not visited before. Peter was keen to try and buy some shoes which would serve for wearing in the office and walking there in the snow, rather than having to change into his walking boots twice a day or risk a tumble on the ice.

The shopping centre (we only got to one) proved to be much like every other one we’ve seen in China, namely huge, glitzy, overpriced, and following an identical layout: basement – supermarket; ground floor – jewellery and cosmetics; first floor – men’s clothes; second & third floors – women’s clothes; fourth floor – household goods. Sometimes they have the same pattern but are all on one floor, in which case they replicate the thing horizontally, as it were, in huge long aisles stretching further than the eye can see. I’m not sure who these malls are designed for. Most of the goods are way outside the price range of the majority of ordinary Chinese people so they are quite often virtually empty, but in cold weather people seem to gather there as a social event, and wander around quite happily just looking at things.

Last Saturday – being the Chinese equivalent of the last shopping weekend before Christmas, I suppose – was an exception. I wouldn’t quite describe it as a retail frenzy on a British scale, but the place was heaving and people were definitely buying. There was a festive atmosphere and some live traditional music by the Clinique counter.

Shopping in China is a Trial. When you buy something in these places, it’s a huge palaver. You get take your item to the counter and they ring it through, but then they keep the item and instead give you a bill, which you have to take to a separate cash desk, not necessarily nearby. There, having used your specially sharpened elbows to fight off would-be queue-jumpers, you pay, and get a receipt which you then take back to the original desk to retrieve your purchase. If you then also want a fa piao (see earlier post if you're one of the few people on the planet, it seems, who doesn't now know what a fa piao is!), you generally have to go to yet another desk – usually miles away in an obscure corner of the shop – and queue/jostle again to present your receipt and tell them what to enter into their fa piao computer. (We now have this down to a fine art, by the way, ever since Kevin provided us with a magic piece of paper with all the requisite details written on in Chinese.)

But it’s not just this, or the language barrier, or the different sizes, or not being able to recognise the products half the time. It’s the fact that they WILL NOT leave you alone. The minute you walk into any shop, at least one assistant will immediately leap up, greet you and proceed to follow close behind you as you move around the shop, so that it’s impossible to look at anything. If you do linger over an item for more than a millisecond, he or she will start telling you about it. Protestations that you don’t speak Chinese, or even blanking them completely, have little or no effect. They may hesitate for a fraction of a second, but will then resume as though programmed.

If by any chance they do speak English and you ask them nicely (or even not nicely) to go away and leave you alone so that you can look, they merely laugh and carry on. We once spent about 10 minutes trying to explain to the girl in a Beijing hotel shop that she’d be far more likely to make a sale to a westerner if they were left in peace to look around, but it simply did not compute. Even in the supermarket they employ staff as what we call ‘pointless pointers’, whose job is to stand in front of the shelves and point to the most expensive item in their section while giving you a sales pitch. Maybe it’s just a British thing, but it makes me want to SCREAM!

The trick (if there is one) seems to be that if you really don’t want to buy, you have to get out fast. If they sense the slightest hint that you are genuinely interested in making a purchase, they get the bit between their teeth and won’t let go. Sometimes this works to their own disadvantage, such as the woman in the same Beijing hotel who was convinced we wanted to buy jade name-stamps with our Chinese zodiac sign on the top and our names specially engraved on the bottom. We liked them, but the price she was asking was astronomical so we changed our minds. She pursued us for two days, finally going to the lengths of engraving our names on for us so that she was then obliged to sell them to us at whatever price we named.

I tell you, the whole experience is so infuriating I’ve more or less given up shopping - which for me is like going into rehab.

So there’s Peter, trying on shoes. Unfortunately he didn’t know his Chinese size, but after a bit of trial and error we ascertained he was a 260 (the approximate length of the foot in millimetres, in case you’re interested – much more sensible than our system). As it was busy, we’d managed to look at several and narrow it down without attracting the attention of the staff, but when it came to the point of asking for the left shoe there was nothing else for it. There were several girl assistants, dressed in smart uniforms with fab red and gold waistcoats, but our case was taken up by a chap whom we’d at first mistaken for a customer, as he was wearing only scruffy jeans and a bomber jacket, with no official badges or markings. However, as he seemed to be telling the girls what to do and they seemed not to object, we had to assume he did indeed belong to the store.

Peter tried on lots of pairs of shoes but none was suitable. When he finally found a pair he did like, they only had them in brown, and he wanted black. This all took some time; you know how it is. Chap in Jeans was highly attentive, but eventually he began to lose patience. He started persuading Peter to try on other pairs in size 255 or 265. Enthusiastic nodding greeted his protests that they were too small or large. Shoe Man kept producing brown ones. It took ages to get the message through that it was black or nothing, but when it did, this was clearly too much. He pointed angrily at Peter’s own shoes, which were brown, as if to say ‘Well, brown ones were obviously good enough for you before, so what’s wrong with mine?’, and started pulling black shoes off the shelf at random and virtually forcing Peter to try them on, irrespective of style or size. He seemed to be at his wits’ end.

After quite a lot of this, I suggested to Peter that maybe today just wasn’t his day on the shoe front, and that maybe we should go and look around the rest of the shopping centre before we actually died. He agreed, and thanking our friend profusely for his help, we set off. But Shoe Guy wasn’t taking No for an answer and began following us. We quickened our pace, and even hid behind some shirts, but as we were about to make our escape upstairs he cornered us at the bottom of the escalator and, grinning, beckoned Peter into what I took to be a stockroom through a concealed entrance at the back of a small shop.

A minute or so later, Peter re-emerged and called me. ‘You’ve got to see this,’ he said. Following him and the Shoe Guy, I stepped through the back of the shop – into a (literally) parallel universe. Attached to the shopping centre we were in, stretching away into darkness, was another narrow corridor of shops running alongside, but where ours were huge and brightly lit, these were poky and dark, with things hanging from the ceiling. Every single shop seemed to sell shoes. There was no obvious entrance or exit other than that which we had used, but customers were milling about as if oblivious to the 21st century going on next door. It was straight out of Harry Potter.

Peter was ushered into one of the little stalls, where our pal and several girls again attempted to bully him into trying on every pair of black shoes they had, becoming quite agitated when he argued that they weren’t his size. Finally I managed to bundle him out and get back onto our own side of the time portal, but our stalker could still be seen hanging about for quite a while, watching us as we walked around, and about an hour later he materialised beside us yet again, several floors up, and seemed to be saying that he had just two more pairs for Peter to try on if he would only come back downstairs. I half expected to see him chasing after our taxi, brandishing black shoes, as we drove home.

Maybe the ski shops of Edinburgh should take a leaf out of this guy’s book.

The season of peace and glove

A belated Happy New Year to you all – and as you can see, it’s new year, new look, for From Scotland to Siberia. The previous template (chosen in some haste) was just too – well – pink, and that Georgia font, while it looked lovely in our wedding invitations, is a bit too curly for on-screen reading, so I decided to go sans serif. If anyone actually preferred the old look, please tell me, and I might think about it. Or I might just ignore you.

Anyway, you’ll be glad to know they let us back into China - although I did have Amazon’s number in my phone and primed as we came through Immigration, just in case! (See earlier post).

We managed to pass a very pleasant and restful few weeks with our families and friends in the UK, despite spending rather more time than one might wish being forced to read the Daily Express advice on how to avert the recession by not buying anything (not sure quite how that works), enduring endless discussions about the Strictly Come Dancing phone-in votes scandal (what?), sitting in doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries, having injections, and rushing around buying up the entire contents of Boots and Morrison’s, trying desperately to stock up on all the things we can’t buy in China. We bought, or were given, so much stuff that I bravely decided to forego the purchase of more Marmite, resolving instead to eke out my remaining third of a jar until the next visit home. In the end we had to buy another suitcase so I could have carried it after all. It’s a tragedy.

But not as tragic as the tale which I’m about to tell you, concerning the World’s Most Expensive Mittens.

I purchased the WMEMs back in August at Blues the Ski Shop in Edinburgh. I don’t mind giving the shop a wee bit of free publicity there, as they are easily the best stocked, most helpful and definitely the most polite of all the ski- and outdoor shops in the city – and believe me, after last week, I know what I’m talking about.

Prior to moving out here, we had been given a ‘cold weather clothing allowance’ with which to buy outdoor wear suitable for Harbin in winter, and knowing not much about that kind of thing, we went to said shop and told them we were moving to ‘somewhere cold’.

‘How cold?’ asked the nice laddie. ‘Are we talking Alps? Rockies?’

‘Try Himalayas’, we replied. ‘Or Siberia’.

‘How cold does it get?’ he enquired.

‘Ooh, minus 35-ish’, we said.

He promptly ushered us towards a special section labelled ‘Mega Expensive Clothing For Lunatics’ (well, it may as well have been) and proceeded to give us the low-down on coats with ceramic bead inserts, thermals spun from the wool of specially reared and individually named sheep whose progress you could follow on a website (seriously), and last but not least the benefits of down-filled ski mittens. Basically the moral of the story in all cases seemed to be: modern artificial fibres may now be very advanced and capable of withstanding great extremes of weather, but at the end of the day, nothing – apologies to the vegetarians amongst you but this is the word of an expert here – nothing beats natural materials when it comes to keeping out the cold.

Now it has to be said that I do tend to suffer with cold hands and feet, and we’d been warned that ordinary fleece, woollen or even leather gloves simply wouldn’t cut it in Harbin, so getting a good pair was high on my priority list. I tried on a few of the less fancy pairs in the shop but wasn’t satisfied with the fit. ‘OK’, I said in the end. ‘Show me your down-filled mittens. Do your worst.’

Well, it was love at first sight. They were cream-coloured on the back, quilted, with a black leather palm and a fleecy lining. They came down over the wrist like a gauntlet and could be tightened or loosened by means of a velcro strap at the base of the hand. When I put my hand inside, my whole body felt warm, and they fitted like a – well, you know, a thing that fits very well.

They were £55. For a pair of mittens. But I just couldn’t resist.

It was late November before I had a chance to give the WMEMs their inaugural outing. The temperature had dropped to about minus 12 by day, minus 20 by night, but my hands were fabulously toasty. Outside, I couldn’t feel a thing (or, indeed, do anything either, as they tended to lend a sort of toy-soldier effect to one’s hand movements and make it impossible to open doors or pick things up – but hey, I was warm!). Indoors, even in a car, I had to remove them immediately or I’d have spontaneously combusted. The cream colour had already proved to be hopelessly impractical in a soot-stained city like Harbin, but I kept sponging them gently since they professed to be dry-clean only.

As it happened, I didn’t actually go out much during December, so I’d probably worn them on no more than about four occasions when it was time to fly home for Christmas. I reckoned I wouldn’t need them in the UK, and certainly not in Shanghai where we spent a few days at either end of the holiday (though in practice it turned out to be chillier in both places last week than we’d anticipated), and so contemplated leaving them behind, but remembering that we’d be arriving back into Harbin on a January night at temperatures of minus 25, I decided to take them with me.

I wore them as we left the house, then took them off for the car journey to the airport, taking care to put them on the floor with my handbag and not on my lap so that I wouldn’t forget they were there when I stood up. I carried them into the airport, and then, in the check-in queue, frustrated by having too many things to carry, I hurriedly shoved them into the backpack which I was using as hand luggage.

And that was the last I saw of them. Or I should say, of one of them. Peter was getting something else out of the backpack that night at the hotel in Shanghai when he said, ‘Oh, one of your gloves is here.’

‘They’re both there’, said I.

‘No’, he said. He searched the bag. I searched the bag. We searched our other bags. There was, most definitely and most, most tragically, only one WMEM.

I’m not ashamed to say I cried. (It’d been a long day.) I am, however, slightly ashamed by my Paris Hilton-like behaviour which followed.

Knowing I’d had them at Harbin airport, I got Peter to phone Kevin, who dutifully phoned the airport and harangued the lost property department, left luggage and the head of cleaning regarding the loss of the ‘very special and expensive’ glove which his boss’s wife had obviously dropped there. The next day I made him phone them again and do the same thing. But all to no avail.

The next day, we flew to Edinburgh, where I had resolved that at all costs I MUST replace the WMEMs with EXACTLY the same ones. Never mind that we had used up our cold weather clothing allowance. Never mind that I could probably buy something very similar in China and claim the money back. I had to have them, and I had to have them NOW (or at least before that flight back to Harbin).

Sadly there wasn’t time before Christmas, so it was last week, early in January, when I eventually went back to Blues and talked to another helpful young man. No, they didn’t have those, but they had the same make in white for £70. Even I baulked at this. Or these, which were not quite as good but very similar, and which felt actually a bit less toy-soldierish and were only £40, but they didn’t have my size. They could try their Glasgow branch? No, I said, I’m leaving the country tomorrow. He suggested a couple of other shops.

I then spent two afternoons trudging up and down the central shopping streets of Edinburgh in search of down-filled ski mittens. No one had them. ‘People don’t really use down much these days’, the uber-cool dude in the snowboard shop informed me, condescendingly. ‘Down tends to be a bit too warm for skiing’, grunted a very surly Northern Irish guy in another shop. ‘Did I say I wanted them for skiing?’, I barked back in intense irritation, being by now in at least my seventh shop. By then they didn’t even have to be the same ones, but I was unshakeable on the down. Thermal micro mega-warm ultra-therm-tech go snow-proof hyper-fab heat-shield super techno fleece just WOULD NOT BE WARM ENOUGH.

Finally, crushed and defeated, I bought a pair of ordinary thermal gloves in Milletts for £12. It was the coldest day in the UK for – ooh, some number of years – check the papers. ‘Do you want to wear them now?’ asked the nice young lad. ‘Most people are, today.’

‘No thanks,’ I replied, ‘I’m going somewhere MUCH colder than here.’ ‘There’s nowhere colder than here,’ he said glumly. I couldn’t help but disabuse him. He apologised.

There was just one slim hope left. On our return to China, I kept the single glove in my hand luggage to show to the lost property people at Harbin airport, just in case they had found the other one and had kept it for me for all these weeks. Our flight into Harbin on Saturday night was delayed, and our poor sweet driver, Mr Li, had been waiting patiently for us for an hour. Despite this, I still insisted on keeping him hanging on further while I found out where the lost property office was. This took some time, as the first six people we asked didn’t speak English, and when Peter found the appropriate word in his phrase book and showed it to them, they kept trying to usher us through the security gates and couldn’t understand that we had just arrived on a plane.

In the end we phoned Kevin again and got him to explain that I was looking for a glove I’d lost on the 17th December. When prompted, I waved the remaining WMEM at them. Eventually the message got through and they went to check, but came back shaking their heads. Alas, all hope was lost. I sat, grieving, with my poor lonely WMEM and contemplated hanging it on the wall as a trophy, while wondering how on earth I would be able to go the Harbin Ice Festival in inferior gloves. It was a sad night.

…..

Last night, Peter went to the supermarket, and took my (now empty) backpack – which I had carried the length and breadth of Britain for three weeks, and unpacked and re-packed at least four times in the process - to carry home the shopping.

He had finished unpacking it when he said, ‘Hang on, there’s something heavy in the bottom’.

‘No there’s not’, I said. ‘I emptied it.’

‘I’m telling you, there is!’, he insisted, and reached down and pulled out a slab of cheese which he’d just bought. ‘I think there’s a secret pocket at the back here’, he said. ‘And – oh! –

HERE’S YOUR OTHER GLOVE!’