It is difficult at times to refrain from starting every entry on this blog with “I love my life.” However, it is true, and truth bears repeating. I love my life.
Yesterday, I went on a mission. One week of random bread-eating (once at a bakery in Macau, where Keir, Lisa, and I split about four loaves of artisan bread; once at Serge's house, where Serge & I baked a loaf of herb yeast bread and a pan of banana bread) left me painfully anxious to get an oven. I love making bread. I will make bread when I have no oven, as attested by my various exploits with microwaved, steamed, pressure-cooked, fired, and fried bread. I was often surprised at my success, but that is by no means to say that I achieved the crispy crusts and chewy interiors of my well-kneaded, oven-baked, freakishly healthy breads. I just got something that was... nice to eat. Yeah, that was the “... nice” that a girl will use to describe a guy who has no major faults to speak of but is not head-over-heels lovable, either. He's... nice. See? It requires the preceding ellipsis.
I am tired of ...nice breads. I want to stun and amaze without using half a liter of oil and earning myself any more scars on the back of my hand (did I mention that I attempted to perfect my fry bread recipe in the dark of an apartment in want of electricity? As a spot of burning oil seared through my skin, I swore that I would never make fry bread again. In the dark. Alone. Unless I really, really needed to. Or really, really, really wanted to. That is to say, that as the pain went away, my resolve to reform my frying ways dissipated, and I was back to frying with 48 hours. I can boast, however, that I have not fried in the dark since. I'll give myself a pat on the back for that.). Well, now I can. I have an oven. It took a lot less effort to find exactly what I wanted than I thought it would. My specifications: big; manual knobs that I can read; temp up to 250 C; new, not used; less than 300RMB.
Oven #1: smaller than my childhood toaster oven. 165 RMB.
Oven #2: Huge. Beautiful. Rotisserie capabilities, even. Digital timer =(. Oh, and 1200RMB.
Oven #3: Smaller than I wanted. 600 RMB on sale.
Oven #4: The size I want. 800 RMB.
Oven #5: Smaller than I want. By a lot. 400 RMB.
Ovens #2-5 were all at one store. I left. I walked to another store. Same selection of ovens and prices. Took a bus to another section of town. I was ready to go to a place called Suning, which I had been told by strangers on the bus was the place to get electronics. (It looks like a Best Buy from outside, right down to its color scheme.) On my way, I saw olive oil in a store with an Italian label. Good olive oil is hard to find at a sweet price, but since this bottle was in one of those very impermanent looking stores along the street that smells like mildew or lunch, depending on the time of day, I thought I may have found a good deal. I went in to ask the price and found a stockpile of other Western goods. Miracle Whip, Hershey's chocolate sauce, black olives, spices... No Smucker's (little here is asked for by name, but when my roommate goes to Hong Kong, I can count on her to return with a small and beloved assortment of Smucker's jams), and no powdered wheat gluten (a favorite for cooks who may not have time to appropriately knead a loaf of bread), but, still, there was some good stuff there. While there, I recognized a store my mom and I had found during her visit. Picture Big Lots. Now, reduce the selection, take away all duplicates of its merchandise, then add back 500 games of Mah Jiang, 30,000 colored straws, and a suspended walkway hanging over your head for access to the upper shelves. Paint the place in dust. Shrink every aisle down to half your own width. Make sure anything breakable is balanced at a physically impossible angle atop something that will provide no friction. About half of everything you see should be in mint condition (excepting the dust) and the other half should appear unsellable (not just by personal standards of moral and taste, but by national ordinances). Welcome to my favorite store. What a treasure hunt! I found a pretty, nice-sized oven there.
How much?
400 RMB.
Really?
Let me check... 350 RMB.
Hmmm.
I'll give it to you for 300.
Let me think about it.
As is true of every such store in China, there was a duplicate two doors down. The same store. Same selection. Different people and different bargains. I found a slightly larger oven at the next place.
How much?
300.
Oh. Hm, well, I just found the same thing at the other place and-
260.
- here you go.
I love my new oven. As of the post, it has been named L'Oven. As of last night, it became very officially our oven – Carrie's, Travis's, and mine. My counterparts very thoughtfully paid a third of the price each, so it is not much of a financial burden on any of us. Now I will just have to try to make sure that I do not spend my small fortune on baking materials, and hope that they approve of the name...
Actually, I went out yesterday to do just that – spend a small fortune on baking goods, not win naming rights or approval. Flour, containers for flour, things that flavor flour, leavening agents, leavening inhibitors, nutritional supplements like wheat germ, unidentified flour-like powders (that have since had their tags translated: buckwheat flour, buckwheat flakes, and other... things...) .... but I found little of what I had set out to buy because I went to the wrong place or at the wrong time. At least, it was the wrong place and wrong time where my wallet and watch were concerned. As far as having an adventure – I was exactly where I never thought to hope to be. I walked around a corner I had never previously noticed and found a new fresh market and new vendors who were excited to have a white girl perusing the aisles. The guy I bought my new transparent-and-blue flour box from especially liked me.
I got directions to take a bus line with a stop around the corner traveling in a particular direction (things I would not have trusted myself to have understood in Mandarin before) and got to see how different parts of town connected in new ways. To Mom: The number 7 bus can take me from Carrefour, near where we played badminton with the gregarious dentist who stepped in a pile of poo, across a few streets to the big indoor market where I bought our host of nangua, then a few more streets over to Jusco before returning to the university. I almost got off at the stop near that terrible market where you filmed the live chicken being weighed right over the prepared refrigerated meats. I didn't. Because I was indecisive, I was offered translation help by a businessman whose employer is a German who never learned to speak Chinese in his 20 or 30 years on the mainland. I declined, able to speak for myself if I so desired, but talked to the guy who ultimately invited himself to sit in on my classes. Businessmen find it hard to fit 9am classes into their schedules, though, so I haven't seen him since.
It is funny how I would never start or continue such conversations in the States, but they are quite common here. They were more novel before, and I think I tire of them more slowly than other Westerners (I don't have a lot of evidence either way for this), but now they do not create the thrill they once did. I think it is more fun to be challenged than to be constantly praised, and praise is all I get if I even only say 谢谢 (xiexie, thank you) in front of someone who does not know (of) me. I get excited only when someone presents a new angle. Every angle used to be new here; now - not so much. Life is no less fun, but the fun has certainly evolved, and I am a bit sad that this stage of my life and all of its developments will, in many ways, disappear in just four months. That said I have changed in ways that I am thrilled to think I will carry with me forever (in, perhaps, continually improved forms). That doesn't make it any easier to think about leaving, though.
Leave it to you to get the best deal in China
ReplyDelete