Communication & Miscommunication

It is incredible how many people speak english here in Guangzhou. Most people under the age of 30 will understand a bit of what you say if you talk slowly, which isn't my strong suit.

We found the equivalent of a Walmart here. It is called the Trust Market. When we first walked in it looked like a very small grocery store. What we didn't realize is that the store was narrow, but kept going and going. The further back we went, the wider the store got and the more merchandise it had.

We were looking for a stroller and found six nice ones for between 150 and 200 yuan. That's less than $28 US. We were looking for a very compact stroller, like an umbrella one, so that we could bring it on the plane home. Most of them were a little bigger, but we saw this really cute green umbrella stroller with Piglet on it way up high on a shelf in another aisle. Gabby said, "Let's get that one!", so I went over to the aisle to get it down and see if it would work.

As I pulled down the Piglet stroller, some of the surrounding small decorations and small cans of formula fell off the shelf. I tried to grab them and put them back up but the person waiting on us waved me away. The stroller did not have a price, so I asked how much and pointed to my hand showing different amounts of fingers.

The woman helping us did not show us how much, she just kept pointing at the formula that was on the shelves below where the Piglet stroller used to be before I pulled it down. She was also pointing to the stroller at the same time. It only took me about five times of the woman pointing to the formula, then the stroller to realize that you had to purchase the formula to get the stroller. Then I felt like, "Duh" I asked how many and showed two, three, then four fingers. She showed five. That would be too many for us. As I was the only tall person there, I helped the woman put the stroller back up on the high shelf as well as the decorations while repeating duibuqui (dwee boo chee) over and over. Duibuqui means sorry. The woman motioned that it was okay. We ended up purchasing one of the other strollers.