Wal-Mart! And luggage woes

I wanted to touch on some more things about our arrival in Wuhan. I’d forgotten to mention that in the airport, as we went to pick up our luggage from the luggage turnstile at the airport, as luggage began circulating, we thought it smelled a lot like urine, but me and my fish issues, I said it smelled fishy, like a cross between a fish and a urinal. It smelled bad. We began collecting our luggage and began realizing as we walked away from the turnstile that the horrid smell was following us. We realized our luggage stunk of this fish/urine stench!

This morning, one of the moms says she opens her luggage (the outside of which was disgustingly dirty and wet) and when she opened it, she said the inside was wet and stinky and fish guts had made it into her suitcase! She had let another mother put stuff in her suitcase and this other mother’s belongings were drenched in the stinky fish guts!

Luckily, I had only brought the small suitcase I was planning to throw away on the plane. But now on to my NEW suitcase that I got less than a week ago. We were instructed to put our biggest luggage on a truck that was going to drive from Chongqing to Wuhan. We weren’t expecting it until tonight, but they arrived this morning, and they basically forced us to let the bellboys bring them upstairs. Fine, so Vivian and I left, and when we came back, our suitcases were sitting outside our doors. All of the zippers had been locked with those plastic things, yellow strips made of plastic were wrapped around the suitcases multiple times, and then a taped seal were all on each suitcase. Someone wanted to make sure we knew that our suitcases had not been opened. So all of this was appreciated. As we were bringing our suitcases into the room, I saw that the handle on my BRAND NEW SUITCASE had been broken! And it had to have been broken by the bellboy because the piece that broke off was on the floor next to my suitcase!

I immediately called Radar to inform him that my new suitcase, less than a week old, had been broken. He said there wasn’t much they could do because we couldn’t be sure who had broken it, but once I informed him that the piece that broke off was on the floor outside my door, he said he’d inform their hotel contact. I don’t expect the hotel to do anything, but as the piece that broke off was here on the floor, it must have been the bellhop who broke it, and I’d at least like an apology! There wasn’t a note or anything! Bastards.

So I brought my suitcases in and placed them where they will live for the next two weeks, and opened them up to pull out everything I intend to mail home, and saw that my toothpaste had exploded all over my NEW suitcase. Usually, I do keep it in a plastic container, but I was afraid it would get taken from me at the airport (and some people DID have toothpaste taken, btw) so I put it in the suitcase. Luckily, it didn’t ruin anything, but now my brand new suitcase is broken and reeks of toothpaste.

How lucky am I?

Viv, Stephanie and I went to Wal-Mart today (that was the excursion between seeing our luggage arrive and coming back to find my broken suitcase). Yes, the real wal-mart! I have known been in two cities with walmarts and have managed to not step into one. But we went today instead of to Carrefour and yes, I felt right at home. Sort of.

Everything was in Chinese. But they had tons of American products. The first level was like a regular wal-mart with a VERY small electronics section (like, 12 Tvs, about the same number in DVD players, the DVD and CD collection was about the size of a bathroom, no computers, but they did have cameras), clothing, shoes, etc. Make-up is still sold in counters (again like you’d find in a major department store) and it’s very intimidating because they are american products and we know what we want, but they make you look at everything and try everything on and it’s annoying and more expensive than in the US.

But despite what you may be told, you can find american products almost anywhere. The Carrefour had just about all of the same products. I didn’t specifically look for it, but I didn’t see deodorant, and the walmart at least had a VERY small selection of tampons (ob travel brand only), but otherwise, they have almost any american bath/body/beauty product you could want. Crest and Colgate, Pantene, Head and Shoulders, body washes like Dove and Oil of Olay… they also had the walmart off-brand equate for almost everything… you can find just about anything.

Unlike apparently the walmart in Chengdu, you can not buy a car at this walmart, but you can definitely buy your own live bullfrogs, snakes, and turtles for consumption, you can fish for your own fish from the many tanks of fish, the squid just lays out in the open on ice, ducks are flattened, fried, and hung from a rod for your eating pleasure… I got Vivian to take pictures, but I intend to go back before I leave here.

I had tried to buy laundry detergent, but I think I ended up with a huge bottle of softner instead of detergent (it didn‘t sud up at all), so Tracy planned a trip to walmart and I asked her to pick me up a bottle of detergent for me, as I now have two bottles of softner. Ugh.

This is definitely not among the better hotels, and we aren’t within walking distance of anything, which is annoying. I hope if we do have that week off after Wuhan that they send us somewhere else for the week. This place is miserable. Ok, not really, it’s only miserable because we aren’t near anything, so we don’t even have all that good of cab access. The walmart was downtown and we weren’t in that pretty area we had passed when we came in, the walmart area was a dirty busy area.

But hey, today we can see outside of our window, there is a view. It is still very polluted, but at least we can see outside!