宜家

Lingering among the stacks of furniture on the 1st floor of IKEA lurk those offering a special service. Trained mercenaries? Sex workers? Possibly the latter, but even more useful when buying un-assembled Swedish furniture are those undercutting IKEA's delivery system and providing their 1980's van for immediate service. "Deliver goods?" She asked in flawless Chinese. "Sure" I said, in equally impressive English. She looked confused. I translated it to Chinese. I am a Mandarin Master. 4+ years in this country are finally paying off. She creeps behind me as I make my way through the checkout and wheels my boxes outside. A man on the other side of the gate, her husband, greets me with a cheerful smile and carefully guides my boxes over the wall onto a cart and into the back of his van. We have the usual "Chinese person + white foreigner" banter and we arrive at my place. He helps me get the stuff into my apartment, I pay him roughly $20, and he returns to IKEA to repeat the process. It's situations like this, among the smog and daily grind of this city, that makes me say, "I fucking love China".

Hold it...

I don’t know how to spell it in Chinese Characters nor Pinyin, but I learned ‘Go Pee’ today which means 'Bullshit’. It was quite usefull this morning after I saw a street merchant type in 10 yen for a kilo of bananas, look at me, then change it to 30. “Go Pee” I say as he soon changes it back to 10 yen and grudgingly hands me my banana. Served.