Anyone for Chicken Claw?

Wandering around Kunming, our “home” for the past week, I sometimes feel a little like those British journalists inspecting America during the Gilded Age, marvelling at how bright and shiny and, well, BIG, everything is.

You see, they make things bigger in China, this giant nation just entering its Gilded Age. They really do.

And, they make things different. So even a mundane activity like a trip to the supermarket becomes, well, quite the adventure.

Our local supermarket is, globalisation fans please note, a Carrefour. Look how they’ve made the Chinese characters into a shopping trolley!

It’s not a big Carrefour for China. It’s not even the biggest Carrefour in this relatively pocket-sized city.

But even the bottom floor is large enough to prompt squeaks from Z of, “Oh my God! It’s a HYPERmarket.”

It’s ripe with possibilities. And full of pitfalls for the unwary.

Take our search for coffee.

Now, tea, they have. Beautifully packaged gift boxes of Yunnan pu’er tea, sold in bricks.

Jars of luxurious teas, from silvertip (the very tips of the leaf), to ribbons of green tea lovingly coiled into rosebud shapes.

Common or garden teas.

Flowers and dried fruit with which (I think) to make your own decoctions.

However… I can’t function without coffee.

The coffee, we learn, is not with the tea.

It’s not with the herbs and spices.

It’s not even with the myriad pulses, laid out in vacuum packs or boxes for you to help yourself.

And it’s definitely not with the Frosties in the imports section.

We hunt.

“Mum!” yells Z, racing off with the trolley into a promising looking section. “Over here!”

So near.

And yet so far…

And, no, I still don’t know what black sesame cream is used for.

We find the coffee eventually. Almost all of it, bar the beans, for which we have no grinder, is the Asian favourite “3 in 1” — coffee with milk and heaps of sugar already added at the powder stage.

Half an hour in, and we have precisely two items in our trolley.

“OK, Mum,” says Z. “We need a system. We need to do a systematic sweep and find out where everything is. Let’s start at this end and work round.”

And what do we find?

Well, the fish section’s definitely different. Not just the live crabs that occasionally escape their plastic bondage.

Not only the grandmothers picking through prawns with their bare hands. Not just the gory slivers of eel. Not just the seafood marinading in chilli, herbs and spices — Kunming’s answer to the microwave meal.

But in this supermarket you can fish for your dinner!

This guy spent minutes netting fish, throwing back the smaller ones, and netting again. There’s clearly an art to the live catch.

Though, given our fishing experiences so far, I’m quite pleased Z wasn’t enthused to try.

We were a bit mystified by this at first…

It’s two walls worth of, well, wet wipes.

Why so many? And why not with the babycare section?

Wayull…

When an Indonesian lady tells you that “the toilets in China are really bad”, you listen.

(If you’re eating, you might want to stop reading now.)

Now, we’re not squeamish. But, as Z puts it, “The problem with Chinese toilets is they’re the worst of both worlds. Flush squats.”

With the mainstream South-East Asian system, a squat toilet is accompanied by a bucket (or a cistern), with a scoop. You scoop water from the bucket to clean yourself, flush away your leavings and also sluice away any dirt your outdoor shoes have left on the porcelain where you put your feet.

In China? No bucket. So no clean-up.

And, furthermore, neither paper nor bum-gun.

Even in malls upscale enough to have an apparently bona fide Ferragamo one is greeted by suspicious stains and noxious odours at best and substantial turds and bloody sanitary napkins at worst.

Hence, the wet wipes. I have a packet in my bag at all times.

Z is, of course, blessed with the equipment to use a urinal.

Anywise… Back to Carrefour.

I’m a sucker for new foodstuffs, generally, and as we patrol the aisles I’m collecting vacuum packs of pickles at random. So this package, in the classic impulse buy position at the till-end of an aisle, catches my eye.

I’m figuring it’s some sort of pickled soy product with chilli. It looks, well, interesting. I pick it up.

Which is when, mercifully, my eyes catch the price tag on the shelf.

On it is written, very small, in English: “Chicken Claw”.

Y’see, most Chinese people value the kind of rubbery, stringy, chewy gelatinous textures that most Westerners despise.

Chicken are sold with their feet (and heads) still on. Chicken feet feature highly in the butchery section, as do pig trotters.

For me? I’m a firm believer in trying everything once. But I’ve tried chicken feet. And we will never be friends…

Now, we like the fruit and veg section. (Not quite as much as Z likes the choice of aged New Zealand cheddar in the petite but present dairy section.) But we like it.

There are posh fruits — pomegranate, salak (the “snakeskin fruit” with the apricot flavour), ripe plums and kiwis. Lotus root, bamboo shoots, bitter melon, giant aubergines…

And a selection of green leafy vegetables spanning the gamut from “looks like lettuce” to “not a clue”.

“Will you stop that?” says Z.

“What?” I say. “How am I supposed to find out if this will go in a salad if I don’t try some of it before I buy it?”

“God,” he says. “In Australia if you stood there eating things at the vegetable stand someone would ARREST you. Probably.”

We pick up some lettuce and a couple of leafy things.

And, oh my lord! The mushrooms! I’m a fungi freak, but the Chinese put Europeans — even Russians! — to shame in this arena. I count eight different varieties of fresh mushrooms, piles upon piles of different dried varieties, and that’s before we get to the ones that are preserved in oil or pickled.

Scrambled eggs with Chinese mushrooms for breakfast, I figure. A different mushroom each day.

But we need salt.

I take it as a good omen that, even, before we start Mandarin classes, we can look up the word for “salt” in our guidebook and manage the tone convincingly enough to be pointed in the right direction.

Salt is, of course, with the soy sauce. And the vinegars. Which is good, because we need vinegar.

“Mmm…” I say. “Apple vinegar. Do you reckon that’s like cider vinegar?”

“Probably,” says Z, who is hovering between white rice vinegar (for the acidity) and mature black vinegar (which we both love: it’s like a more acid balsamic).

We go for the mature black vinegar and the apple vinegar.

But… where’s the salt?

There’s half an aisle of white salt-like substance next to the chicken bouillon. But it’s all MSG, in a bewildering range of chemical formulae, all specified.

We head back to the spices and the loaf sugar. Not there.

More promising white powders? Sticky rice powder. Rice powder. Bean powder…

We head back to the soy avenue and try our Chinese syllable on another lady. And there it is! The salt. A single shelf, buried below the soy.

“I guess they just use soy or fish sauce to bring out flavours,” says Z, philosophically.

The deli section’s a bewildering whirl of vats and jars — you help yourself into little plastic bags.

We grab more pickles. And pass, for the fourth time in this supermarket, on chicken feet.

I sniff, dubiously, at the Chinese sausages. They smell sweet, and I don’t know the Chinese to ask for only one, not a whole bunch.

Large family? You can buy a whole ham hock here…

Z pulls his T-shirt over his nose in the dried fish section. But, bizarrely, eschews the pick ‘n’ mix that occupies a space the size of several shops.

We need moisturiser. That’s a tough one.

Most of the products labelled in English contain skin-bleaching ingredients of one kind or another. (In China, as elsewhere in Asia, the female models are creamy-pale, the guys a little darker.)

There’s an array of Dove products, lined up together so it’s impossible to tell what’s shampoo and what is skin cream.

I consider buying something called “Nivea Happy Time” purely for the name, but in the end I opt for something by bottle size.

We go Chinese on toothpaste.

One item left, and Z’s itching to get home to demolish his Cheddar.

We need washing-up liquid.

Now, I’m not a novice in the game of roulette that’s Asian supermarket shopping.

We return to where we found the laundry liquid. No dice.

There’s dishwasher liquid aplenty. And some weird stuff with pictures of people washing fruit and veg on it.

I point, hopefully, at the dishwasher stuff and mime washing up by hand. We are directed, unsurprisingly to the laundry section.

Where we admit defeat. Cash out. And head home.

Washing up?

Well, after we’ve learnt that “apple vinegar” is not the same thing as “cider vinegar”, Z has an inspiration.

“Just use the vinegar,” says Z. “It’ll cut the grease. And we’re not going to use it any other way.”