China Bus Adventure #2 (will it go round in circles?)

It started as an innocent Friday evening trip to the Carrefour. Little did we know that we'd embarked upon an EPIC trip that would test our limits and push the extremes of discount shopping. We must have been feeling quite confident in our abilities to navigate Kunming, because for the first time ever we decided to test the Kunming bus system. There is a bus stop located right in front of our house. It was high time that we figure out how to use it. So off we were on bus 100, which Ben remembered dropped off just a few short blocks from the Carrefour. Ben also knew that the Carrefour stop was only 2 stops away, so we were a bit dismayed when, eight stops later, we still had yet to see the Carrefour. No panic...these buses travel in loops...right? We figured we would cool our heels and catch the lovely sights of our great city from the bus window and eventually we would come full circle and reach our destination. The problem was that there weren't any open seats and we're both too tall to see out the window when standing. So, standing squished between Chinese grandmas, little kids, sleeping babies, and shopping bags, the few glimpses that we managed to catch out the window informed us that we were, in fact not traveling in a loop, but rather heading out of town! So 30 minutes later we finally realized where we were....heading back to An Ning Hot Springs. Our suspicions were confirmed when the bus pulled into a large parking lot on the outskirts of Kunming and the one passenger who remained (besides ourselves) got off. Then we drove another 100 feet and the bus driver got off. As he was climbing down, he gave us that super special look that always cuts right through the language barrier. It said...what are you crazy white people doing still on my bus? Kelly had a quick exchange and determined that he was heading out to eat dinner. He told us to get off the bus and wait right here (he pointed to the ground in front of the bus) and another bus would come to take us back to Kunming. So now , here we were, hanging out in front of the bus station (which everyone knows is always the safest place to be) in the growing twilight. Flash forward another 45 minutes and we'd finally gotten back on the bus and were heading in the right direction. We both smiled as we cruised back by our house and on to the right stop. Just as Ben said, 2 stops after the one near our house (the one where we had gotten on the bus 2 hours before), we pulled up to the Carrefour.

We should give you some background as to why this mission was necessary in the first place. Most of the foods we buy in the stores near our home are expired. Apparently, when products in Shang Hai and Bei Jing reach their pull date, they get sent to western China. We had heard that Carrefour has high quality standards and needed to check out their vast selection of unexpired food. Additionally, we had heard numerous tales and myths about boxed mac n' cheese, and other cheap Western delights available at the Carrefour.

How surprised were we to find the same expired Chinese goods that are available at our corner markets? The mythical Western aisle turned out to be smaller than Kanye West's popularity after the MTV music awards. Just some expired Italian cookies and other non-Chinese Asian foods (Thai mostly). There was not a box of Kraft mac 'n cheese to be seen. Funny, in the US, it is not often that we get a hankering for box mac 'n cheese (in fact, Kelly is rather snobbish about powdered cheese products), but here we were just looking for a little taste of America. We looked around for a while and were able to score some Listerine and some real bread (read, "unsweetened"). The buses had stopped running by the time we finished our outing, so even though we now knew which bus to get on, we had to walk home.