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| One delivery company has packages piled up on the ground just before classes let out. A few minutes later the whole area was filled with lines of waiting students. |
It was only a few years ago when we
ourselves had our eyes opened to the broad shopping horizon known as
Taobao. Taobao is like a Chinese Amazon marketplace (there is also
Chinese Amazon, but their things tend to be more expensive). You can
find pretty much anything on Taobao. Clothes, toys, furniture,
produce, live hedgehogs. The selection is wider and the prices often
much lower than in stores. And you can avoid actually having to go
shopping, which I think is a big plus. I buy most of the girls
clothes on Taobao, some harder to find or bulk grocery items, and a
lot of odds and ends I don't want to have to search for in real life.
The only tricky part can be figuring
out the names of things in Chinese. “Girls winter boots” is
pretty simple, but sometimes I have to do a lot of guessing and baidu
translating to get what I'm actually looking for. A lot of import
items are also available, but they are usually still expensive.
November 11th is “Singles
Day” in China (双11
or “double 11”). Thanks to the owners of Taobao, in recent years
this holiday has been turned into a Chinese Black Friday. It is now
the biggest shopping day in the world (because you know, China has an
awful lot of people). We waited until the holiday to buy things for
ourselves and our teammates, and the past week we have been getting
multiple packages a day.
If you live in a regular neighborhood,
delivery companies will deliver packages to your house. Since we
live on the university campus, they deliver to several designated
areas and we have to go pick them up. There are close to a dozen
different small delivery companies with different locations near
different school gates. The delivery company sends a text message
letting you know you have a package to pick up, generally around
lunchtime but recently as late as 8 or 9pm.
This past week the companies were
seriously overloaded with Singles Day packages. Hundreds of packages
delivered through each company, multiple shipments a day. When we
went to pick up packages, there were often 30-40 people waiting in
line at each location. Fortunately the delivery companies have
improved their organization. Instead of searching through an
incomprehensible organization of 100 packages, they now text you a
package number.
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| Students lined up at another delivery location. |
As I went to pick up several packages
the other day, waiting in one of four lines while harried delivery
workers called out, “What number? Next! What number??” I realized
that I still have trouble with Chinese numbers. The numbers
themselves are pretty elemental and one of the first things I learned
in China. But I still find it hard to read off a series of numbers
in Chinese, like a phone number or a 5 digit package number. “That's
kind of ridiculous,” I thought.
But then I realized, I also have
trouble reading numbers aloud in English. They make sense when I see
them, but to say them out-loud I feel like I have to translate the
numerals into words and my brain or my mouth gets easily confused.
So naturally it is hard to read numbers in Chinese, when my brain has
to first figure out what the numerals mean and then into Chinese
words.
I also have a terrible time remembering
numbers. I still don't have my phone number memorized, and I have had
the same number for 5 years! I have tried memorizing it several
times and it just hasn't stuck.
Well, I always knew my brain had a
tenuous relationship with numbers, despite their color connections. Isn't it reassuring that I am the one teaching Juliana math?
