New Year shopping

Last Wednesday, my wife and I went shopping in the Chinese district of Antwerp ( the Van Wesenbekestraat, for the locals ).
The plan was to have a little Spring Festival party after mid-session break in next day’s class.

Red scraps of paper littered from the street down to the farthest isle of the warehouse left no room for doubt: this is Little China and someone had been lighting a cracker or two.

The Chinese warehouse is an interesting experience in itself.
Some impressions:

• I hardly recognize any of the products in the shelves.
  Labels in Chinese are not helping of course, but the products are … not what we go shopping for on Saturday afternoons.
• No shopping carts ( maneuvering them through these souks wouldn’t be practical nor safe ).
  Plastic shopping baskets – made in China, most likely – make this more of large grocery store than a warehouse.
• An abundance of spices an noodles.
• Vacuum wrapped dried squid. Really ?
• Bales of rice, hardly compatible with the basket.
• Thank the gods for accepting credit cards.

In the end, I bought my fellow-students some fancy chop-sticks ( which hardly anyone was able to use, imagine that ), just to be sure to bring something which will not  burn anyone’s tonsils.

And we topped off the evening with Irish stew and Guinness.
Don’t you just love that?