In Search of a Princess Bike

We apologize for, yet again, another story from a shopping excursion, but we must share our latest experience. Annie and Juliet picked Scott up from work tonight and we headed to Thumb Plaza – our favorite area for eating, shopping, etc. They have a good American diner, a great Italian place, and a Papa John's, not to mention a 20 foot tall, silver-plated, modern art sculpture of a man with two thumbs up. We went for dinner, but also to procure a new bicycle for Juliet, as we did not bring one from Texas.

After having some great Italian food, we headed to Carrefour (French Wal-Mart) for what we thought would be a five minute trip (we don’t really like going there because despite being able to purchase a 12 pack of chopsticks for about $0.08, you must deal with a strange odor that conjures images of a combination of b.o. and Tuna.) But alas, they did not have the Disney Princess bike we had been eyeing for three weeks. So we made our way back out to Mr. Chen (procuring along the way all seven seasons of The West Wing, the first season of Jericho and Ratatouille all for less than $6 bucks) and had him drive us to the other Carrefour about 10 minutes away. This Carrefour is actually worse than the first because they apparently won’t open the doors unless they can get at least 10,000 sweaty shoppers into the store at once. Unfortunately, we struck out here as well and had to have Mr. C take us back across town to Wal-Mart (passing Thumb Plaza on the way.)

Now this was our first family trip back to Wal-Mart since our second day in Shanghai – and it didn’t disappoint. We were able to find just the bicycle we were looking for – in fact it was an even better model than we had seen at Carrefour. This bike contained not only a basket on the front and a bell, but also a baby seat on the back for Juliet’s “childs”. We were all filled with glee – Juliet because she had an “amazing” bike, Annie because her child’s eyes were filled with happiness and Scott because there wasn’t another discount retailer within 60 minutes of the house.

There was just one small problem that we hadn’t really thought about. As we mentioned before, our car is the same used for taxi cabs here – a small Volkswagen that would fit in the “economy” category in the U.S. So after waiting in line for 20 minutes, Mr. Chen began trying to load the bike into the trunk. We were sitting in the backseat (he refuses to let us help him load anything) watching him struggle. We worried how we would get the bike home because it was obviously too big for the VW. Little did we know that Mr. Chen (The Chinese MacGyver) had a plan. We saw him unload a sack of items we had purchased into the trunk. He then rolled up the Wal-Mart sack and tied down the trunk hatch with the most inventive “Boy Scout knot” you’ve ever seen. Bewildered, Annie turned to Scott and matter-of-factly stated “our driver just jerry-rigged our trunk with not a rope, not a bungee cord…but a Wal-Mart sack.”

So there we were…a sophisticated American couple with our five year old darling…clunking down the road in our taxi cab with the famous yellow “rollback man” flapping in the breeze.