There are no Starbucks outlets in Jinzhou. If they find out about this in Seattle they will probably build one right next to the Museum of the People’s Revolution. Maybe even inside the museum. They did, after all, manage to build a Starbucks inside the Forbidden City.

Among the chain stores that we do have here in Jinzhou are KFC, and a whole assortment of sports-wear shops. Yesterday Josh and I took a tour of these stores, hoping to find him a pair of running shoes.
What an ordeal! It was almost impossible for us to find the equivalent of American size 11. There was nothing that big in the Adidas store, or in the Nike store. Josh started to feel like a freakish, American monster. A woman at Adidas spoke English pretty well, and actually intercepted us as we were leaving Nike. She took us to the Converse store several blocks away, because she thought they would have larger sizes there. They didn’t, but we were still very impressed by how helpful she was. I hope this post doesn’t travel around the world, and end up getting her fired for brand-disloyalty.

We had almost given up hope, but we decided to try one more place, a Chinese store called X-tep. Success! They had his size, and they didn’t even think it was a big deal. The shoes look pretty cool, just like American sneakers. We will wait to see how well they hold up.

I was a little surprised at how much trouble we had to go through to find these shoes. Chinese people are not really short anymore. The government has been pushing milk, and pushing it hard. There are adds all over the place featuring cute chicks drinking milk. The results are obvious. The young people in my classes are probably taller than the average Spaniard or Frenchman. Maybe the foreign brands are only selling small sizes here because they think the Chinese are small people. The local companies know that they have a big and tall market, so they are ahead of the curve.