Eggs: Eggs are sold by weight and they are sold in plastic bags, as opposed to cartons that cradle every little egg. You can buy them either in the shell or naked. There is even a hook on the back of shopping carts made to hang delicate bags full of eggs. We walk home from the store very carefully.

Weights and Measures: Most every food stuff is sold by the “jin”, the equivalent of one-half kilogram, or a little more than one pound. When you ask how much apples cost, the apple merchant will tell you how much for one jin. This took us a little while to figure out, and we made several haggling errors along the way. We still haven’t learned how to ask for fractions of a jin, so sometimes we find ourselves buying too much. Have you ever tried using a pound of cilantro in three days? Salsa, salsa, salsa!

Farmers’ Markets: They are everywhere. We buy all of our produce direct from the source. At least we think so. It is possible our fruit may change hands a few times before it reaches us, but it never passes through the Del Monte sticker machine. There are two ways to buy duck at the farmers’ market, and one of them quacks.

Milk: China is not traditionally a dairy-consuming country. Stuff they call Chinese cheese is actually stinky tofu, tofu that has been inoculated with some of the same bacterial strains found in parmesan and epoisses. So, we were surprised to discover the amount of dairy consumed by our students. There is a huge milk and yogurt aisle at the school store. Mostly, they drink Ultra-Heat-Treated milk, the kind that can be stored for months, unrefrigerated, as long as it is unopened. But that not the kind of milk that we buy. We buy milk from the milk maid, who sells raw, unpasteurized milk from an urn. She has a motorcycle with a side car, which is where is carries the milk. She decants it into plastic bags. We take it home and boil it. It is the best milk ever!

Booze: The local fire water is called baijiu. Some phrase books will describe it as wine. In fact, it is anything but. It’s a white liquor. Most of it is made from sorghum, some of it is made from rice. The strongest variety we have seen (not yet tasted, mind you) is 144 proof. We like to mix the 80 proof baijiu. The most expensive brands taste like rancid flowers, so we don’t buy them. Instead, we buy street hooch. Our local bootlegger (for lack of a better term) sells spirits out of hundred gallon pots. We pay 1.5 RMB (about US$0.37) for a half liter. It is a little cheaper than bottled water.

Laundry: We don’t have our own washing machine, but there are lots of them in our hotel. These are very different from the washing machines in the US. There are two different top loading receptacles in each machine. One is the washer, and one is the spinner. When you do your laundry, you have to first fill the washer with water from a spigot. If you walk away during this important first step, the washing machine will overflow. We live directly below the laundry room, so we feel very strongly that attention should be paid. The valve that controls the water in the washing machine is connected to the cold water feed of the building. If you wish to wash with hot water, you need to fill a bucket with hot water from your water heater (to be described later) and carry it up the stairs to the laundry room. To wash a medium sized load, you need to do this about three times. We don’t bother. Cold water is fine. Add the clothes, add the water, add the detergent, and set the timer for fifteen minutes or less. Then you need to return to the machine, manually open the drain, and let the soapy water run out. Rinse and repeat. Then you untangle your knotted clothes and put them into the spinner. There are no electric dryers on campus, but the climate in Jinzhou is so dry that most clothes are dry after two hours on the line.

Raw fruits and veggies: We bleach them. We have a bucket in our cupboard that we keep filled with one half gallon of water and a tablespoon of bleach. We dip raw foods in the bleach solution, then rinse them thoroughly. It’s no fun, but neither is hepatitis.

Donkey: In our town, we see donkeys pulling carts down major streets. After the donkeys are retired, we see their remains in the farmers’ markets. We once made donkey dumplings. Emily doesn’t like the taste of donkey. She finds it musty. Josh doesn’t mind it. He compares it to mutton.

Other exotic meats: You can get silk worms, all manner of shellfish, and lots of things that are still wriggling when you buy them. We have also seen snake whiskey in a few restaurants.

DVDs: We have talked a little about this before. We buy the pirated kind. They are the only kind available. We have found one vendor who reliably sells us good, quality bootlegs, and not the hand-held camera kind. Each disc costs 5 kuai, about US$0.60. And they have something for everyone. They have the big-budget blockbusters, oldies and goodies from the Hollywood cannon, and an eclectic bunch of art-house films. We have bought a documentary about a flock of wild parrots in San Francisco and a drama from Palestine about suicide bombers. What more could you want?