血拼 (Shopping)

Back to Chinese for one post! Just learned this word watching a Chinese movie called "Bride Wars" (新娘大作战) and is one of those "English-sound Chinese words," where Chinese kanji are used for their sound, not their meaning, to form an English word, here the 2 words would normally mean "blood bath" or "bloody conflict," but instead their sounds create "shopping." Pretty funny considering many people (myself definitely included!) probably feel this way, where shopping is just a slow bleed from many cuts of swiping the credit card and spending money. Every time I go shopping I have to ready myself to absorb minor cuts to my wallet and metaphorical financial well-being, and everything I pull out my credit card, I feel the money being sucked out of my bank account or like someone cutting my hands to pry cash out. It's not a great feeling. 


Luckily, MJ is an EXCELLENT shopper and gets great deals. I used to always wonder if I was getting bled out unnecessarily and being "slaughtered" for the lack of a better term by the commercial stores and tricked by the pushy salespeople (by the way, July 4th weekend apparently is a big shopping holiday and salespeople we met with were in FULL pushy mode to get their commissions), but MJ knows all the tricks of false discounts, which stores offer a student discount, return policies, etc., so that we can have a fighting chance of getting a good deal. It's like going to Vegas and not just expecting to lose money at the tables anymore, I have a blackjack expert telling me when to stay or double down. 

Shopping for a suit is REALLY difficult. Everything looks the same! Grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, light grey.......how do people differentiate the colors? And the size of the suit, what happens if you're between a 38 and a 40 and there's no 39 sizes? I would suggest bringing a white dress shirt to wear underneath the suit to get the full trying-on experience, by the way. I didn't know there was such a thing as having to "open up a fitting room," which I was pretty sure was a ploy to get you to feel indebted to the salesperson in some way like "oh gotta buy something now, he/she was so nice!" Personally, there was nothing as gratifying as getting done with the suits, leaving them in the fitting room, and tiptoeing past the salesperson who helped us and silently end the relationship. That must be how the guys who just break up with girls via silence and unresponsiveness feel. Clean break. 

There's a lot of Chinese words that were created just for their sounds to combine together to form an English word, the funniest of which I think is 补肥, which means (regain the fat), but also phonetically sounds like "buffet," and it's true, at buffets you can easily regain fat. NOT what MJ and I want for now. It's a brussel sprouts and salad kind of season for us, especially summer when people don't get that rain-hungry or cold-hungry (when you get that extra hunger from the weather). It also makes shopping 血拼 for clothes harder if we gain too much weight! 

Fantasize on, 

Robert Yan