You'll Figure It Out... Maybe.

After getting our cell phones and things set up the single thing that has made the transition to China life somewhat smooth is getting TaoBao setup. TaoBao is basically Amazon in China, except there is no free 2 day delivery with a "Prime" subscription that I know of. Even though the app is all in Chinese they use a bunch of handy pictograms/icons that make it pretty easy to get around. AND... you can search in English and generally get decent results.

So, I've ordered a lot of stuff. More than I ever would off of Amazon just because even the big stores don't necessarily have what I (as an expat) am looking for. For instance, we needed a dish drainer for drying our dishes after washing. While technically we already have one of these (it's a lower cabinet in our kitchen that slides out and has a dish rack) it just feels wrong to place a bunch of moist dishes in a closed cupboard to dry. In an already humid region to boot.

So, I ordered one on TaoBao that looked about right. I'll maybe go into detail on this more in another post but the other great thing about TaoBao is the shipment system here in China never seems to stop. I get packages on all weekend long, even on Sunday. It makes the shipping seem faster even if it takes 4-5 days to get to me.

Anyway, back to the point. Once I got my dish rack and unpacked it from the box I had a bunch of parts and... a little piece of paper that was definitely not instructions, even if it was in Chinese. It looked like this:

It's basically a little puzzle to solve. Luckily this one wasn't too bad. My little computer desk I ordered was the same way (no instructions) except it was orders of magnitudes more comical, with at least 50 different pieces and about 100 screws. Luckily, I only wanted the desk portion and had no interest in the sliding keyboard tray that (I think) was a part of it. I was able to get it together and it's what I'm writing this post on now ;)

Not too bad, right?

Last, another cool thing about TaoBao is sometimes you'll be surprised by extras. For instance when I ordered my monitor they also sent me the keyboard below.

It actually types pretty smoothly, but there is no way I'm going to try and switch my command keys at this point. I might as well switch to Dvorak! Or not. Haha. On that note I'll never forget having a coworker of mine helping me with some code and trying to type something on my computer and he couldn't do it because he was so used to his Dvorak layout. Just because you read about it in Tools of Titans doesn't mean it's a good idea! Nothing against Matt in any way as he is amazing :)