travelling day five - in which a trip across town over the yangtze river results in a lot of possible puppets

Today we were driven in a company car (one of my friend's friends husbands works for a company that has a car and a driver at our disposal) all across town to visit the fabric market.  I had a crazy idea that we would replicate Mr Orange for my puppetting workshop on Sunday with the teachers here.  We needed to find a tailor, fabric, foam, cord for the arms, eyes, wool, felt and glue.  And it was no quick trip to Spotlight.

After visiting several little stalls we managed to find all of the above, bargain for it and choose colours.  And we decided to make 24 new puppets.  They will be ready on Saturday - very excited!  This is a result of a conversation that went like this:
How many do you think we will need?
Maybe 6
Well if we are going to make 6 we might as well get ten
ok then, but I want to take some back to Australia, so let's get 20
4
ok so it's 24 puppets
yep
and we need 8 different colours of fabric (one metre makes 3 puppets)

The fabric market was all that a great Asian market should be - confusing, random and unplanned with some brilliant stuff hiding on the bottom shelf.  I am sure the shop owners thought we were a bit nuts.  The puppets will work out costing about $7-8 dollars each.

Hence the decision to get 24.

Chris had his shopping face on today.  He can play cricket in the sun in a field for 8 hours, and can shop for about an hour before shopping face appears.  But he was very supportive and took the girls for an icecream while important fabric decisions were made.

Chris' cultural tip: It's all in the name
After our trip to the fabric market (and I think I am doing well to have persevered where many men would not have even dared to tread), we went to a restaurant fondly called "Greasy Joe's" by the fellow-foreigners we were lunching with.  More culinary delights, but what stuck me there was the label of the Pepsi bottle.  To me it is a perfect picture of modern China.

I'll let you interpret that yourself, but it did strike up a conversation about the translation of its name.  When Pepsi's name is cleverly rendered into similar sounding Chinese characters it is read "100 ways to good luck".  With a fascination on luck in this culture it is apparently having a positive effect on sales.  Apparently people prefer the taste of Coke, but are more likely to buy Pepsi because it may bring you good luck.  Coke's has worked out its characters to mean "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice".  In the growing market that is China, the cola wars are being fought not just in advertising, but over names.  Pepsi seems to be winning that battle at the moment.  And Pepsi's current translation is much better than the rumoured confusion with past Pepsi campaigns in China where "Come alive! You're in the Pepsi generation" was possibly mistranslated as "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead"!  Now I certainly don't want that from my cola drink.  It just goes to show that it's all in the name.