Chapter Fourty-Five: My American Shopping Spree (~jinghan)

Okay so far I’ve been in Davis only three days (it feels like a week) and I’ve bought:

• Shampoo, conditioner and toothpaste – do not under estimate the importance of this purchase, not only do I have clean hair now, but somehow after buying these things I suddenly knew where all the shops were in Davis and have been able to navigate my way by site. Magic items I tell you, magic.
• Hat – be careful of what you ask for. I spent all of last month moping about how I would miss summer, but I managed to catch the tail end of Northern California summer, and boy is it hot. It’s even hotter when you have to walk everywhere. Hence hat.
• UTP (internet) cable – having internet on my laptop again is like being able to breathe. Yes, okay, I am a dependent. But when you’re half the world away you kinda want to be able to talk to your friends on skype. And when you have no phone you at least want skype.
• Food – I missed various meals at the food hall because of sleeping in, plus I went out to dinner with Club International and met some other international students and chatted to them about what they were doing about living and communications.
• Mobile – (see  chapter fourty-four) also it was lucky that I got one yesterday because I was meeting my future flatmate today and – oh yeah, I didn’t tell you, UC Davis university campus is bigger than Davis down town (city centre) – so locating people is a little tricky with a phone, and possibly impossible without one. Plus $35/month gives me unlimited texting and data. What?
• Pillow, Bedding, home-wares, vacuum – my future flatmate is a really really nice american (mexican) girl and her. Parents are also amazingly nice, they drove her to Davis all the way from Berkley today to meet me, and then they drove us all the way to west Sacramento to buy stuff. So we pretty much went on a massive shopping spree in Walmart, Ikea and Ross. Walmart is like Bunnings, Kmart/Target/BigW and Safeway/Coles all put together. And for some reason I had never been to Ikea before (oh right: dad dislikes their furniture) so it was really cool to see their show room and then their massive warehouse. And Ross was a bit more under control, but it did have stacks of cheap homeware and clothing. Saw Hm… maybe I need to go back there when I start “running out of” clothing. So now I have a doona and a pillow >D this is also a big deal because I was wondering how I was going to buy stuff like this without a car. Did I mention that my flatmate and her parents are really really nice amazing people?