This is not Gumby

The more jaded of you might say hey, wait a minute, that looks an awful lot like Gumby. But no that blue figure waving so happily is not Gumby and I'll have you know there are in fact several key differences. For one thing Gumby is a copyrighted cartoon character and our blue friend is the symbol the Shanghai expo. A big event, apparently, that is scheduled to take place in like two years. For another thing he's blue. Another difference is, well actually that's pretty much all the differences. Not that I would be so crass as to accuse the good people of the Shanghai expo of stealing Gumby entirely and trying to hide this by slapping a blue coat of paint on him, but if he has a talking horse as a friend I'm going to alert the authorities. I saw our good friend Cumby (Chinese Gumby) down near Wal-Mart. When I was in Wal-Mart today I started to notice some interesting differences between our America Wal-Mart and this one. Now a lot of these had not really occurred to me before for two reasons. One, I don't think I've ever been to a Wal-Mart in America. It's not that I look down on Wal-Mart thinking for example that it's for hicks or that any place that has its own brand of wine and shotguns shouldn't be allowed anywhere near me, it's mainly that I'm a Target person. Two, I go to Wal-Mart here mostly looking for American things so I don't notice the Chinese things as much.

The first thing that caught my attention was this alrge stack of powdered milk that for some reason was on steep discount. Interestingly despite the Chinese predilection for saving money I don't think I even saw a Chinese person look directly at it. The next odd thing I noticed was the behind the food counters where in America you might see cold cuts of vegetables, or since we are talking about Wal-Mart chicken fried stake, I instead saw pot after pot of I don't know what. I don't mean to say that I wasn't quite sure what was in them, I mean that if someone came up to me with a gun and told me he'd shoot me if I couldn't correctly identify even one of the food items, I would go ahead and tell him to shoot. Going farther into the Wal-Mart I saw a fruit that sort of looked like what I imagine a porcupine would look like if it were a fruit. It was greenish brown and seemed to be entirely made up of sharp corners. Finally, I think my favorite thing was the raw fish and squid that was just sitting in the middle of the isle on a display table with no bags or anything near it. I'm sure you're supposed to ask someone for help but I'm also pretty sure I could have gotten away with just shoving a fish in my little blue basket and flopping it down on the check out counter. Honestly I'm sort of curious what they would have done.