It’s deceptively shiny and new and almost Western here (and by Western, I mean, it’s all about the shiny, the new, the casually bilingual, the commercial and the branded). We are waiting for our flight to Guilin at the Hongqiao airport and a few cracks in the veneer have revealed themselves, as they tend to do at regular intervals. We first stopped at the Starbucks near the gate for my grande cappuccino (which was purchased entirely in English despite my efforts to do otherwise). Do you know what you can get at a Starbucks here, besides a lovely lemon tart or a caesar salad wrap?
You can get a lovely cuttlefish cheese bread.
You can also get shiny, gelatinous Dragon Dumplings for the upcoming Dragon Boat Festival in June.
You can also haul your grande cappuccino into the less crowded Acting Cafe and face no objection from the staff when you decide to indulge in a morning speedball involving Outside Drinks (try that in Canada, I dare you).
On a non-consumptive note, one I’ll expand on later, once I’ve got the photographic evidence, is the slight shift in gender delineation boundaries. I dare you to find a boy in North America willing to wear a cute bunny backpack in public. I should note that the security guards in the metro all wear soft rosy pink shirts. Without any sense of irony or fear for their masculinity.
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