What's in your buckets, ma'am?

New opportunities present themselves daily here, and I take 'em! For example, I saw a woman calling something something out, as vendors sometimes do here in China. She was on the street between our long row of apartment buildings and the row on the other side of the street. I thought she might be the person to whom we could sell our mountain of recyclables that's piled up outside our kitchen window on the ledge. That mountain has been getting on my nerves!

The woman spoke a very broad Sichuan dialect. Her "r" sound was heavily rolled, her "eh" sound more like "ay." Through the accent, I couldn't tell what exactly she had, but I'd buy it, I said. Or maybe I said I'd sell it to her, as the words for "buy" and "sell" are the same, except the all-important differences in tone that I still don't remember.

She was carrying two silver lidded buckets, connected on either side of her shoulders via a long pole. To one bucket was tied a large bag full of empty plastic jars of varying shapes (hence I thought we could sell our empty recyclables to her).

Anyway, we buzzed the bell to our house so I could I ask Jiang Ayi, the woman who helps us everyday, to corroborate that we needed whatever it was she had to sell us. After they spoke, Jiang Ayi said, basically, "Uh, yes, a little."

I then got the bright idea to look in the buckets. It was honey! Heck, yes, I'd buy honey from her, even though we still had some.

We went up the stairs, and Jiang Ayi met us on the first landing, which is where the photos were taken.

It was great fun watching Jiang Ayi dip her finger right into the bucket and deeming it delicious. It was intense to see one of my young-grandmother-type neighbors walk down the stairs and hiss, "How much? 10 kuai per jin (a half-kilo)? That is too expensive! Should be 5!" A bunch of haggling - on my behalf, I guess - occurred, with the neighbor lady still muttering and shaking her head as she continued down the stairs. Ending price: 8 kuai per jin. For a large-ish container, I paid 24 kuai, or about 3 1/2 dollars.

The post-script to this story is that at Zekey's birthday party the next day, a couple was telling us that there's fresh honey available at a field just a few blocks away. Dave has, in fact, biked by that field and seen the bees buzzing around (we acquired a bike last week, more on that later). We agreed that would be the ultimate way to purchase the best honey. I asked how much they paid for their honey: 7 kuai!

I can never get a price as low as the Chinese, but oh well! I paid for the novelty of the experience of buying honey in my stairwell from a woman walking around with buckets of it. All in Chinese, spur-of-the-moment, and another mini-adventure in China.