All the wine in China...

Wine is apparently not something that the Chinese are overly familiar with, as Chinese wine is terrible. The hotel had a tasting of American wines last night and all of the wines that they import are the wines that you buy off of the discount rack at the supermarket. Their top end was the Kendall-Jackson, you know those $10 bottles that you only open after you've already had two good bottles.... Tina tried to convince one of the importers that they need to import some better brands and wines and his answer was a quick "No, we import too many bottles now." Yeah, that's the way to grow your market...

So, we met another couple who have been living here for 6 months and yesterday the woman took Tina to the Metro and, of course, Tina came back loaded with all sorts of items. Wine, glasses, tea cups, notepads, everything we didn't realize we needed. But now we know where to get good meats and cheese, and the women that she went with have promised to show Tina all the places on the island to get great deals on everything one can imagine. Should be fun, it sounds like DVDs for the latest movies go for about 40-50 RNB, which is 6-7 dollars. I'm thinking that's what everyone gets for Christmas, DVDs with Chinese captioning...

As for the continuing apartment hunt, nothing new. We've been told that we can barter them all down, so maybe we try that with one of the really nice places that we've seen. Yvonne at the hotel has connected us with one of her friends and we are going to see his apartment tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully this is something that works for us.