How to procure a couch in China

As I sit on my lovely, albeit not as soft as desired, newly procured couch, I recall the occurrences of my last two days.

Said couch

One would normally think that buying a couch would be relatively simple. I mean if you wanted a lightly used cheap one, you could look on craigslist or drive around town in your car scavengering the alleys. Or if you wanted a new one you could choose one of the many furniture stores around such as Value Shitty Furniture, uummm I mean Value City Furniture (hehe) or go higher end with Luxury Furniture and Lighting (Really ppl? Selling luxury furniture and that's the best name you can come up with?!). You're couch shopping experience would consist of going to the store, telling the sales person what you want, giving your address and then coughing up an arm and a leg or just a few bucks, depends on which store you went to of course, and then sitting around Indian style on your floor waiting for the thing to be delivered. And that would be it. A child could do it!

Can you spot our couch?

However, my experience was slightly different. The day started with my mother and I heading out to the whole sale fabric store. Seems like a logical start to my couch story, right? Well the fabric store did not have our desired fabric, lace, so we just for kicks walked up this escalator that hasn't been used for years to the second story, still holding on to our hopes for Chinese lace. Well, no dice on the lace, however, we did stumble upon a whole room full of furniture! Do the Chinese mean to hide such goods from us Laowais or is this really where a furniture store should be located according their ultra logical thinking?

Either way, after making a quick loop around, we found our victim; the loudest, smallest couch in the entire room that wasn't a ridiculous price. And now the fun begins. We got the price relatively easily but the delivery aspect was going to take a bit longer.

Since arriving in China, I have taken to carrying around a little red notebook in my purse to write down menu items that we like to eat in Hansi, pinyin and our own little description. So I take out my little book and start very kindergarden-ly drawing a picture of a couch and a house and then an arrow connecting the two with a question mark (can anyone guess what I'm asking with my drawing!!??). The Chinese lady who owned the couch was not having it or even attempting to understand me. Frustrated, we were about to walk away, when I remembered I have a very useful and awesome friend who speaks both English and Chinese, AND is only a phone call away (Alexix I love you!). Well I don't want to bore you but let me tell you what went down in these phone calls (there were three of them!). I would call Alexis and tell her my situation, she would them tell her coworker (who is a Chinese native), who would them talk to the shop lady. After that, the coworker would tell Alexis and Alexis would tell me. It's was a real life version of telephone! Well after three such phone calls we went from having to go down stairs and find our own guy to deliver the couch, to having the shop lady deliver the couch to us for free by the next day before10:30am. I was not part of the conversation so I have no idea how this change came to be, but I was too happy to care! I had just gotten a couch and somehow managed to get free delivery! This is what Charlie Sheen would call "winning". :)

Priceless

So the next day, at 10:30 on the button, my phone rings and I pick up my phone to hear the shop lady (I recognized her voice) screaming, well that's what it sounded like, at me in Chinese (doesn't she know by now I don't speak Chinese?). After saying yes and thank you over and over to her in Chinese, I just hung up the phone. I mean I obviously have no idea what she is saying! Brandon, Mom, and I ran down stairs and are looking around for a delivery truck to no avail. We're standing there looking and looking and then all of a sudden my Mom points to the left... And there is a little old lady with the biggest grin on her face on her adult tricycle pulling our couch. *Dramatic Pause* The Chinese deliver furniture on tricycles! Priceless moment. Oh, I also want to point out that the store was 10km away! That's not particularly a short distance via tricycle. Additionally, I am sad to report I did not have my camera on me since I had been distracted by the Chinese yelling on the phone, but I found this picture instead. It's pretty representative of what went on with our little old lady and her tricycle.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of how I got a couch in China.


Summary for those who don't want to read the whole post:
1. Go somewhere where no one in their right mind would expect to find a couch
2. Don't bother drawing pictures, they can't read those here
3. Always have a bilingual friend at your finger tips
4. If they say they don't deliver, just keep asking the same question in as many different ways as you can come up with until you get what you want (free delivery duh!)
5. Pay for your couch and go home to wait for it
6. Go pick up your couch from the old lady delivering your couch via tricycle.