Winning at Charades

Its so much easier if you can go into a shop, see what you want, and pick it up and take it to the checkout to purchase it. But here sometimes the simplest of things are not apparent in the big shops, the ones with checkouts.

I have a sewing machine - because being able to sew up a little something, to make or to fix something, has always been part of me, part of who I am and what I do, and I found it very frustrating when I couldn't. Sure, there are lots of little people out there on street corners and in alleys, eager to do my bidding for very little cost on their little treadley machines. But then I have to explain what it is I want, and sometimes I just want to try this or that.

When I came to do my first little sewing task on my new machine it was very difficult because I had forgotten to buy any dress-makers' pins. That, I soon realised, was because I had not seen any in the shops. You can get needles, though, so I completed the task with needles clumsily holding my seams together.

Elastic. I could really do with some of that, it has so many uses. But I hadn't been able to find any of that either. Oh, for a "Spotlight" store! I looked up the Chinese word for 'elastic', and promptly forgot it, and wandered past the big fabric warehouse place in Wuxi. There are lots of little shops all kind of jammed together, and the ones on the outside have a little glass counter with a few small reels of thread and packets of needles.

There was a friendly looking lady at one of these counters, and very eager to sell me something. Everything I looked vaguely towards she dragged out and laid hopefully on the counter. Peter made "stretchy" motions with his hands, and some fine elastic appeared. I tried "bigger/wider" with my hands and the type I needed also appeared from somewhere deep down behind the counter. So we tried for "pins", but kept coming up with needles. I grabbed a piece of paper and drew a pin. The lady and her companion looked a little startled at first, and a discussion between them ensued. Finally the light-bulb came on and they brought out a packet of pins.

A thousand pins. Do you buy them by the "jin" (half kilo) or by 20's or what? She seemed reluctant to break open the packet, so in the end I bought the lot.