When you're out alone
It could be the weirdest day to see me out alone on the street. It was time for a change since nobody else really had the same interest and I had to learn to do some self entertainment.
I landed at the designated place - the big Popular shop at Chinatown.
Having a fetish for writing pads with good design, I siege at that section. I browsed through almost all the different designs, including the inner parts and they seemed to be persuading me to bring them home. On the second thought, I knew that I wouldn't bear to use them, therefore I shouldn't let them turn yellowish at my house.
I came across some 26-rings folders with the refills of blank papers below the shelf. I wondered how long could the file last since my plan was to use it as my note book. And since I was mainly using it for draft work, I didn't need such nice papers.
I looked at the pencils, colour pencils, crayons and drawing papers, I really wished I could spend some time drawing and discover any potential.
I stopped by the CD section, peeped at the CD casings, but the purchase wasn't my problem. It wasn't my responsible to burn CDs for friends and provide them the nice casings. I shouldn't have thought about buying them in the first place.
I approached the keyboard section. There were multimedia keyboards of various brands. I needed one to replace my old one which I had to press the "N" key so hard each time; but most of the time I probably had to use the "backspace" to redo the typing. However, none of them interested me. None of them also worth more than the one my brother had for himself.
Some light sticks and glow in the dark items caught my eyes. Things were always beautiful but not the price.
I found a laptop casing, which I wanted to buy since long ago. But I didn't know the size of my laptop anymore; I wasn't using it as often, not wanting to torture it with the long hours of usage time. The incurable stains and scratches on the top made me wonder if it still worth to spend the big sum of money on a casing.
I saw some pencil casings, I remembered some time back I was going to get one, however, I couldn't remember what was it for and I currently no longer required one.
I walked the whole stationary section one round again, and then proceeded to the dictionary section.
At first I was just trying to see if they still sell an old brand of Chinese dictionary with the "四角号码" searching method. I was distracted by some English to Chinese and Chinese to English translation dictionaries; I had a tiny English to Chinese one, but not both. I often used the internet to do the translation for me but it couldn't be possible when I was out; but if I wanted to get a travel one, it was too small to contain enough contents.
I was fascinated by some Chinese Proverb and Idiom dictionaries; they made me miss the period of time when my Chinese was of a better standard. I wanted to get them but the price of each was around thirty bucks.
I grabbed a "康熙字典" (Kanghsi - historical China's emperor) but couldn't understand what it was about. Then, some weird noise seriously annoyed me. It took me some time to realise it was from an old man and I wondered was he sick or if he was doing it on purpose. As the noise volume increased, I realised he was burping.
I moved on to the other reading sections, glancing at the Romance of the three Kingdoms books. There was one which I could read and understand so easily and the price was less than eight bucks, but the quality of paper was lousy. I wondered if I had the need to buy one since I didn't have the time to read.
I spotted another one each highlighted some of the interesting facts of the heroes. Finally my legs could no longer take me on and I sat down like most of the people around were doing, reading through one of the chapters before I left the section.
I glanced through a book which teaches how to play "围棋" (a type of Chinese chess), managed to roughly know how to play it. I had a quick stop at the books of design and then paper folding.
It was eight and I was hungry. I walked off from my little paradise, on the dark street alone. It was my Deepawali.
Labels: shopping
... Skai (Kailun) dreams @ 3:47 PM
