F is for fortunate

A few days ago while in Suzhou, Shohei, Angela and I made our way to Walking Street for our favourite ma la tang. It's good, cheap and non-diarrhea-causing spicy soup with whatever you choose to have in it. So what they have is a bunch of freezers with food on sticks like crabsticks, mushrooms, intestines, meat and other food that isn't on a stick like vegetables, silky tofu (how one would have that on a stick, I'd like to know) and noodles. 

By cheap, anyway, I mean that it would cost 10-15RMB for a bowl, depending on how much you'd like to stuff yourself. That makes it relatively cheap considering that when we eat out in China we always head to restaurants. Some paranoia we have (passed on from parents) about eating street food, getting food poisoning and, I don't know, have it be fatal. 

So about three quarters into slurping up our noodles we notice a man who's standing about 6 meters away, looking at us. He stopped looking after awhile, only to keep glancing back at us. 10 mins later when we give up trying to stuff ourselves and sit around doing what teenagers do, which is to, y'know, chill, he starts walking over. That creeped us out a tad bit and we decided to head off. As we were walking off, we saw him pick up Angela's spoon and bowl and carry that over to another table, sit down and eat. 

Okay yes, we were shocked, freaked and somewhat traumatised. But that scene stuck with me and it made me pretty sad. A bowl of noodles which we consider rather cheap - he can't afford. That made me think about all the "I can't be bothered to walk that 1km, imma take a taxi", "Mom but this is only 79rmb", "Mom I need another pair of jeans because this is different from my other 10 pairs", "Yeah I need a new sweater because my 30 others are so boring and I've worn them over and over the past 3 years" moments. (Yes I'm materialistic and a shopaholic, get over it.)

There always will be some who are richer and others who are poorer and the idealistic but impossible mission to rescue the whole world out of poverty (bell curve, statistics, 'nuff said), which makes it all the more important to be thankful for and cherish what we have, even if that happens once in awhile.

But that's not to say I don't have a massive list of things I want/"need". If you're feeling rich and charitable, drop me an email and I'll send you that list.