MP3 player

I was thinking that a month without music might be kind of boring so I went and bought an mp3 player. But buying things in China, especially electronics, stresses me out. There is a great electronics mall-like place close by called zhong guan cun. I almost went the first month I was out here but since then have avoided it. The problem is a lot of the place looks like a free market and if you don't know the price of things here, you'll get screwed. The other part which looks more official still requires bargaining. And the place is so spread out you haven't a clue where to go for anything. To top it off, you never know if what you buy in China is real or not. so when making large electronic purchases you have to be very careful.

Lucikly mp3 players are small purchases. You can get a cheapo one for a few hundred kuai. So now I have my new small (in size and storage) 256MB mp3 player. The cheapest ones are Chinese brands, which of course means the manual is also in Chinese. Last night I managed to "read" the manual to figure out how to use my player. It mostly consisted of a lot of partial reading, guessing, poking at the buttons, and pattern matching words from the pictures in the manual with the words showing up in the player. I had to do the same thing with my phone but this time it worked out a bit better. Wow, the Chinese classes have paid off!