The dry cleaner and spring roll wraps

Over the road from Alex’s house is the dry cleaner.  He has a little shop the size of a small single garage, with all the cleaned clothes hanging in the ceiling. He also does alterations, I have seen him using his sewing machine and sewing by hand. He has quite a good little business going.

He also has two children, a son about ten years old and a daughter I met yesterday. She is sixteen years old and speaks excellent English. She is obviously a very studious girl, she taught herself a lot of English even before she started English lessons at school three years go. I gave her an English name of Lyn, her Chinese name being Lin Bi Qing.

But the most fascinating thing about this man is the iron he uses to iron the clothes. He is a fastidious man, the little shop front is always spotless and when he irons clothes he is likewise very fussy about the end result.

He uses an iron like no other. Three shops down there is the little family who make spring roll wraps. They use round compressed pieces of coke to give heat and they cook on a cooktop that is attached.

 

This family makes around 400 spring roll wraps an hour, I have stood for ages, watching and calculating. They have customers rolling up all the time and leaving with bags of these wraps, made fresh each day. Because I can see all this from the lounge window I am inclined to spend some time each day watching this little corner of the world in action.

The drycleaner goes to the spring roll people and collects the ones they are discarding, they are mostly spent fuel, but for him they still have enough heat for his purposes. He cooks on the same drum using this heat source, and, wonder of wonders, this also fuels his iron.

I don’t quite know how to describe his iron, but I will try. The picture may make things a little clearer. On top of the drum sits a round cylinder. This cylinder is really a device for compressing hot air. It has a pressure gauge of some sort on it. This has a hose that goes to his iron. He is able to control the heat somehow but if the heat from the coke is not enough, he has to set the fire burning higher until the steam builds up again.

The gray can with the blue hose is what builts up pressure and heat and he uses this to feed his iron hot air and hot water.

 

With this iron, he has the ability to set up some sort of pressure on the table he irons on, so that the clothes are sucked down onto the ironing surface. It is all governed by some pressure pedals he uses. I don’t know how long he has been using this, but it is a fascinating piece of equipment. I know one or two people back home or are iron-aholics, I don’t think they would be quite so inclined if they used this contraption.

Yesterday I wandered further afield. This is a market area, full of sort of wholesale places, so it is a combination of many places around old China. In the newer areas, these places don’t exist, it’s the Walmarts and Auchan’s of this world that are taking over. But here, you still go and buy an onion, and pick your fish out of a basin, and choose a couple of oranges for the day, and go back and do it all again tomorrow.

Here is a picture of the butcher, pork out for sale.

In this market area I found a book shop, that may or may not be a library, I’m not sure. There was a shop selling lovely calligraphy and large Chinese looking paintings, done by the proprietor.  There are tea houses, and dentists, stalls selling bra’s in every shape, size and colour, and some of the most beautiful blankets you will ever see. There are also bags of dried mushrooms, little tiny dried fish, and nuts, dates, legumes, and every sort of snack imaginable. Another kind of shop that surprised me, were the many embroidery shops locally, often selling huge embroidery kits with the finished pictures being about 2 metres by 1 meter.

There are also some interesting little flower shops, where I bought an orchid, and pet shops that you don’t want to know about. Being the only foreigner in this whole area I am constantly stared at, but I just grin at them all, ni hao them all, and pretend I don’t exist. I did buy a couple of nice tops though; shopping is not hard even though my Chinese is minimal.

Considering we are still house sitting and likely to be for a while yet I am having a huge internal struggle. I have found some curtains I am coveting big-time. They have the most beautiful curtains here, cheap as chips and just lovely. I want to buy some and send them home for the time we settle down. I will never get anything like this in Aussie, and for this price, around $3 per meter, will never get anything like this price either. I am still struggling with this one. I can post them home, they won’t be too heavy, it’s just that they will sit in a box for another  year or two till I have my own place again. What to do! What to do!