How To Buy An XL T-Shirt In China

We hiked down from high up in the Longji Rice Paddy fields and caught two buses to Guilin. We had the whole day to waste ahead of our 17 hour train journey to Hong Kong.

Most of us went shopping and I restocked on a couple of T-shirts. Before I came away I bought one T-shirt for 40 UK pounds but in China I bought two T-shirts of similar quality for 2 UK pounds each... its mad!

Every shop seems to have more assistants than customers and every single one of them wants to help you, it's a little intimidating. I went to the chemist to pick up a tube of toothpaste, first of all I needed to get a piece of paper from one assistant before going to the till (about a metre away) to pay. By accident the once familiar "Crest" toothpaste I bought turned out to be in the less familiar flavour of green tea! Its actually pretty nice once you get used to it.

I noticed something else amusing when shopping for T-Shirts, every time I browsed them the assistant would try to help by pulling out the right size for me. On each occasion in completely different shops they selected a huge XL. Now I know I've been eating a lot of greasy Chinese food lately but I'm pretty sure I haven't put any weight on, with all the hiking, cycling and walking over the last three weeks. The XL was way too big so I handed it back and went for the medium which was a perfect fit. I think it must have something to do with the Chinese perception of Westerners because I'm miles from an XL!