A very Starbucks Christmas to you
Without Thanksgiving to use as a point of outrage for commercial Christmas decorations put out too early, I can just enjoy what Christmas we can get here in China, whenever it comes.
Starbucks made good on theirwarning countdown. It's not quite the abundance I remember from Shenzhen Starbucks, but I think it is in keeping with the global campaign.
By the way, since we are in between soccer seasons, I've been down to one (sometimes two) trips to Starbucks a week. Are you amazed at how well I'm holding up? If you are, you obviously don't follow me on twitter where I might tend to vent a little bit, or at least work myself up into an anxious frenzy a full twenty-four hours before I plan to hit Starbucks.
Starbucks made good on their
By the way, since we are in between soccer seasons, I've been down to one (sometimes two) trips to Starbucks a week. Are you amazed at how well I'm holding up? If you are, you obviously don't follow me on twitter where I might tend to vent a little bit, or at least work myself up into an anxious frenzy a full twenty-four hours before I plan to hit Starbucks.
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On the occasions when we do drop in to our local Starbucks franchise to pick up ground coffee, we also pick up their *spent* coffee grounds -- collected en masse in hygienic plastic tubs -- to use around our acid-loving azaleas. Have you ever seen Chinese establishments cooperate with their clientele in this fashion? When we lived in West Germany, the plant's cafeteria staff collected all the daily slops for a colleague to take home to feed to her father-in-law's pigs on his smallholding. I find this sort of subsidiarity in social cooperation intriguing and was wondering if it presupposes a Western laisse faire attitude to flourish? Perhaps there's not much call for zero-cost fertilizer if folks don't have their own yards. I've even heard that waste coffee grounds can be used to make those fake-log paraffin fuel bars that burn in fireplaces all over suburbia. With fuel a premium in urban areas of China, is there any evidence of that sort of innovation taking place?
p.s. I discovered a way to while away a rainy day online this week focusing on the intangible assets of Asian culture like silk, paper and ceramics expressed in three distinct ways, Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
http://www.dramafever.com/drama/133/1/Cultural_Trilogy/
that may be fun for you and yours.
Happy Thanksgiving
(hubby and I dined on various vegetarian bean curries and Tandoori Turkey -- yup the whole carbon-crusted crimson bird carved on the steam table in at our local Indian lunch buffet -- since we had to cancel a planned trip South to family at short notice and had no food in)
One thing that is different is I see people take the garbage from the stores. They's have a spot in an alley or curb where they go through the waste to pull out all the recyclables, a common way to earn money here. They don't do it as a service to Starbucks, but as independent garbage collectors.