Escaping Chinese products

Twice a week, the “bread man” comes around our neighborhood with his little car filled with fresh baked bread, rolls, pizza, cookies. We usually buy rolls and cinammon bread and pizza. The kids love it. Jacob has come to call him “the bread master,” which is how he is now known. Last week, anna ran to me and said, “Bread man here, bread man here” and grabbed my hand to lead me outside, where I took this picture. After he left, Anna returned across the street to sweeping the sidewalk with her friend George. You got to love these old school brooms.

One nice thing about living here has been the lack of commercialism assaulting the kids. There are not 20 catalogues a week coming into the house. They don’t watch TV so they don’t see commercials. We don’t go to McDonald’s or Burger King, and whenever we do eventually venture into one of the places here, they don’t have all the tie in product giveaways anyhow. We don’t spend our weekends going to Costco (though I did discover Carrefour today, a great French supermarket/ department store, but that is another post for another day). So the kids don’t have all these desires ramped up. “I wan this! I want that!” We buy a lot less plastic.

It is rather ironic that we had to move to China to escape the lure of all the China-made crap merchandise. Jacob only wants “cards” which used to mean Yu-Gi-Oh and now means Pokemon. Eli only wants little Pokemon figures. Both are for sale in the clubhouse store for 3 quai. The cards filling your house endlessly are a lot less annoying at 40 cents than they are at 4 bucks.