However, I eventually left Qingdao anyways, for several reasons, the primary one being that I'd completely lost patience with people in China, from the staff at the latest language school where I was teaching, to the old people staring at me hatefully, to the taxi drivers driving very slowly to increase their fares, and the lights at intersections all being set to make traffic stop for a full two minutes, even if they were only two blocks apart. I lost patient with shopkeepers and vendors all trying to charge me more money because I was foreigner, and not even being able to take advantage of sales at the local supermarket because they'd always ring my purchases up at full price because I was a foreigner.
Not that Ulaanbaatar is any better; in fact, in some ways, it's worse. I went shopping at the largest market yesterday to find shoes. The black market is a huge outdoor market that has plastic sheets for roofs over stalls. It was raining off and on and I was stepping carefully in the mud to stay out of puddles. There were hundreds and hundreds of shoe stalls, but I didn't like the styles for women's shoes and most of them were too narrow for the base of my foot, so I looked and I looked and I looked. Finally at the end I bought a pair of black shoes that look like what a witch would wear, and a pair of Adidas for running.
