Re: Apartment: Mingmei & Donna
Oh! That's what she meant. Mingmei nodded in understanding, pondering a bit as she thought about it. "Well, hospitals for one. It's so strange to a Chinese person to come into a hospital to see that everything is white. You see, white is the color of death for us, so it was a bit scary to walk into a hospital the first time and to see everything white and all. I didn't really understand it at first until a friend explained to me that white doesn't mean the same thing here." She pondered a bit more, trying to think up other things that had been strange. "Umm...the fact that all the furniture in a room is usually facing a television is a bit weird. We still believe in feng shui, to be honest, and try to move things around the room so that they give the best karma to everyone involved."
Mingmei did laugh a tiny bit at Donna's perplexed look as she tried to understand the concept of bargaining. "Hmm. How to explain it? It's like this. Basically, you are saying that you have so much money if you buy stuff at the original value that what you are buying from them has very little worth to you. I know it's confusing. By lowering the price, it means that you value the object enough that you're willing to try to get a good deal for it instead of taking it for face value. It's rude not to because they put a lot of work into it and if you're willing to just walk in and buy it without the conversation, then it's sometimes not worth it. They might get a chance to really talk about their product too. Old fashioned networking before facebook and all."
"Excellent!" Once she got things going on the screen, Mingmei started plugging in her notes and putting code into the right places. She was by no means a complete genius at it, but she did enjoy programming and understanding how things worked. Her fingers flew across the keyboard naturally as she put in the data, trying to picture what the end product would look like even as she put in the new data.