They say love can cross language barriers. I don’t know about love but you know what else can cross language barriers? Shopping. Yes! I have on this day been initiated into the world of ‘Taobao’. It was quite a feat to get entry I should say, I mean enter into using it. Firstly I needed an Alipay account. Which is another story, and which is why it has taken me awhile to get here. Taobao is a Chinese site with no English language option but when you open the browser on your PC in Google Chrome, you can use the built-in Translate feature. It translates the site into English but not perfectly obviously. It is a bit funny to find the word ‘baby’ all over the site for ‘product’. More funny that I am now thinking of buying this baby or that baby… hehe. Then it happens that certain things like tracking your package and so on works better on the phone app. But there is no way to get the app to translate into English. The app itself seems to be much better designed and configured to browse products – or babies! – but you have to make sense of it in Chinese. It’s not that hard to figure out  that you are looking at a purse or a dress or a bag of course… and even the women demo’ing some of this stuff in Chinese can be understood to an extent if you watch their posing and gesturing. That’s what I mean. Not having a word of Chinese has not stopped me from making it into Taobao. I managed to buy a few things today with the help of a Chinese colleague in this first instance. I couldn’t help telling him that I can see myself getting progressively poorer, now that I am onto this ;)