What's That? Wednesday 11-16-2011

Sorry, no earth-shattering post for today, but rather a commentary on life here in China.  I'm going to introduce to our "CVS room".  We have a spare bathroom behind our storage room, which is supposed to be for the Ayi (housekeeper) to use.  I don't really care which bathroom our Ayi uses, so when we toured the apartment I knew that I would use the room for extra storage.  Chinese apartments are not built with a lot of closet storage, so extra space is at a premium.  After I took over the Ayi bathroom, I started affectionately calling it our CVS room, as homage to the art of "CVS-ing" and stockpiling.

For those that are not familiar with CVS-ing, let me explain.  In the United States there is a pharmacy called CVS, which also sells bath & beauty products, toys, food, ecetera, but on a very small scale.  If you have a CVS card, you can earn Extra Care Bucks (or ECBs for those who are in the know) and earn "free" money on specific products that week to spend in the CVS store on your next purchase.  The whole point is to roll your ECBs forward and basically keep getting things for close to free, especially when you use coupons.  If a person is really good at "CVS-ing" he or she can build up quite a stockpile in their home of extra goods.  If you'd like a better explanation, go to the Money Saving Mom CVS tutorial.


I was not a hard-core CVS-er in the States, but once I knew we were moving to China, I did try to look for deals on hand soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes and other items I knew we would use during our over-seas assignment.  But, in the end, we ran out of time and then we did this...










...we made a huge trip to Sam's.  We were very fortunate to have two shipments of our things to China.  The first shipment was an air shipment, which was about a coat closet's worth of things (and no liquids).  The second shipment was a semi-trailer that held the rest of our things, including our stash of toilet paper, paper towels, hand soap, etc.






And now we go shopping in our "CVS" room...

And the overflow spills into the
storeroom next to the
Ayi bathroom

I've already started a list of some more things to bring back with us after our Christmas trip back to the States.  I guess when we empty out the CVS room it's time to move back to the States!