Saturday, April 03, 2004

Y'all ready for this?

sassy me

Join me as I swap my too-small load of bra for some new bra, won't you? (Disclaimer: You know how you can have a ball of yarn with the most vivid/subtle colours but be unable to truly capture it's beauty with your digital camera? Keep that in mind. All bra shown hereafter is more -- just more! -- in real life.) OK, let's begin with an overview of the streetside bra deli itself:

bra deli

There was no room to step back and get a sense of perspective. This is just a long narrow table heaped with kilograms of self-serve bra. I made sure to dig up two license plate–print bras for you: click here to pop those up. A personal favourite was the orange-purple-blue-lime camouflage bra: here it is. I think I could handle any of these bras individually, but it's really an assault on one's sense of vision to look at hundreds of them for too long: click here for a slight dizzy feeling.

I handed the saleswoman my previous purchases and made some moves that were suitable for a game of charades in which the answer is Dolly Parton. I was able to find four new bras I liked. She weighed them on the scale:

the weigh-in

See, I could exchange the too-small bras for whatever I wanted that weighed the same. It turned out that I was 15 grams short, so she steered me to the other end of the table to choose some panties. Fine, no prob-- hey, wait a second! These are all lace G-strings! I don't mind telling you all that I like cotton underpants of the butt-covering variety. I gingerly picked up a few Gs to humour the saleswoman, and then she enlisted her colleague, and together these two women start pulling black lace G-strings out of the heap and tossing them at me! I tried to communicate that I'm not really into butt floss. The first saleswoman switches her focus to sheer panties. I point to my butt and say the word "big." Here she is convincing me that my Western butt will indeed fit in a pair of Asian panties:



Um... yeah. I finally decided to take my four new bras and walk away. Besides, think of how many sheer lace G-strings I would need to pick to come up with 15 grams? I didn't have that kind of time! (Those are my workmate Danny's arms you see in that last shot. Isn't he a good sport?) Isn't it bizarre that the bras are so sturdy, and the bottoms are so not? Wacky, I tell you.

And now it's Saturday, and I'm going to go and knit for a while!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

My coworkers are wondering what I'm laughing so hard at. Great story.

Anonymous said...

Came here from Ann and Kay's place. This is hilarious. So, what are their sizes like? It may just be me, but I can't see the popup images and am most disappointed to miss out on the license plate bra.

Rebecca said...

I couldn't see the popups either and I really needed to know. So, in my hacker effort I grabbed the image links. :)

http://brainylady.blogspot.com/assortment1.jpg

http://brainylady.blogspot.com/assortment2.jpg

http://brainylady.blogspot.com/assortment3.jpg

Awesomely funny.

Anonymous said...

It's probably a bad thing that I think some of those bras are totally awesome, right?

Anonymous said...

Make sure to check out the 'panties' - as close to a virtual garment as you will ever see:
http://brainylady.blogspot.com/barely_there.jpg

Anonymous said...

Hi! I grew up (lived) in Taipei for eight years. You're right about the crazy bras; I just never thought they were crazy until you pointed them out. They fit Asian breasts pretty well (most of the time). Now, when I visit my mom in Beijing, I can pick up the prettiest bras that can't be found here in the U.S. for 1/10 the price. My mom thought I was crazy until she looked at the prices of bras here in the States.

Anonymous said...

I remember seeing the beautiful bras in Taiwan ten years ago. I was surprised that my mother-in-law was right about them because most taiwanese fashion is pretty dowdy to American eyes. I never bought any though because I wear a 38J. Try finding an oriental lady that size!

kateoverseas said...

I got the "Look, it will stretch!" answer too from a streetside vendor in Rome when I was trying to buy a makeshift swimsuit. Funnily enough, it does, though it was thankfully a more substantial material than the lacy things seen here. (yikes!)