All Intensive Purposes

Laura Rozen blogs from Wuhan, China, the capital of Hubei Province, on the Yangtze:

[I]t has 7.9 million people, dwarfing even Manhattan in population. With that population, I expected skyscrapers. Not so. It is more like an endless expanse of dusty five story buildings, villages, going on and on....

Today, we went to the New World department store, with Max Mara, Burberry, etc. At this most new world of Wuhan's offerings, they still have the way of paying for merchandise familiar to those who visited the former Soviet Union back during Communist times: the three line system, whereby you identify the item you want to purchase, the sales person writes you up a receipt, you go to a cashier's desk and pay for item, and then return with a stamped receipt to the original salesperson to receive item. And they have one cashier for the entire floor. It takes a bit longer than at Lord and Taylor in Friendship Heights.