So tonight’s dinner, bought from the supermarket, is costing us somewhere in the region of three times the price of lunch, eaten in one of the BeiGongDa cafeterias.
I would suggest we turn totally vegetarian, except that I don’t believe inflation will be limited to meat. Tonight’s dinner involves meat, by the way. It’s a rare occurence- we normally only eat meat when we eat out. Perhaps we’ve got that the wrong way round, from a food safety point of view. Anyway, back to inflation: So what if the government is restricting corn-based ethanol biofuel plants?
Anyway, I’m no economist, but I don’t like the signs right now. lzh and I, as it is, just barely manage to scrape into the bottom end of “middle class” in terms of income (according to the last figures I saw, which was a long time ago), but it’s hard enough as it is for us to save up money for stuff we need (like, when the hell am I going to be able to afford to take my wife to visit my homeland?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? And then there’re the age-old questions of housing (alright so long as I’m a foreign teacher and we don’t mind living at the mercy of others), education for our future (God-willing) kids, and retirement).
Yeah, I’m old enough to know that this, too, will pass, but in the meantime, my parents are China-bound (via Japan- they’ve got as much bad karma as I do to work off), and we’re trying to organise a proper wedding ceremony (instead of just the civil ceremony that was little more than form-filling and stamp collecting) for when they’re here, and besides, we have student loans to repay (simply impossible in my case, so long as we’re in China; easily workable in hers, inflation permitting) and we desperately need to save.
And people wonder why I feel the need to
!
on occasion.
