The magic Blue slippers...

Summer 2009, I went to China for the first time. It was not my first experience in Asia, so I was familiar with some of the intrinsic Asian habits, so everything was not entirely new. I do not have the pretense of saying China is the same as Japan, even saying that it is similar, is close to blasphemy. However, compared to Western countries, China and Japan do have a lot in common. 

The wearing of slippers in the house for example is similar. If you think about slippers in Quebec for instance, you get the woolen slippers, meant to warm up one's feet, especially in winter, from the cold floor. Mot of the slippers we have in mind in the West, are soft ones, that have a range of looks between an interior 'boot' to a home made knit slipper given by grandma.

In Asia however, they wear slippers winter-summer-autumn-spring. The purpose of slippers is basically to make sure your feet don't get into contact to the floor (with the exception of Japanese tatami mats, which require people to be wearing socks only, or barefoot so they don't get worn out quickly). Their slippers usually looks like sandals, with only the tip of the foot covered, and are not necessarily meant to keep warm. In Japan, it took me a long time to get used to wearing them. felt so much simpler just to take my outdoor shoes, and walk in the house, than to bother putting on those damn slippers. Now, when I am home, I cannot walk on the ground of houses barefoot: I can't stand the little dust and pebbles getting stuck to my feet. 

...

In China then, when I arrived at the hotel we were to stay at for 10 weeks, I was not surprised to see two pairs of plastic slippers for inside the room - one for me and one for my roommate. They were pretty ugly: def meant to wear inside, more for comfort than looks. They were pretty cool actually, as in, they had a small bubbly surface that help the foot breathe and enhanced comfort. 

Those slippers were the trademark of the Pekin 2009 cohort. Everyone - of the 90 students in the program - had those, and some even wore them outside (I did do that as well actually) when going out for a short time to get food or drink on the street. They came to mean a lot to me and I ended up bringing them back home.

Those blue slippers represent my 3 University years. They are now worn out, uglier still than when I got them, dirt never really gets completely off when I wash them and still are really out of fashion.

I have tons of shoes. 

I wanted eventually to make a couple of blog entries to show off my shoes, so I decided that this one, would be the first entry about my shoes. My magic Blue Slippers.

Let us end this with a picture, worths a 1 000 words.

Maybe I should just have posted the picture, instead of the 1000 words I just wrote, but I feel they needed a little history, to show how cool they are.