Sticker Shock

All my neighbors are local people, and many of them have really nice cars, including some Mercedes, BMW's and Porsches. It baffles me, especially since car prices are quite a lot higher in the Middle Kingdom than they are in the USA -- due to taxes and fees they cost 2 to 3 times more than in the USA. I help my neighbors feel superior to the lowly masses by driving around in my beat-up electric scooter with a headlight held intact with clear, but clearly tacky, packing tape (it got damaged when I moved twice in the past four years). I kind of ruin the neighborhood image. Well, the fact that they only cut the grass three times a summer doesn't add much to the image either, but I digress.

One of my super-cool neighbors has a Mini-Cooper, which was all the envy of, well, me. It's a BMW car, but honestly, almost anything new with four wheels strikes me as awesome. Every time I went downstairs to the storage area/parking garage to get my e-bike, I would ooh and aah at the coolness of this trendy-looking city car.

Then one day I went downstairs and about fell over in shock. 'Cause this is what had become of the car:

Yep, it is now a "Miss Kitty" car (as I always accidentally erroneously call it...why can't I remember it is "Hello Kitty" not "Miss Kitty?" My American friends remind me that "Miss Kitty" was in Gunsmoke, but I still get it confused. But then again sometimes I accidentally call a Blackberry a Blueberry, and again, I don't see what the big deal is; they are both tasty fruit that start with the letter "b.")

I mean, this car costs over $20,000 in America, so here the web reports the price as somewhere between $60-75,000. And it used to look so sophisticated. And now Miss Kitty and Teddy the Teddy adorn the driver's side door (and back of the car too). I just want to cry. 'Cause now it looks like it belongs in a toy box alongside Barbie's orange plastic convertible.