Super Cao Nguyen

I decided to visit an Asian store in the Asian district of Oklahoma. My wife has had the pleasure of visiting a lot of different cultural stores due to her job. So when I told her that I needed to visit a store different then my culture over the weekend she knew the store that she had in mind. I enjoyed my visit. We even bought some things for cheap that we normally would get from Walmart. For the most part I thought I knew most of the things that where apart of the Asian culture (Pocky anyone?). There were a lot of things that I recognized so my thoughts were wondering. How was I going to complete the assignment? That's when we walked into the "celebration" aisle. There I found paper, foils, shrines, etc. But what caught my eye were not the various amounts of "fake gold" (picture below) or even the signs of wealth.

I picked up what I thought to be fireworks. I wanted it because of how big it was and I also felt that it was rare to find fireworks outside of a firework stand. Of course I had no idea where I would set this thing off but I wanted it. I really, really like fireworks. I turned to my wife and asked her why fireworks next to the shrines were there. She laughed at me, took them from me, and looked them over. As it turns out they were actually very large incense. These types of incense aren't for everyday use. They are actually used for shrines, prayers and meditations, and for the Chinese New Year. There are some that are even as big at 66 inches that are used in temples. I wanted to buy some but my wife didn't want me to burn the house down with a giant ash pill in my room.

Aside from that I enjoyed my trip and also ran across something I thought may have been a back scratcher or maybe even a very large pie tool for decoration. My initial thoughts were wrong because it actually was a coconut scraper. This tool gets all the coconut meat from the coconuts' middle. This is much easier than using a fork or spoon...etc. I was drawn to this because it was huge and pointy like some weird torture device.

Some other things I found...