What's The Opposite of a Blinking Red Light?

Tomorrow morning we will be driving our guests to the airport.  My wife Becky just told me that one of our guests, Cassandra, who has read this blog, asked her: "Does he always make fun of his roommates?" I think she was referring to the "Cellulite Pants" blog entry with Irene.  But I'd like to clear the air on that particular "expose."  A few weeks went by before I actually got around to blogging about that.  Irene kept asking me: "Did you blog about the cellulite pants yet?"  

Irene asks me to blog about things.  Most things she asks me to blog about, or tells me that I should blog about, don't end up in this blog.  She's sitting about five feet away from me right now, curious what I'm blogging about, and looking at a picture of a guy we know who's at least 6'6" standing next to a guy who's about 4'10" at most.  Dave just commented that the big guy is about six of the little guys.  How can people vary so much in size?

I guess that while I'm clearing the air, or telling you that I didn't blog about Irene behind her back, in fact it was at her behest.  I'm also, at the same time, making fun of her again.  The four of us have been sharing an apartment for almost four months now, most of it unblogged about.

A shame really, so many things have happened that have been blog-worthy, but it seems that when the blog-worthy things that happen, the less time I have to type them into a blog.

Many things happen here that are not fun for me to blog about.  For example today we went and visited "Russian Street" and saw the river half thawed.  It was exciting, and I'm not sure what else to say about it...  There was a weird tunnel under the road with a McDonald's in it right before the river.

Also today: we had six single girls over to visit with us and our guests.  Becky and Irene arranged it, they called it "The single girl party," the goal of the party was to counteract the pressure the girls have here from their families to get married.  I slept through the first half of it, in other words I was sleeping in our room and woke up and came out blinking and confused why I heard so much giggling.  Becky had waked me to pray so they could eat dinner.  Now that I'm thinking about it I wonder if my stumbling into the living room was part of the "stay single" plan.  Anyway, enough about me, the "single girl party" was a smashing success I'm told.  

Irene has asked me to blog about the washing machine several times.  But I never have.  Our washing machine is a piece of junk.  There are two columns of buttons labeled in Chinese, each with little red lights next to them.  I've never understood all the complexities of washing machines, for twenty years I've just used the "default" setting.  (I had to calculate how long I've done laundry)

Even though I don't know what the buttons say, it doesn't take long to figure out how to get the machine spinning and spraying hot water on my dirty clothes.  Maybe it's just difficult enough to look at those buttons to make you forget to put the drain hose into either the shower drain or into the floor drain in the middle of the bathroom.

Twenty or thirty minutes later you'll be sitting in the living room reading something or chatting with your room-mates yelling loudly above the ridiculously loud banging of the washing machine as it works itself across the bathroom floor, and you'll hear the water gushing...  

Hearing water flowing is perfectly normal when you're within ear-shot of a washing machine.  But something will catch your attention about the sound: it'll be just a little extra clear and crisp sounding. The sound waves will be unhindered by the washing machine's little round glass door, as if they were on the wrong side of it.  What you'll hear is the drain hose pumping several gallons of water onto your bathroom floor.  

Some of the water will spill over the little threshold and into the hallway area outside the bathroom, but not much.  The little shower mat, that I normally step out onto after carefully drying myself and my feet, will be floating if you let the washing machine completely drain out.

You'd think this would be one of those "I'll never let that happen again" things, which all four of us have said to ourselves.  But we've all forgotten that hose at least three times, and there are four of us.  I'm sure it's a simple thing, but there is something mysterious to me about things like this stupid hose that is so easy to forget.   How does that work in my brain?  Have brain scientists ever studied this phenomenon?  It's like the reverse of advertising: How to make someone forget something they want to remember.  Or it's the reverse of a blinking red light that the brain can't ignore.  My phone used to have a blinking red light when it was charging,  I always had to turn it upside down at night because I couldn't ignore that blinking.  Something about that white plastic hose makes our brains forget it.

The positive thing about all of this is that the bathroom floor gets cleaned pretty well when that happens.

Language Problems

No, not that kind of language problem.  You're probably thinking this blog entry title is about learning a foreign language or about being confused by telemarketers, and them being more confused than you are.

Telemarketer: "Are you Chinese?"
Me: "No I'm American"
Telemarketer: "But aren't you in China?"
I could hear his brain working: "But I called a Chinese phone number... how did I get the wrong country?  What am I supposed to do now?"

OK, I can't really read minds, and that's probably not was he was thinking.  I was mostly worried that he was calling about a recent order I had made on taobao.com, China's Ebay.  If there were any problems with the order, or if he needed more details, he didn't get them from me.  I didn't understand a word he said.  He's one of those people who doesn't know how to slow down and dumb down his speech for foreigners.  ...and I'm one of those foreigners who gets confused easily and needs to learn the local language better.

But, like I said, that's not the "Language Problem" I'm talking about in the title of this blog entry.  I'm talking about the language problem I developed when I was five years old.  I still remember my dad making me put soap in my mouth.  I think I had said something to my mother that he didn't like.  Sorry mom.

I can honestly say that even though I developed, or discovered, the ability to swear at the age of five, that I've never had a problem controlling it.   I have never spent much time around people who use "bad language," and I usually want people around me to feel respected.

But things are a little different here.  No, I haven't developed a potty mouth, but there's a new temptation here that I never thought about before.  If I'm on the bus, full of people, I can say whatever I want, no one will really understand me.  And, importantly, no one will feel disrespected.  This is not a temptation I expected before I came here.  I've thought about this too many times while riding the bus or walking down the street.  So pray for me.

Also take this as a cautionary tale if you decide to live somewhere no one speaks your favorite language.  You can hear you.  So keep it clean.

Also: Yes, some parts of big cities like this smell really bad, but there's no reason to yell what you think you smell.

Ice City Melting

The joke that's already gotten old around here is: "It's balmy outside!"  This morning it was 25 degrees Fahrenheit.  The ice is melting, it's been snowing and then melting.  It's kind of weird for a Northwesterner like myself to think "Oh it's snowing, it must be getting warmer!"  But it's true, this city has been literally and figuratively "thawing out" for the last few weeks.

Of course we all have mixed feelings about this.  There are ten million people in this city, we're stacked in here pretty high.  Ten million people means a lot of traffic, garbage, and sewer.  And it's all thawing out.  The melting snow is black, wet, stinky, and ankle deep in some places.

But I've learned to appreciate how such things are dealt with here.  I've come to respect the thousands of people with shovels, brooms, ice chippers, and giant tractors.  Just the other night a tractor, the size of a house, pushed some of that black slushy-like sludge into the path of twenty of us pedestrians who were frantically trying to cross the street.  It was like a trail was being washed out by a black flash flood right in front of us.  But I'm being dramatic: we just walked to the right and avoided it.

The paragraph above describes a lot of what we do here, "frantically trying to cross the street."  Today I came home exhausted from walking around on the ice.  Walking on the ice is just as slippery as you're imagining, but there's miles of it, it's not just a few mud puddles that froze over.  The sidewalks are all covered in a fresh inch-thick layer of ice, ice that used to be snow that was subsequently packed down by ten million feet and then frozen again.

This morning I slipped and fell on the ice, again, I think it's the fourth time I've fallen since I've been here.  I wasn't hurt, I just fell on my butt.  But I got a good laugh out of my two friends behind me.  "You fall slowly!" they said.  Yes, it happened in slow motion.  That's what happened last time.  I fall in slow motion.  Maybe someday you'll be lucky enough to see it yourself.

During this "Great Thaw" as I like to think of it, this little town is starting to come alive and act more like I'd expect a city in Asia to behave.  There are street vendors popping up all over the place on the sidewalks.  And my favorite part is the little "bucket tables."

Street vendors usually have a little portable kitchen about six feet wide and four feet deep.  (It occurs to me that I have no idea how then get them there every day, they have wheels I guess)  The street vendors usually line up on either side of the sidewalk in rows so you can walk between them and smell their delicious food.  I told Dave the other day that it reminded me of a state fair back home.  We both wished they had funnel cakes and elephant ears.  Oh! and those fried "blooming" onions!

Now these street vendors did not entirely disappear during the cold months, but there wasn't nearly as many of them as there are now.  And none of them had "bucket tables" like they do now.  Some of the street vendors have set up a little square table with four, usually red, buckets around each side.  I think it'll be kind of nice, if you're impatient like me, and you want to eat it immediately, while it's hot, there's a little kid-sized table right there for your convenience.

But it amazes me because it's still only 25 degrees outside and people are eating on the sidewalk like it's a hot day.  Well I guess it is hot outside, relatively speaking.