Three Wons of Wontons

A few days ago I spent the morning wandering around with an older lady, about 70 years young.  And I say 'young' because she must have five times as much energy as I do.

I think she could outperform me in many things: races, dancing, maybe arm wrestling.  I don't really know for sure, I certainly didn't challenge her to anything like that, but sometimes we just know who not to compete with.

This older lady I'll call 'grandma' because she most certainly is one.  I could also call her 'mom' because her son, that I've never met, was born the same year I was.  We're both dragons on the Chinese zodiac, her son and I.  She doesn't do 'zodiac things,' but everybody knows the animal that belongs to the year here.  Or does the year belong to the animal?  For example, this is the year of the chicken, and I know that because there are chickens everywhere, not real ones, but pictures of them... everywhere.  Think of it like Christmas in America but instead of holly branches, Santa Claus, elves, and other Christmasy things you might see printed on Oreo wrappers and billboards, you see the Animal of the Year.  Only you see it all year.  Last year it was the monkey, this year it's the chicken.  How time flies... or does it swing through trees?  Wait do chickens fly?

'Grandma' is not quite five feet tall, I have no idea how many meters that is, (I keep forgetting how many meters tall I am, more than one, less than two) She probably weighs less than a hundred pounds, and she's always laughing and bouncing around talking a mile a minute.  So imagine a chubby white guy walking slowly up the sidewalk next to a older Chinese lady flailing her arms around and laughing most of time.  That was us.

Eventually we ended up on the fifth floor of a huge book store, about five times the size of a Barnes & Nobel with about fifty times as many books.  The fifth floor is where the English books are.  Not the books 'in' English, but the books that 'teach' English.  I enjoy grabbing the English books and flipping through them saying: "It's so easy!"  That's the only time I get to brag here, my English is so good!

So, after 'grandma' and I left the book store, and as we walked down the busy sidewalk, she told me that she was going to take me to a wonton soup place that we had passed on our way to the book store.  It had an English sign that said "Mombo Wontons."  I remembered that she had talked about it and pointed to it a lot when we passed by it on our way to the book store.  Apparently wonton soup originated in her hometown, Shanghai, you might have heard of it.  As she convinced me that we needed to go eat wontons, she told me something I didn't quite understand:  She said I looked like I would need 3 "wons" of wontons.  Of course, in America it would be insulting to tell someone that they looked like they needed a lot of food, her basic meaning was that I was fat and needed to eat a lot.  But it's not considered insulting here, and I actually took it as a complement.  There's so much of me.  I didn't know how many 3 "wons" of wontons was anyway, I was kind of hungry, and I've learned that it doesn't pay to argue with people who want to feed you something.  I remember thinking: "A 'won' (or wan) means 10,000 in Chinese, but I don't think she's ordering me 30,000 wontons.  It must mean something else."

I remember hearing, long before I even started learning Chinese, that in many lands it is extremely rude to refuse food and that people, foreigners, often find themselves in very uncomfortable
situations where they have to eat things they really really don't want to eat, or eat far more than they wanted to. But I have lived in Taiwan and in China and I have not found that to be a problem.  It is true that Chinese people love to be very pushy with food, they will try to 'make' you eat huge, unreasonable, quantities of food.  But do not fear,  this pushiness is just how they show good manners here, it is a show of hospitality and generosity, they will actually back down if you refuse, and I have never seen them with hurt feelings at my, or anyone else's, refusing extra portions of food.  They just have to try, it's like their job.  The other side of this custom is refusing to accept any food or beverage even if they kinda want it, but I won't go on about that.  I just accept all food that I want, and none that I don't want.  It's my own personal culture.

When we stepped through the front door of the wonton place, that 'grandma' was so excited about, we immediately saw three of our mutual friends sitting at a little table to the right waiting for their food.  This city is packed to the gills with restaurants, so the chances of running into them on pure randomness are slim, I think, my theory is, that 'grandma' had enthusiastically told them too about this wonton shop.  "Just like in Shanghai" she said.

There was a table next to our three friends so we ordered and sat down next to them.  I don't remember the following conversations, I probably spaced out for most of it, and didn't understand the rest, but it wasn't long until our friends' food arrived.

I pointed to the large steaming bowl of wonton soup in front of one of the girls and I asked her if it was "three 'wons'"  I was starting to wonder how fat 'grandma' wanted me to be, and how much a 'won' was.  She frowned and said, no, it was one 'won'.

Then I felt a little stupid: The word I was hearing as 'won' (Actually spelled 'wan' in Chinese phonetics) was the word for 'bowl'.  Grandma had ordered three bowls of wonton soup!

Of course this was one of the days that I had actually had a complete breakfast, sometimes I don't and I can get pretty hungry by noon, but today I was only 'kinda' hungry.

Fortunately 'grandma' didn't order three bowls just for me, really one bowl was for her.  But, in sticking with my rule about not having to eat everything just because somebody is telling me to, I didn't eat the last dumpling, I left one in the last bowl.  I was so full I could barely breathe though.  But I think I ate two bowls because they actually were really good wontons, and I'm a fat guy who likes to eat and forgets what words mean sometimes.

Old vs New, Elbow vs Shelf

A lot has changed in the last month or so.  The biggest thing is that we've moved.  Yep, we're in the same city but we've moved a few miles southwest of where we used to live.  Our old place was about three times the size of this place.  Yes we've moved from a big place to a small place, from three large bedrooms to two small ones.  The new building we live in is exactly twice as tall, 28 stories instead of 14 in the old one, it has two elevators instead of one.  Most people we know here don't have elevators, most people live in seven story buildings, half as tall as our old building.  They seem to build in multiples of seven here.

The southern view from our new living room is overlooking the roof of a two level grocery store, just as our old place was.  Not the best view, but a convenient one.  But the new grocery store here is twice the size of the old one, but only has half as much foreign food.  Foreign food being 'Western Food' like peanut butter and sliced bread. Actually they have peanut butter, but the jar is only half the size of a jar of peanut butter from the old store.  I thought the old store's peanut butter jars were as small as they came! but I was wrong, I think I could put one of these half-of-a-small-sized peanut butter jars into my pants pocket.  I think I could make about four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of it if the jelly (or jam) jars weren't even smaller!

I guess it's a good thing when my biggest complaint is about the size of the peanut butter jars at my local grocery store.

The Internet is six times faster in our new place and it takes one-sixth the amount of time to get to the subway from here.  We chose this apartment mostly because of it's proximity to public transportation.

I'm almost out of fractions and multipliers but I should mention that we have only half as many bathrooms in our new place, or one instead of two.  But our washing machine is about one hundred times quieter.  Yes, you may be surprised that our old place here was quite a bit bigger than any place we lived back home in the states, but not anymore.

The other things that have happened I can't remember now, so they must have been unremarkable, moving is quite enough. Although we did just get back from one night in Hong Kong a week ago, which sounds way cooler than it was, even to us.  I really like Hong Kong, they call it the city where East meets West, and it is, it is an interesting mix.

I guess one other thing that happened, happened yesterday when I was taking a shower.

Most bathrooms in China, and Taiwan for that matter, do not have bathtubs or shower stalls, they just have a shower sprayer on a hose and a floor drain.  But don't worry as soon as we moved in we installed a suction cup supported shower rod in the corner of the bathroom where the shower head and drain are.  After that we installed a suction cup supported shower shelf to hold our various soaps and shampoos, and recently a pink razor.  The little "shower shelf" as I call it, has three aluminum shelves and a little frame that we had to assemble with a screwdriver after we got it.

I think we only had the "shower shelf" installed 24 hours before I discovered that the edges of the aluminum shelf bottoms were razor sharp.  You could peel a potato with them.  Of course I discovered this by casually, I guess somewhat recklessly, reaching for my bottle of packed-from-America Old Spice body wash.  I cut a razor precise and clean cut into the largest knuckle on my right middle finger.

There's something about cutting yourself in the shower, with all the water flowing it's hard to tell how much you're actually bleeding with the stream of blood flowing down your hand and disappearing rapidly into drain.  It makes me woozy just typing about it...

Anyway, it wasn't a big deal, I was done showering anyway, I put a band-aide on it and then mentioned it to my wife telling her that I was going to do something about it, somehow cover or fix the razor sharp edges of that "shower shelf."  I was thinking of using my new hot-glue gun to put a small rubbery bumper over the razor sharp edge.

Of course we both made jokes about how you could only buy something that dangerous, and cheap, in China.  We even joked that if we mentioned it to a local person that they would just say something like "Just be careful and don't cut yourself on it."

But yesterday, about a week after my knuckle injury, while I was being careful when I reached for bottles of things sitting on the shelves of that "shower shelf" I did not cut myself.  But when I washed my hair, elbows up, I turned and sliced open one of my elbows.  Either the skin on my elbow is about an eighth of an inch thick or I cut through some extra fat layer too, it was very white.

Most of the time when I do something like that I think to myself "That was stupid" but I have to say, this wasn't really one of those times.  I was in a confined slippery wet space inches from three strategically placed razor shelves, it was bound to happen.  Of course I guess I could say it was stupid of me to have not "fixed" them somehow, covering the edges with something.  But don't worry, I have fixed them now, I filed those edges down with a fingernail file earlier today.

Of course the tricky part for a hemophobic like myself is to remain calm and not pass out.  I did fine. I barely worried about all the crazy probably exaggerated rumors I've heard about willy nilly blood transfusions, and people getting antibiotics for the sniffles at hospitals in China.  The hard part was drying myself off without getting blood on the towel.  I had to have Becky help me put a make-shift bandage on it because I sliced open the part of my elbow that I can barely see.

Now I must apologize, you probably thought that this blog entry would be more about China, like things happening outside of my apartment in China.  But I say to you: our apartment is in China! I doubt you know anyone in America who has sliced open their elbow on the razor sharp shelves in the showering corner of their bathroom.

The End of Hot Winter

Spring is basically here.  I don't know when spring is "officially" here, but it looks like spring outside... or at least the end of winter, since it's brown and not green.  I say it is spring because the snow and ice is gone.  There haven't been any surprise snow falls either.  There are a few piles left over that used to be huge, like the kind you find in the back corner of a parking lot, and that have been slowly melting.

I also say this because it has been at least 80 degrees inside for the last week or so.  It's still cold outside, just a little above freezing so when you decide to go outside you have to be smart.  These are my recommendations for anyone who sweats: (Apparently some people do not sweat easily!)

Lay out your outside clothes, shoes, socks, jackets, sweatshirts, thick pants, thermals (thermals only if you're going out for a long time).  Then two minutes before you actually go outside put on all your clothes as fast as you can and race outside, down the elevator and out the door.  But don't forget your keys.

I recommend leaving your jacket unzipped and your hat off until you go outside.  In the dead of winter this isn't a good idea, you can put your hat on in the elevator before you go outside.  You can put your gloves or mittens whenever you want since your hands don't generate much heat.

If you're like me, a sweat machine, from the time you put on your outside clothes to the the time you get outside, roughly 3.5 minutes if you're fast, you'll already be hot by the time you're completely outside, sweat droplets will already be forming at the back of your neck.  Let the steam vent out of the front of your unzipped and open jacket for a good ten to twenty seconds until you actually feel cold, don't wait too long though.  Once you zip up, you're body will heat up the inside of your jacket and hat in about a minute, and you will have minimized your perspiration output.

Keep in mind that sweat is very undesirable in the cold, avoid it!  Sweat makes you colder when it hits the air outside.  First you're boiling hot, then you're cold, wet, and freezing!

After you're zipped up your jacket and put your hat on, as you walk down the sidewalk, you'll start to notice the weak areas in your armor.  It's different with everyone, and different items of clothing have different weak spots too.  You may also notice "hot zones" where there's more insulation than you need.

Having hot zones can help balance out the colder parts. (Think of your body as a liquid heated system where your blood is warmed in some areas and cooled in others, like a heat transfer.)  You may need to vent your extra heat from time to time to prevent "sweat zones" which will inevitably become "ice zones."  But you won't get "ice zones" right now because it's basically spring.  Now you'll just get a little chilly and your immune system might be compromised, in other words you might catch a cold.

But soon the days will be warmer outside and we'll be able to wear sandals and shorts outside and those "sweat zones" will just become "gross sticky zones."  But I guess some people don't perspire that easily.  Maybe it's most people, maybe it's about a billion people who live here.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm often the butt of awkward praise here in Northern China for being sweaty year-round.  When it's -25 degrees outside and I come in and peel off my 3-inch thick down jacket revealing that my tee-shirt is damp and stuck to me people are just all kinds of amazed at, and often commenting on, my chubby and hot blooded body.

But don't worry I try not to let it go to my head.

Line 3, Not 2

Yesterday I rode the subway.  While we were away visiting The States they added a new subway line.

The city we live in, of about eight million people, had, when we moved here, one subway line. The subway was brand new, not even two years old, it was "Line 1", and it's color was red. I didn't know that it's color was red until the new yellow "Line 3" appeared on the little subway maps at the station, distinguishing it from the red "Line 1."  I kinda thought that red was just the color of subway system. It is, after all, the color of their little "Metro" logo.

The term "Metro" make me smile a little bit. I think I've had more than one conversation about how to say "subway" in English. Oftentimes English learners get confused at the terms we use to refer to the subway. In Seattle it's the "light rail", in New York it's the "subway", I think in London it's the "tube" or "the underground" or something. In San Francisco we called it "The BART", in Taipei, when speaking English, we called it the "MRT." But it's often called the "Metro" too, actually that's part of it's official name here.

 As a nerd I'd like to point out that "Metro" has a lot of meanings, and I believe it comes from the word "metropolis" which basically just means "big city." I've also heard the word used to refer to the area around the city limits, or smaller cities and communities that are so close to a bigger city that they are kind of part of it and often, like in the case of Bellevue and Seattle, share a public transportation system. Anyway, it's just fun, in a dark sort of way, as a foreigner struggling with the local language, to see the confusion on someone's face who thinks that they may have been saying "subway" wrong since they've been speaking English. And then the horror on their face when they learn there are several ways to say it, but that they can't just interchange them.  I know the feeling.

"Wait a second! What happened to Line 2?" you might be thinking. Don't worry, they're building it. This city is riddled with construction sites in the middle of major intersections surrounded by little plastic yellow walls with the local "Metro" logo on them. I don't think that the subway line numbering, (Line 1, Line 2, Line 3) is intended to indicate the sequence that the lines were built. I'm sure when they finish and open up Line 2 for business it will look like it was there before Line 3.

So anyway, I rode the new Line 3 all the way to the end, which is only two stops away so far, but the last stop is the huge train station to the west. It's gigantic.  A train station is a good idea for a subway stop if you ask me.

The new subway line is shiny and new and has quite impressive LCD screens above each subway car door showing which stop you're going to.  It also shows which side has an open door, sometimes it's the left side, sometimes it's the right side. An older subway car usually just has a big green or red light to show which door will open.  People like to know what side is about to open so that they can push their way through people to get close to the door before it opens. When the subway car is packed tight this is pretty important information.  Nobody wants to miss their stop.

But on this new Line 3, the LCD signs are wrong, backwards actually. The LCD screen above the door that is closed says it is open, and the open one says it is closed, in both English and Chinese. Being a computer programmer I couldn't help but smile and imagine how frustrated the programmers must have been trying to find whatever bug that caused this. But they released the software anyway because, though embarrassing, people are really good at knowing when doors are open or closed, and the subway is not yet packed tightly since Line 3 only has three stops.

I even took a picture of the new LCD screens because I thought they were so cool. I love subways but I haven't seen any with LCD screens like that. They are extra special too because they are short but very wide, most LCD screens are TV shaped with that letterbox 16:9 ratio. They must have these long screens manufactured especially for subway cars.

The Extra Wide LCD Screens on the Subway

When I took the picture I noticed the guy sitting across from me watching me. Then a minute later he took his phone out too and made a little video panning around the subway car.

But one of the highlights of my subway tour was my ride up the escalator on the way back home.

All over in northern China young people wear long warm black jackets that say odd things in English on them in big capitalized letters. The one I see the most is "SCHOOL KILLS." I'm not sure exactly what it means, but it might have something to do with high suicide rates amongst the students. A sad thing. But often enough I see different things written on black winter coats that make even less sense.

On the back of the coat of the girl in front of me on the escalator I saw written: "CARNIVAL FEAST." I can only guess what it means, a hip new band?  Maybe she likes the food at carnivals?  But why would she have that written on her coat? Maybe that's the point, to confuse Anglophones like me. Maybe it's just too deep and I wouldn't understand.

I was so flabbergasted at this message that I pulled out my phone to take a picture of it. Normally I'm a little shy to just take pictures of people, people would probably see me doing it and think I'm weird. But on this particular escalator, at the vertical level I was, there were walls on both sides shielding me from the eyes of any onlooker, and everyone in front of me was facing away, upwards.  My huge puffy winter coat shielded activities close to my chest from the eyes of everyone behind me.  So I went for it. I pulled out my Chinese cell phone and tried to unlock it...  My phone was giving me grief, so it took a few moments longer to get to the camera app.

But by the time I took the picture I had already emerged from the depths below and from between the walls on either side of me that blocked view of my activities from the eyes of onlookers. When I looked up from my phone there was an old cleaning lady standing to the side of the escalator, at the top, staring at me. I think she caught me. But I'm not really sure.  She had a tired expressionless blank stare, she may have just been staring at a funny looking foreigner unconcerned with what he was taking pictures of.

I'll never know.

A Better Burger King?

At the Shanghai Airport Burger King here, where we are sitting, there is a self-serve cooler, with a shiny glass door, full of 12oz cans of Budweiser beer.  What other kind of beer would you serve at an American fast food restaurant?  Each can is 30RMB or about 5.00 U.S. dollars!

Look under the word Whopper

Sometimes I've heard myself say that China can't quite get certain American things, like food, quite right, but it's OK because America doesn't get Chinese things quite right either.  But sometimes, more than you might think, and more than I blog about in this blog, China gets a few American things better than America does.  Why don't they serve beer at Burger King in America? 

Imagine that you grew up in China and, once you were an adult, loved spoiling yourself occasionally with a bug juicy Whopper and you always washed it down with a can of Budweiser while trying to imagine how much better this authentic combination might taste if you were in America made by American burger experts.  Like eating Sushi in Tokyo!

Then imagine you go to America, the birthplace of the Whopper, the land of burgers and beef, where we eat burgers every day... and the Burger King barista says "No we don't serve beer here." as if it was a ridiculous idea! 

Becky, my lovely wife, just looked up from her computer and asked me if I had gotten a beer yet.  No not yet, but now I better do it, before the taste of the burger I already ate disappears entirely.  I can't blog about it and not drink it right?  Also, fresh off the plane from America, waiting for my next flight, the 30RMB price tag doesn't really mean much to me, I don't have the foreign exchange rates wired back into my brain yet, 30RMB isn't attached to a value yet.  And besides how many extra authentic American experiences can I get in China?  It'll be worth it.

P.S. It was everything I imagined it would be.