The "The Guy" System

I'm typing this blog entry from the front passenger seat of a yellow taxi.  Our driver, like most taxi drivers, is eager to get to our destination quickly... he just honked at the other taxi in front of us to get out of his lane, there's two lanes.  Don't you wish you could do that sometime?

We're about to pass the other taxi now.  Passed.  Now on to the next clump of cars and Volkswagen taxis ahead...  Virtually all of the taxis here are Volkswagen Jettas.

It's 5:39 AM here in "East-North" or in the Northeast of China.  (I still think it's funny that they say "East-North" instead of "North-East"  "North-East" sounds just as funny in Chinese as "East-North" sounds in English.)

Everywhere around us is covered in a light fog due to the heat and humidity.  The sides of the highway are lined with green deciduous trees.  It's not an unpleasant drive other than the break-neck pace and the lane weaving.

I woke up this morning to the sweet sound of gentle harp string plucking, which is the ring tone that's on default for my phone alarm clock.  I guess maybe "sweet" wasn't how I felt about it this morning, it was 4:31 AM, I hopped out of bed, it was already fully daylight outside.  China is all on one time zone so the sun comes up here, pretty far east of the where the time zone should be, at about 4:00 AM.

I don't usually wake up at 4:00 AM, especially for the last three weeks, it's been hot and muggy and I've had insomnia which means I usually fall asleep, finally, at about 4:00 AM then wake up at about 11:00 AM.  It's not my preferred schedule, but it's better than not sleeping at all I guess.

The taxi driver just commented to Becky that I seem to be working on my computer, as I typed this blog, and asked her if I was German or American.  I responded, to his surprise, that I was American.  He told me that my Chinese was excellent... even though I literaly only said one word 美国人 (meiguoren) which means "American."  Usually people think I'm Russian.

But this morning, less than an hour ago, as I was showering, I worried about getting sick.  I got 2 hours of sleep the night before, and then last night about 4.  No sleeping in to compensate for my sleepless nights.  I was about to get on an airplane, a metal tube crammed full of people who might be sick, breathing and coughing out cold viruses into the airplanes ventilation system... my immune system would work better with more sleep. There's been studies... But it was too late, we had to leave the country, our visas only allow us sixty days at a time in China.  So to the airport we go!

Even as I typed that paragraph our taxi has just arrived at the airport, I'll pick this up later.

OK, I'm finishing this blog entry from a coffee lounge in the Incheon Aiport in Korea.  Our trip here was a different than the last.

Back to the airport in China: There's this guy who stands at the base of the stairs that lead to the check-in counters at our local airport in China, it's usually the same guy, I've come to recognize him from my frequent travels through the airport.  You tell him where you're going and he lets you up the stairs, or he tells you to wait.  Most people asked to wait just stand there in front him, so you have to push your way through a  little crowd of people clustered around the base of the stairs.  I guess you could say he's the "Stair Master."

At first this arrangement was a little stressful to us because we weren't used to this "the guy" system of doing things.  We weren't accustomed to shoving through throngs of people.  But now we are. Becky usually likes getting behind me because I'm pretty good at clearing a path.  ...If I don't say so myself. I'm a little heavier than the average Chinese person and once they see my scary face they tend to yield.  Actually I've come to almost enjoy it.

People are trained to be extra polite to foreigners in China, nobody messes with foreigners, other than over charging them for things.  But in our little unimportant city in a forgotten corner of China, people aren't used to seeing foreigners enough to think of overcharging them.  But maybe I'm just a little biased towards the friendly farmer folk here in our little corner of China... the friendliest part of China.  I even heard a Westerner who moved there describe it as "real China" comparing it to other more popular "Westernized" parts of China in the South.  Maybe you'd like to visit.

Anyway, after we shoved up to "the guy" and after we were admitted to the check-in area, waited in line, got our tickets, waited in line, got our passports "departure stamped", I turned around to see if Becky was still behind me.  She wasn't. I saw her heading in the opposite direction, away from the immigration booths, he must have turned her away for some reason, back towards the end of long lines...

Becky prefers if I go in line before her when we go through immigration in China.  There are few Americans passing through, and even fewer Asian Americans.  For some reason they get confused by her documentation.  Actually most of the times I've entered China the immigration officer calls his manager over to look at his computer screen after he's processed my passport.  They have more than once been confused by which date was which on my passport or visa.  So I guess they are less perplexed by her U.S. passport after they've already processed mine.

So there I was, with my passport already stamped as having had officially left China, standing between the immigration booths and the security checkpoint, where you're not encouraged to stand, watching my wife, out of ear-shot, walk back into China.  Was she not allowed through?  Would I be going to Korea alone this time?  We didn't have much more time before our flight left, and the lines looked really long for her to have to come back through.  Did they send her to some office in the back to ask her questions or something?

Just a little earlier Becky thought for a moment that she had forgotten her passport and joked that she'd have to go back and get it while I went to Korea by myself to avoid having to absorb the cost of two instead of of one ticket.  Now it seemed like the joke might be happening.  I pulled out my phone and tried to call her but an automated voice said that her phone had been turned off, which I remembered her doing to save battery life...

After about five minutes of waiting, I decided to keep going through security.  We were flying to Korea during peak season and our tickets were at least twice the price that they usually were.  Even at the lowest off-season price our visa runs are our biggest expense every 60 days living in China.  If she didn't get through in time Becky would have to fly out the next day to avoid over staying on her visa.  If we were just going on vacation I probably would have tried walking back through immigration to stay back with her.  Why did she go back?  I wonder if the guards would even let me go back through immigration?  (Or is it called emigration?)

Maybe, if I explained it, they'd let me through and just stamp me as having re-entered China... that would be a neat trick to avoid these expensive "visa runs".  But, alas! I'd have to buy an airplane ticket to get that far anyway.  So probably not worth it.  Plus I'm more honest than that.

In the security line I attempted to walk though one of two metal detectors only to be physically grabbed by the arms by a security "guy" and firmly but gently pushed into the other metal detector.  Apparently I hadn't noticed that they separated the metal detectors by gender, with the wand search afterwards being performed by a female on the right and a male on the left.  My foreign, scary face did not help me avoid the man-handling, but like I said it wasn't exactly rough, and you can't expect people in foreign countries to obey the no touching rules of the U.S. You get patted down at airports anyway in the U.S. too right?

Usually when we leave through our little international airport there's only one plane leaving at a time.  There may be passengers for two later flights waiting in the waiting area, but only one boarding, one checking in, and one going through emigration and security.  At gate four, the gate closest to the entrance, there was a plane boarding for Russia.  My gate, gate 3, looked like the last three people were boarding. I didn't think I was that late. By the time I got there it was just me.  I walked up to the gate and flight attendant looked at me and raised her hand and said clearly and firmly "No!"

Of course, I admit that I've explained it in this order and in this dramatic way for anyone reading it to wonder "Is Marc going to get on the plane or not?"

I wasn't actually worried myself, maybe I anticipated her to say "No."  You see, I was at gate three.  Gate four had a long line of about a hundred people, at least a third of them were Russian, as it was a flight to Russia.  She thought I was Russian and trying to go to Russia, we kinda look the same.  I didn't look Korean.  I still don't. But now I wonder if she thought that I thought that I was really clever and found a second gate, door, leading to the flight to Russia that didn't have a line of people waiting at it.

I smiled and handed her my ticket.  She quickly saw that I was at the right gate, tore off my ticket stub and let me through.  But I couldn't help saying "No?" before I walked in.  She laughed.  I wonder if she knew that I knew that she thought I was Russian.  I'll never know.

In our little international airport in China, much to our annoyance, there are no "sky ways" or walk ways, tubes, that connect the airport to the airplane that you're boarding.  There's a shuttle.  The shuttle takes you out on the tarmac to the plane, and then you get off the shuttle, walk up the stairs into the plane.  Which isn't so bad in the summer, but it's a little rough when it's -30 degrees outside.  I'm not trying to speak ill of the friendly locals in our little corner of China, and I don't want you to think that they aren't as friendly as I say, but theres always a lot of crowding and rushing onto and off of the shuttle and then onto the plane.  Even though it's assigned seating and it doesn't matter who gets on first or last.

But the shuttle hadn't left yet!  It was still sitting there waiting about half full.  They were waiting for more passengers.  Becky had since texted me that she had forgotten to fill out her departure card so they made her go back and fill it out.  The lines between there and the shuttle were long enough that I was pretty worried that she wouldn't make it.  But, after standing on the shuttle for about ten minutes, she did, she made it with a few minutes to spare.

I had also forgotten to fill out my depart card, but "the guy" didn't say anything.  I guess he filled it out for me, but didn't do that for Becky.

One cool thing about our little, sometimes frustrating, international airport, with it's funny little quirks like having to deal with "the guy" system, is that, if you can communicate a little bit, and when you're a little late, "the guy", or often "the gal", will move you to the head of the line.  Like I said before, there's only few flights being processed at a time in the airport so they usually know where you should be.

When Becky got back in line, as I was hoping, it didn't take "the guy" there very long to fast-track her back through to the front and reunite her with her family. Me.

Thanks "guys".

Grocery Shopping in China

Lately I've wondered why I haven't had anything to blog about in so long.  I guess we've been in China for over two and a half years already, and we're just used to it.  I guess it's not that things don't happen, just not things that I think of as interesting enough to blog about. 

But lately I've noticed that some of the things I've grown accustomed to are things I might think of as odd, or different from the States.

Today, as I was coming home from the grocery store, riding the elevator up to our apartment, there was another man in the elevator.  He had a delivery box of some sort, maybe he was delivering it, it had a bunch of shipping labels on it.  He looked at me curiously as there are not many foreigners in these parts.

After a few floors he looked down at my two grocery bags and said "You bought that much?"  His meaning was that I bought a lot more that was normal.  Becky and I have often noticed this viewpoint when we go grocery shopping.  It seems that the locals like to buy food every day, like it's part of their routine.  Even we buy some fruit or something at the fruit stand on the side-walk near our apartment building almost daily, but we try not to go grocery shopping more than once a week.  Why not?  Well, because we don't want to, and because it doesn't seem like the best use of time, does it? 

I think back home, when we had a car, we'd push going to the grocery store out to two or three weeks if we could.  So two bags of groceries doesn't seem like much to me.  But I guess to my companion in the elevator it was way more than I needed for dinner and breakfast.

I was thinking about this very thing as I was grocery shopping earlier.  I was keeping note of how heavy my basket was getting, I knew that I would have to carry it, on foot, all the way back home.  This a new thing I've had to learn here.  Back home where we drive our cars everywhere we don't limit ourselves so much to how much we're going to buy.  We can fit a lot of groceries into our cars.  The more you buy the less often you have to go grocery shopping.  Sounds like a good idea to me.  But here, I was thinking as I was carrying my extra deep red plastic shopping basket, even if we did have a car they don't let the shopping carts out the front door.  Why would they? There is indeed an area in front of the store where people park their cars, but you don't see people rolling their shopping carts up to their cars and unloading them into their trunks. 

And don't get me wrong, there's lots and lots of cars here, and lots of people have them, but not most.  So things are different.  Different things make sense.

I tried to explain all of this to the guy in the elevator, and he seemed to understand, but I'm not sure.

Another thing that's different here I noticed when I was at the checkout.  Here, not unlike new bag policies back home, you have to ask for and pay for grocery bags.  I always ask for two bags, but they always give me one.  Then, a minute later, I  have to ask them again.  Here, I guess, since the bag is not free, you pack it as full as you can, until the handle holes won't touch each other.  But I'm always worried that a bag will break, and I'd rather carry two medium weight bags than one heavy one, especially for a longer distance.  In other words, especially since I'm not just walking to the car, I'm walking all the way home, maybe taking a bus...  But here bags don't break.  Bags here are made of something tougher than I'm used too.  In Taiwan too, I'd buy soup and they'd put it in a bag.  The bags never broke.  Can you say that about a plastic Safeway bag?  So, again, here, different things make sense.

Another thing that's different about grocery stores here is something I was reminded of when we had guests a few months ago.  We walked into a very western style grocery store and they sort of gasped, and I think one of them said "Oh my goodness!"  I thought "What is it? What did I miss?" but then I remembered: In China, not unlike in the States, you have various people selling things inside the grocery store, they usually give you a taste test in the States, maybe it's on sale.  In China they do that too, just more often, sometimes you get a taste test, but usually they just sell things like a auctioneer with one price, by yelling over and over again what they're selling and the price.  Often they have what I'd call a "personal P.A. system," a microphone with a speaker attached to their belt.  They don't look at you, they don't say "Hey mister, these eggs are only 20 RMB, hey you!"  It's more like a monotone chant: "Eggs 20 RMB, Eggs 20RM, Eggs 20RMB..."  they never look at you.  I think they keep doing it even even no one is in the store...

Oh, and the last thing I'll mention that's different.  Most food, other than meat, is about one fifth the cost as it is in The States.  So we'll get four bags for like $35, depending what we get.

Also, I mentioned having to walk "all the way home,"  but I live in the same building as the grocery store.  It's a big building at least a block wide, and I have to walk outside and all the way around it.  And there's a dozen little restaurants along the way there just in case I change my mind about getting groceries.  So I guess the convenient distance makes up for the annoying egg hawkers yeah?

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.

Always With The Questions About Beef

Tonight is another night I just can't sleep, it's already 3AM.  I don't have any fun stories about eating pig parts.  But we have noticed a pattern of questions here...

I really noticed it this summer.  During the summer it was very hot.  I was with a friend visiting a mom and her twelve year old son.  In China, as it is in the rest of Asia and even in the U.S., it is customary to remove your shoes when entering someone's home.  It is also customary here for them to provide you with slippers.

On that particular hot day I don't remember if the slippers were too small for me or not.  It's not uncommon for people to not have slippers large enough for my feet, although there are plenty of large people here, maybe their feet are small, I don't know, but it happens.  But I do remember that I wore sandals that day so I had bare feet once I slipped my sandals off.

As we were about to leave the twelve year old boy pointed at my feet in amazement and everyone looked at the crazy barefoot American standing on the hot cement floor.

Was I cold?  Weren't my feet cold?  Frankly I didn't understand the line of questioning, it was over 95 degrees outside and inside, wouldn't cold feet be desirable?  But they weren't cold, I was hot!

The twelve year old boy joyously kicked off his house slippers as if kicking off shackles and chains.  He said that he was going to be barefoot too!

But his mother immediately told him to put his slippers back on and that the only reason that I was able to do it was that my body was different because I ate beef all the time.

Yes, beef.  I have heard this so many times: Americans eat beef.  Of course it is true, the average American eats more beef than the average Chinese person.  Everyone asks us if Americans eat lamb, or sheep.  Yes, we tell them, but a lot of people don't like it, we don't eat it as often as beef...  I must have said it a hundred times!

Just what does that kid's mother think will happen to him if he doesn't wear slippers in the house when it's hot outside?  Is she worried that he won't put them back on in the winter and it gets cold out?  Actually it makes sense to me that the locals here insist that slippers should be worn, the floors are usually cement and usually cold and hard.  Cold is a very real thing to be reckoned with here. It's just strange to me that we need a wive's tale about how you must wear slippers at all times so you don't die.  Seems like kids would just want to do it on their own when it was cold.

Now recently it hasn't been hot outside, it's actually very cold.  And I wear a huge down filled jacket, hat, mittens, insulated pants, thermals, everything, it all keeps me warm.  But the trouble with all that insulation is that when I get inside and I can't take it off right away, or I have to hike up five flights of stairs:  I tend to sweat a lot.

So I usually wear a teeshirt and sometimes a flannel shirt under my huge jacket so that I can quickly take off, or open, my jacket and flannel and cool off as fast as possible, which I do often.  But so many times I get comments about how "lee-hai" I am wearing my t-shirt.  "Lee-hai" I think can translate into "fierce".  They seem quite impressed, even though people here ride motorcycles through the -35 degree wind bare faced with shaved heads, no helmets, scarves, or hats.  -35 degrees is crazy cold, it makes the exposed parts of my skin burn within seconds when I'm just standing there, with a hat and a scarf.

I am always confused by the questions.  You think I'd just learn to move past it, just nod my head or something.  But every time these questions and comments flabbergast me.  Did they not see the huge four-inch thick jacket I just peeled off?  Or didn't they notice the sweat dripping down my face and that I also took off a sweat wet flannel? Does the temperature inside, which is usually quite warm, feel different to them?  (Actually it probably does)

And, yes, of course I've been asked more than once if I can wear T-shirts in December because I eat beef all the time.  Recently I was asked that in a restaurant right after lunch, but the person who asked had just ate beef and lamb with us, we all just ate the same thing.

I think I need to turn the tables on the people here and turn the questioning back around on them.  Maybe I'll ask them if they're wearing long sleeve shirts because they eat rice or noodles every day...  Or maybe I'll just get over it and learn to just nod my head:  Yep, I eat beef every day, that's why I am the way I am.  Slippers? Don't need 'em! I ate beef for breakfast this morning.

Eyes Wide Open & Other Things Dried Open

It is 2:30 AM, sharp, as I'm typing this blog entry.  I can't sleep, I can't stop thinking, my eyes are wide open.  You probably know the feeling.  Years ago I made agreement with myself not to just lie in bed staring at the ceiling for hours on end, while not sleeping, when I could be doing something a little enjoyable or productive, while not sleeping, instead.  I might as well be doing something. Sometimes I read, sometimes I write computer code, and sometimes... I blog.

Tonight, Becky and I ate at a fancy restaurant called Pizza Hut.  You may laugh, but it is a little fancier than the Pizza Huts that I've been too in the U.S., and the menu is quite diverse, and fancy.  It is also open until 10:30 PM, being the primary reason we chose it while walking towards home through a mall whose stores were all closing at 9:00 PM.  But this blog entry isn't about Pizza Hut, I feel like I've already explained Pizza Hut in a previous blog.  Did I mention that Pizza Hut is not directly associated with the Pizza Hut in the U.S?  Anyway we had half of a left over pizza to bring home.

Dave and Irene were also not at home while Becky and I were eating our fancy dinner at Pizza Hut.  They were somewhere in some other part of town, kilometers away, saying their farewells to some friend of theirs that Becky and I'd never met.  I guess their friend was going back home to Korea or something.

A couple hours later, after pizzas had been boxed, and farewells had been said, Becky and I heard Dave and Irene come in through the front door while talking to each other.  We hadn't been home for very many minutes ourselves so we went out from our room to greet our old room-mates as they shed their thick warmth protecting jackets, boots, gloves and hats.

Dave and Irene have moved back in with us, it's the second day.  For about a month, after they got back from the U.S., they were living in an apartment across town, but it turned out to be too expensive there.  Rent is paid a year in advance here in China, and they were lucky to get 7 months of their rent back after staying that month.  So for Becky and I it has been kind of like "old times" when we first moved into this apartment as guests one year and 22 days ago.  It's nice being able to tell jokes and complain about the weather with friends in one's native tongue.

We shared our leftover pizza with them, which all four of us were excited about.  "It's almost like a real pizza!" we told them.  Pizza that tastes like pizza is hard to find here.  Apparently people on the other side of the world have different likes and dislikes when it comes to things like pizza.  Most pizza has shrimp on it here.  Also corn, peas, and other things are what people want to see on their pizza here. Becky and I have noticed that even the Pizza Hut pizza has basically no pizza sauce on it.  I never realized that I liked pizza sauce until I ate pizza without it.  It's just a little off.  Dave ate his two slices cold, like a man, but Irene heated hers up in the big toaster oven.

But my favorite part of the evening wasn't the leftover pizza that Dave and Irene were happily eating on the other side of our little breakfast table, the four of us sitting there just before midnight.  It was the lively conversation about what had happened during the day...

Dave had spent part of his day in a leather shop.  We are all good friends with, and frequently visit, the leather craftsman: Mr. Han.  Actually I was just there the day before sharing some of my favorite tea with Mr. Han and one of his apprentices.  But, tonight, Irene wanted to hear about what Dave ate for lunch.

Many times I've heard people back home in The States make jokes, and many have asked me if we've had to eat cat or dog here in China, or in Taiwan.  And that question always makes me chuckle to myself that eating cat or dog wouldn't be that bad.  The difficulty doesn't usually arise from what animal you're eating, it's more about what part of the animal you're eating.  The Chinese do not let anything go to waste.  And really, honestly, coming from the famously wasteful American culture I have to respect that.  It was not so long ago that China was having food shortages, people close to my age remember it, and, even now China has a large segment of it's population that still struggles with poverty. So it might even be a little insensitive to act disgusted because people may have been desperate enough to eat cat or dog here, and even learned to like it.  That being said, I have never seen anyone eat cat or dog here.  But I have, while driving by, seen two restaurants that, according to their signage, do indeed serve dog.

But today Dave told us, over our laughter, that he had eaten some pig butt hole for lunch.

Yes, sorry, it's hard to blog about it without being crass, but that's what they gave him for lunch today: A slice of the colon of a pig, with the anus attached.

Apparently the colon is quite muscular and thick, it has a lot of meat on it, I guess it's a muscle after all.  The "meat" had been smoked, partially dried, and the colon part sliced like calamari.  Actually Dave said that the texture of the colon was a lot like calamari.  He also mentioned that the "butt hole" part was "dried open," meaning that it had been cooked in such a way that it was partially open.

Of course, over our little wobbly breakfast table that's held up on one side by a two-by-four, we all laughed and made jokes about sliding "dave's lunch" over a chopstick, or sucking up apple sauce with it.  Personally I tried not to imagine what it tasted like, or felt like while he chewed it.  According to Dave it tasted fine, he said he would not have eaten it if it had even smelled a little bit like poo.  But even so, he said, he felt a little sick and grossed out for the rest of the day.  He ate it because his friend Mr. Han said it was good and offered it to him.  Dave's a good friend.

Now in case you're wondering, it wasn't a cruel joke that Mr. Han was playing on Dave.  He wasn't laughing or anything like that, Mr. Han is very kind.  Also, in case you're wondering, you will never have to eat anything you really don't want to eat here.  No one will actually force you to eat anything or be offended if you don't.  People do love pushing food on their guests, it's considered generosity and hospitality when they put food on your plate and tell you to eat, eat, eat!  But you don't have to eat it if you don't want to, you just have to say: no, no, no!  In fact, I don't think it would be lying if you told them that you "can't" eat pig butt hole.  I mean could you?  I don't think I'd be physically capable of it. But Dave is.

Actually I think this story says something about Dave, as a guy, Dave is not somebody I'd trifle with.  I mean you just shouldn't mess with guys who can eat things like that for lunch.

Selfies & Details

At this very moment, as I'm typing this, I'm sitting in a restaurant on a maroon couch, that is less comfortable than it looks, facing one of those standing reception desks with three hostesses behind it busily yelling into walkie talkies, putting things into bags, taking payments from customers as they leave.  There is a mirror-like panel on the side of the desk facing me, about 20 feet wide with six giant simplified Chinese characters etched into it.  I think the sign says something like "Old North East Something Noodles."  I guess you could call this a "Live" blog entry.

Every time a customer comes in through the front door I feel a little blast of cold air blow in from the ice covered sidewalk outside and hit the left side of my face.  Even as I'm articulating these things into this blog entry I'm surprised at how many customers are coming into and out of this place!  It's as busy as any restaurant is that doesn't have those little plastic beepers with red lights, like The Olive Garden.  This restaurant is about a 15 second walk from our apartment building and, now that I'm noticing it, I think it accounts for a significant percentage of the traffic on the sidewalk in front of our building.  I'm also wondering how many of the cars parked on the street are parked there for this restaurant...

Someone just left one of the doors open and a server walking by ran over to close it.  It was starting to get cold fast, and they don't mess around about the cold here.  There are, of course, two sets of doors separated by a little vestibule that usually provide a little bit of what I think of as an "air lock" between the freezing air outside and the warm air inside.  I guess some people using the "air lock" can be careless and leave it open.

As I was typing the previous paragraph an important looking guy, about my age, moved me from the couch to a two person glass topped table just around the corner from my couch.  He asked me if I was waiting for someone, and I said that I was waiting for take-out.  Never-the-less he sat me down at this little table and gave me a little cup of the traditional hot water, that they give you everywhere here, and a small bowl of either corn nuts or soy nuts.  I'm not planning to eat the nuts because they were sitting on the arm of the couch next to me earlier, and it looked like someone else had been munching on them.  Although the longer they sit there the more tempting they are...  I am not germaphobic so why not?  I've never been able to find corn-nuts here so maybe I've found a source.  (Edit: I never tried them)

A girl that looked about eight years old wearing a bright red coat with a pointy hood just turned around and gave me a good long stare from the reception area.  I have altered my habits a little bit in the last several months, I don't look for people staring at me as much as I used to.  Actually I just avoid looking at people like I'm really cool or something, as if people staring at me is not even interesting to me at all, of course they're staring at me, I'm so cool.  People coming in, at least when I was sitting on the couch, did usually seem to give me a quick glance at least, but not much more than that.  I guess they don't stare at me any more than I would stare at them if they were waiting for a table at The Olive Garden.

A lot of time has passed since my last blog entry, it was cold when I got here, then it got really hot! We've been to at least two countries, Hong Kong, Taiwan that I haven't blogged about.  But other than things like that I don't feel that too many things have happened that I wanted to blog about.  Even this blog entry might not make it into my actual blog, and even if it does I might not click the "Publish" button.  I usually like to blog about amusing or weird things happening.  I guess I've gotten used to the things I used to think were weird or amusing.  But tonight I figured I might blog a little bit about some of the little things, about the details.

To my right, from my table, there is a large, four foot wide, gold painted idol of that really fat smiling guy with huge ear lobes.  I think he's the god of prosperity or something.  There are a few offerings next to him: a pile of apples and some red burnt up incense sticks poked into a little bowl of sand in front of it.  Idols like these are in a majority of restaurants here but this one is very large, shiny, and occupies a very visible and central place in this particular restaurant.

As I was typing the description of the idol a young woman, in her late twenties, came around the corner apparently to meet with her boyfriend who had sat down in front of me a few minutes earlier at the same table as me.  As I was typing, staring into my laptop screen, I noticed her walk around to take a picture of her boyfriend talking on his cell phone.  She was trying to discretely take a picture of both of us.  How do I know?

This is a common thing that happens here: People will take selfies with foreigners, like us, in the background.  I'm not completely sure if they think we foreigners don't notice, or if they just don't want to bother asking, or if it's just OK to take pictures of strangers without asking.  But I can't imagine many other reasons why a girl would want to take a picture of her boyfriend while he was talking on his cell phone.  Either way she has a picture of her boyfriend talking on his cell phone while sitting at a table across from a foreigner who's frowning into the glowing screen of his laptop that he brought into the restaurant because he knew he'd have to wait a little while for his food.

I imagine that she'll post the photo she took on one of the selfie cluttered social media networks that's popular here like WeChat.  But I can't imagine what the comment would be.  "My boyfriend's cell phone battery lasts all the way until dinner time!"  Or "My boyfriend is having dinner with the actual god of prosperity, look at his huge ear lobes and belly!"

This little incident tonight was just one example of a detail of my life that is just a little different than the details of my life when I lived on the other side of the globe.  This is one of the details, that differ, something that I used to notice but that I've forgotten about since I got here a year ago.

Maybe one of these days I'll do a selfie with someone in the background doing a selfie with me in the background.

Come Grow Old In China

Wherever you go, there you are.

That's what they say, and it's true, obviously.  But sometimes it's hard to believe: "Wouldn't I be at least a little bit different?" you might think, or at least I did. 

I'd like to revise it a little too: "Wherever you go, your body comes with you."  I thought some of my body's problems would go away, or at least lessen a lot when I came here, especially my frequent neck pain.  I also thought, or hoped, that I'd lose weight like I did when I lived in Taiwan.  Maybe I'd have more energy from all that exercise I'd get here too.  But my body is the same body that I brought with me on that 12 hour flight over so many months ago.

But this is isn't a sad blog entry about my almost 40 year-old body, let me clear that up.  Actually I think I have lost ten or fifteen pounds, my neck pain is easier to manage since I don’t have to work at a full time job, and I do get more exercise walking, although maybe not as much as you'd think.  I'd also like to add that, according to feedback my wife gets, I'm considered pretty good-looking here, handsome even, probably due to my looking a lot more like Brad Pitt than the average local does.  Brad Pitt and I are both what we'd call in America "white guys," no one could tell us apart.  Actually I haven't heard anyone use the name "Brad Pitt" here, I'm not sure why I'm comparing my looks to his.  So, the point is, even though my body looks the same to you and to me, here in China, it has a different exotic "Westerner" look to people.  So this isn't a sad blog entry, just another weird one.

Last night, at about 10:15 PM, I was standing in front of the little elevator door on the first floor watching the tiny orange LED screen between the up button and the down button.  The lights in the room kept going off, as they tend to do here, so I had to clap my hands or stomp my feet several times to turn them back on again.  I really need to time the delay on the lights so that I can blog about it properly, I think it's twenty seconds.

When I first got there, to that room, by myself, the little orange screen said "6" with a little up arrow indicating that the elevator was going up.  I could faintly hear it's doors opening then closing through the elevator shaft behind the door.  Then it went up another floor and made some more noise. 

"That's odd," I thought, "It seems kind of late for the elevator to be this busy."

By the ninth floor I had recognized a pattern to the sounds echoing down the elevator shaft: it was stopping at every floor opening it's doors, waiting for someone to get on, then closing it's doors and going up the next floor, which it did all the way up to the fifteenth floor.  I couldn't help but laugh a little bit to myself when I realized it was doing this.  Only a young boy would cause an elevator to do something like this, or in this case an young boy trapped in my brother-in-law's 39 year-old body, Enoch, he pushed all the buttons in the elevator.  After I congratulated him on his prank he told me he didn't realize that I was behind him, he saw me still watching a little green bug when he left.

Both of our wives and his two kids were still back on the sidewalk watching a little green praying mantis trying to climb a brick wall. It was the first time my wife had seen a real live praying mantis.  Enoch stuck around for about five minutes watching this funny aggressive little green bug attack the flashlights on our cell phones, then he announced that he was going back up to the apartment.  I only lasted another two minutes, then I went back too.  I think I'll blame my "almost 40 year-old body" for my impatience and lack of interest in little green bugs.

Actually my disinterest extends beyond green bugs to things like Uno, the card game.  It was not even an hour before we encountered that green bug, that I was waking up to my own snoring noises in the living room of our friend's house where I was sleeping behind two people who were sitting on a mattress pad.  The mattress pad had been pulled into the little living room to accommodate the extra guests who were all, but one, me, sitting around a little low folding table on the floor playing Uno with plastic, water-proof, Uno cards. 

"Huang Se!" I kept hearing as I'd drift off to sleep, which means yellow in Chinese.  If I remember right you're supposed to call out a new color when you play a wild card in Uno.

As I've been turning into an old man I've found that I really like napping in the same room while people play games.  I guess I like people enough to want them to be around me, but maybe not enough to want to play the game that they're playing.  When I was young I didn't understand why anyone would not want to play a game, games were fun.  But now that I'm turning into an old man I don't understand why I would want to sit on the floor, with an aching back, bending my fragile neck and leaning over a tiny table to play cards that were randomly assigned to me from the shuffled deck.  I remember my dad saying "I don't like random games, I like strategy."  Well I guess I'm a chip off the old block, but I've found that even a strategy game "accomplishes nothing" in the end.  So there I lied, accomplishing a nap while everybody else played Uno and got to know each other.

Another thing that shows my advancing age is my indifference to what people think about me, at least certain aspects of me, like my snoring.  When I was young I would have been depressed at the idea that I might snore, and even more embarrassed that someone might hear it.  But now I just think it's funny, it was my gift to the room so they could have something to laugh about while most of them lost at Uno.  Only one person wins, randomly.

There are a few things left to enjoy in one's twilight years, and probably the biggest one is food.  Thank goodness for the delicious food here.  Before we were playing Uno, or before *they* were playing Uno I should say, we were all sitting at a long narrow table in a restaurant building what I've been calling "Northeast [Chinese] Burritos,"  or "Dongbei Burritos."  They are made out of thin "spring pancakes" and you pile on shredded (crunchy) potato, scrambled eggs, sweet and sour meats, bean sprouts, raw onions, and a delicious brown sauce.

I've also become impatient.  Ten of us were sitting at the table for about thirty minutes waiting for the last person to show up.  We were waiting for someone who works long days six or seven days a week and probably deserves to be waited for.  But it didn't take me even fifteen minutes to loudly say that it was silly to wait for anyone this long because our food was getting cold.  Irene Rice, who was there, laughed and said that she was glad that I was there because I always said the thing she was afraid to say before she said it. 

Saying the thing other people are afraid to say, because saying it would be rude, is probably not a good habit of mine, but it's increasingly difficult to control when I'm thinking more about the food on the table than the people sitting around the table.  I like people, don't get me wrong, I love them actually, but since I've chosen to live in a foreign country for this part of my life where apparently my hearing isn't so good anymore, and most of the time people are speaking a foreign language, I tend to focus on "the little things" or at least things that I can eat.  It keeps my attention occupied.

So that's where I am in life, my crazy life, I'm a rude, food-obsessed foreigner, that thinks he looks like Brad Pitt, and goes to people's homes to eat their food and then snores on their mattress pads while everybody else, with any manners, plays games.  Apparently I was talking in my sleep too.

Needless to say, our friends here are so friendly and so awesome, they even seem to like me to come to their homes for some reason.  Just think how much they'd like you if you came to visit.

Two Nights & Two Souls in Seoul

I can finally spell Seoul now, and I've finally been there.  Which is weird because I'd already been to Korea two times before that, all in one year. 

When I was there, in Seoul, I had the "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier" song by "The Shins" stuck in my head most of the time.  Becky was the only one around to hear it, poor thing, and I sometimes tried to add to the lyric: "I'm in Seoul but I'm not a soldier," but it was never as funny as I'd hoped.  Hoping that something will be funny is a good sign that it won't be.

To me it's weird to say things like "This is my third time in Korea this year."  I'm not a traveling businessman, or rich and retired, or young and trying to find myself, or whatever it is that makes people travel a lot.  Although I do like seeing new things and places I'd have to say that I have a below average desire to travel the world, I don't have a "travel bug."  But on our trip back from Seoul I was staring at the back of the airplane seat in front of me trying to remember how many times I'd been on an airplane recently, and it was a little fuzzy: China, Jeju Island in Korea, Taiwan, Beijing, Incheon Korea, Seoul Korea. So six times.

But, in case it sounds like I'm bragging too much about how many places I've been, I have a confession to all travel lovers and adventurists: I didn't really do anything in most of those places.  I am a terrible, stick-in-the-mud, traveler.

Even I, as I'm typing this, am shaking my head in disgust at myself.  All the expense, the preparation, hours of buying tickets online with bad internet connections, sitting in cramped airplane seats, trudging through airports, getting stuck in long security lines with only minutes to spare… and I'm just not motivated to do anything cool when I go places.  In Seoul we ate at Outback Steakhouse for lunch, it wasn't very good, and then we ate at Costco and had pizza and a hot dog for dinner, it was delicious!  But no Korean barbeque, no Bibimbop, nothing new and Korean.  Not even Sushi, which is plentiful in Korea.  OK I admit I really regret that last one.  I saw someone throw away a partially uneaten tray of sushi at Costco, and it broke my heart.

I should defend our decisions though.  Going to Korea is like going a little bit closer to home for us.  Korea is saturated with English, some things, signs and stuff, have only English with no Korean.  Korea also has things like Costco, Krispy Kreme, Taco Bell.  In Korea I can use a VISA card to buy things, that's pretty cool.  In Korea they have Google and our Android phones actually work, we can use  maps to navigate places!

Of course we don't have Korean, or even American, SIM cards in our cell phones so we were not able to use the aforesaid Google maps without some sort of free Wi-Fi connection.  It's actually a little bit puzzling to me that tourist brochures have websites and phone numbers on them when there's a good chance the tourists won't have working phones.  Although it might be puzzling to the people who made those brochures that I didn't buy one of those SIM cards that they are selling at the airport.  But it's hard to justify buying one when you're only there for such a short time.  Next time I think I will though.

But anyway, we were far more excited to be out of China than we were to be in Korea.  Let's just say: We miss home.

Even though Seoul Korea has so much English, and is so convenient, we did find ourselves next to a rice patty, with dirt roads leading into it, in the dark, on a pedestrian-less road waiting for a bus.  Our phones were both dead, even though they didn't have Internet connections they did have the address to our hotel in case we needed to give it to a Taxi driver or something. Not that we could really get a Taxi because we only had a few dollars left in our pockets, and I wasn't sure how much money was left on our bus cards.

And when I said there's lots of English in Korea, that means on the signs.  Bus drivers, and anyone else, get really stressed out when you try speaking English to them, they can read it sometimes but they can't speak it.  Maybe I just have a really mean scary face…

We ended up next to the rice patty (did I mention that it started to rain) because we got on the right bus going the wrong direction.  It took at least twenty minutes for me to realize that we had crossed too many bridges.  Yes, I'm getting a SIM card next time.

But the story has a happy ending, eventually we ended up back at the airport, which was one of the stops on the bus route, transferring to the next bus.  We tried swiping our bus cards (or T-Cards as they call them) but the bus driver made an X with his arms indicating that we didn't need to swipe our T-Cards, of course it was too late.  Then, after that, we were running through the rain, me in shorts, down a poorly lit street sidewalk that badly needed to be weeded, from the bus stop closest to our little hotel.  We even stopped at 7-Eleven, dripping wet, and got some Kimchee to eat in our hotel room. 

So it turns out that the Kimchee in Korea, even at 7-Eleven, is really good, so the trip wasn't a total waste after all.

Summer Night Freedom

(By the way, I have recently enabled comments on these blog entries if you want to comment the comments are emailed to me then they show up at the end of the blog entry)

Last night I got up to go to the bathroom, something I started doing at age 30 when I lived in Taiwan (I even blogged about), when I came back from the bathroom I quietly lowered myself back into the body indentation where I had been trying to sleep before I went to the bathroom, I didn't want to wake my wife.  About a week or two ago we bought a memory foam mattress topper for our bed, so now I can lay on my side without my arm and shoulder going numb, my body leaves and indentation.  This "lowering myself" down was a very unpleasant, the indentation from where I had been trying to sleep before was soaked with my own sweat, which was now cooled down from the fan that was blowing.  Are you sure you want to keep reading?

I'm not grossed out by sweat normally, actually I'd say that I almost like sweating sometimes, it feels purifying to me when sweat drips off my chin, as long as I'm wearing the right clothes.  Not only that but I sweat to some degree year round, I hear myself often brag "I start to sweat when it's 50 degrees outside," so I'd be very unhappy all the time if sweat grossed me out.  But a bed soaked in cold sweat goes over the line with me. 

Needless to say, it's been swelteringly hot here in northern China lately.  Just a few days ago we had three new fans delivered, the one fan just wasn't enough.  A friend of ours told us yesterday that it was 34 degrees! That’s 93.2 degrees Fahrenheit, even temperatures have to be translated here, I think in metric now.  Do you think I'm cool now because I think in metric?  I do.

So anyway, I'm laying in bed restlessly listening to the street noises, and then one of the noises compels me to get out of my now warmed up sweaty bed indentation.  Sweat doesn't feel as gross when it's warmed up by your body, or in this case: re-warmed.  Now, I wouldn't get out  bed for just any sound, at a subconscious level I knew that my sweat would start to cool down, getting grosser and grosser every minute I was away from my sleeping indentation, so I was reluctant to leave it.  But I heard someone yelling.

Yelling is very common here, people yell for many more reasons than they do in the Western world I grew up in, not just when they're at a sports event or when they're angry.  But this voice seemed angry, and it kept going on and on, so I got up to go the our fourth floor window and check it out.

I wish I could describe the scene below me better, but across the street, maybe 150 feet to give you an idea of distance, there was a restaurant, the one that specializes in donkey meat, that had it's lights on still and I could see the outlines of people standing in the door way and I could hear a scraping sound that sounded like someone dragging a garbage can on the sidewalk.  If memory serves, I could also hear a thumping sound, like someone was kicking a garbage can too.  I could also see a man standing on the sidewalk, it looked like he was yelling at the people standing in the restaurant doorway.

I never did figure out what he was yelling about, for anger or for some other reason, but I later figured out that the thumping sound was the sound of workers tossing bricks from the brick sidewalk into the back of a big blue truck.  I'm sorry that the mystery of the angry sounding yelling man will not be solved in this blog entry.   But, even though it's fairly common to hear yelling, it does motivate one to check it out and see what's going on, maybe it's human nature, or just me, I don't know.

There is still another mystery:  As I stood there watching the man yelling across the street some movement closer to me caught my eye: two middle-aged guys on the street in nothing but their boxers.  They seemed to think nothing of wearing just boxers on the street.   At that time of the night there were only a few cars here and there, so of course, it was logical to wear boxers since it was also very hot.  I guess I was wearing the same thing, just not on the street.  A minor detail.

Below our apartment there is one of several construction zones.  The construction zones are fenced in by seven feet tall plastic yellow barriers, you can't really see inside the construction zones unless you peak through the cracks between the panels.  Next to the largish construction zone below our window is what I'd call a blue job shack, where the two guys in their boxers apparently came from.  It looked like they were security guards making their rounds, checking on the construction equipment to make sure no one was stealing it or messing around with it.  One of them even stopped to re-secure one of the yellow plastic barrier panels after passing through it.

After my surprise subsided from seeing two security guards walking around in their boxers on the street, I felt myself smiling, "that's pretty cool," I thought.  When it's hot in China, just wear your boxers, no problem.  When I was in school I was taught that America is a land of freedom, I think those guys felt a large degree of freedom here in China, even if was surprising to see.  One of the guys even stopped for few minutes to gaze at the scenery and the night traffic in the distance, wearing just his boxers and flip flops.

After the two guys retreated back into the blue job shack I gazed at the traffic in the distance myself …also wearing boxers.  (But inside).

Crazy Taxi Drivers

A few weeks ago a friend of ours, Carol, was visiting from Beijing. We has just eaten a late dinner. It was delicious if I remember right. I don't remember exactly who we ate with other than Carol, but they had gone to the left to go home, and we had gone to the right. The buses stop running here at about 9:00pm, kind of early, so we had to catch a Taxi.

Taxis here are pretty cheap, it's about 2.20 USD to get halfway across town. A bus ride, mind you, is only about 0.20 USD, and the Subway, even though it has only one line is 0.40 USD, or 2 RMB, we usually say "two kuai." even when we're speaking English. Every single taxi I've seen is a Volkswagen Jetta, 90% of them from the late 90's. They are painted yellow and green usually and they have a little red meter usually in an inconvenient location next the driver so you can see how much you owe him. There are also blue taxis, also Jettas, but some people don't like them, they don't trust the meters.

I smile a lot when I get into a Taxi because the meter talks to you when it's started, first it says something quickly in Chinese then it switches to English: "Welcome to take my Taxi" it says with a female voice. Sometimes Becky and I laugh and try to explain to our non-native English speaking friends how that's funny. It's hard to explain why it's funny, and it took me awhile to figure out myself I have to admit. Think about it.

It's not uncommon for Taxi drivers to light-up when you're in their taxi, but don't worry they crack their window so the smoke blows into your face. Actually they are always pretty cool about putting it out, but they appreciate it if you tell them right before they light their cigarette, obviously they don't want to throw it away and waste it. But usually Taxi drivers don't smoke. Usually bus drivers don't smoke either.

Taxi drivers love their smart phones too. I don't think thirty seconds can go by without them recording or listening one of those mini-voicemails on WeChat that they love so much here. Imagine listening to a hundreds of little voicemails a day, like a voice mail conversation, the next level after text messaging. Taxi drivers are huge social-network butterflies, it's like the passengers aren't even there sometimes. They also love talking on their walky-talkies, often switching between WeChat and Walky-Talky.

But a few weeks ago we had a new experience with a Taxi driver. We had a hard time getting a Taxi to begin with, he immediately told us, before we got into his taxi, that where we lived was too inconvenient for him to take us there. Three or four other taxis before him would not let us in because we lived too far. (15 minutes away) But this Taxi driver let us in, even though he complained.

The second thing that happened was he quickly noticed Carol's Beijing accent and told us that he hated people from Beijing! While he was telling us why he hated Beijingers he was driving unusually fast, even for here, weaving around cars like a madman. I kept my mouth shut, I was sitting in the front seat next to him and he hadn't seemed to notice that I was American. You'd be surprised how often people don't look at your face. If he didn't like Beijingers I couldn't imagine that he'd like Americans any better.

The drive back home is only about fifteen minutes, and about halfway into the drive he was still talkative but as happy and as friendly as could be, totally forgetting about how he hated people from Beijing. Becky attributes his gradual attitude change to Carol's charming personality while talking to him. Well done Carol.

Of course my favorite part was when he blew past our street, a major street, and apologized for it. After he made the U-Turn and got back on our street he turned off the meter so we didn't have to pay the extra 0.20 USD for his navigation error. That was nice of him. Perhaps we can thank Carol for that as well. But the funny part is how he apologized for missing our street: He had drank too much. He was drunk. Yes, I guess it explained the extra crazy driving, the mood changes, even the talkativeness, and blowing past our street. Though I'm not sure why he told us he had been drinking, that part mystifies my from childhood D.A.R.E. & M.A.D.D. trained brain.

In spite of this craziness we made it home just fine. And I have to say that Taxi drivers are not usually drunk, just the one so far, they don't usually smoke, but you should stop them before they light up. We do not live each day here in fear of our lives. But we do have a few stories.

Midnight Snacks, Hinges, and Light Bulbs

I just got back from eating a midnight snack in the kitchen, it's about one in the morning actually.  Everyone else is asleep, and has been for at least an hour and a half.  Dave and Irene Rice have been a little extra tired with Jet Lag for the last couple days.

I ate a pepperoni stick from a bag that Dave and Irene brought back, a small slice of Pepper Jack cheese, and an even smaller morsel of smoked gouda.  Delicious.  It's the kind you get from Costco. 

I'm sure there are people who might read this and cringe at my midnight selections.  But you have to understand that I close my eyes when I eat smoked gouda, to enjoy it more, and I only eat the smallest possible pieces to make it last as long as possible.  Remember I'm ten thousand miles from where anything like smoked gouda is made, and I feel those miles in my heart.  I love cheese and I miss it, let's put it that way.

Northern China seems to be a land of contrasts, at least in weather.  For about a week it's been swelteringly hot and humid, reverse opposite of the painfully dry and cold winter we experienced not so long ago.  It's the type of muggy here that you feel yourself sweating as you towel off after a shower, wondering if you need bother take showers.

It's a good thing that it's warm outside too because the hinges broke off of our bedroom window.  One of the two large openable window panes is sitting, somewhat dangerously, on the window sill leaning against the frame.  A small pile of hinge parts and screw drivers is sitting next to it. 

The window pane that is sitting on the window sill, leaning against the frame that it once sat in, might be unlike anything you've seen before, unless you've lived somewhere cold like the Midwest.  It's a triple pane window, just imagine two double pane windows sandwiched together.  The hinges have an extra piece in them to support about 75 pounds, pretty heavy for a window barely two feet wide.  We're really lucky that the hinges didn't break all at once and crash down and hurt someone.

Even as I'm typing this I can hear men unloading a truck outside our un-closable window.  We live on a busy street.  We live on a busy street that is also a huge construction zone, they are redoing the storm drains and building a subway station pretty much right outside our window, not more than 60 feet from where I'm sitting.

The hinges we bought to replace the broken ones are not the right size.  We take this hinge-lessness very seriously.  We know that there is a clock ticking somewhere, counting down to when the temperature will drop to thirty-five degrees below zero.  Buying the correct hinge parts will be a great challenge, like climbing a mountain, I'll even be wearing my backpack.  I'll keep water, and the broken hinge parts in a little zip lock bag in my back pack so that I can point to them when I try talking to people who look like they might sell hardware.  No Home Depot here.

It's funny even when you use the simplest possible tactic you can think of for communicating:  You put a broken hinge in a bag and point to it saying "Do you have?"  A simple yes or no answer is all you want, but there are inevitably questions that are asked.  I know that my Chinese should be better, but I think the questions they ask are a lot more complicated that what I learned: "I would like to buy an apple."  or "I would like to give you these magazines.."  I can't tell you what the are asking me when they ask, but it's kind of fun to guess.

If you ever talk to someone who is learning English you might want to learn how to use simple words.  I think this is a challenge for most people, especially if they have never learned a foreign language.  You might think that the word "hinge" is a simple word.  But is the "hinge" on a door called the same thing as the "hinge" on a window?  After all a door has a "knob" but a window has a "handle."  Why is that?  Why aren't they both called "handle" all the time?  Of course if you call it the wrong thing the person you are talking to is bound to explain the difference to you, and you, who are already confused are bound to wonder what they are talking about, because you had to look up the word "hinge" on your smart phone anyway.

But the biggest thing about this word "hinge" that you are trying to buy one of, is like I said, you had to look it up in a dictionary.  Unless you work in a hardware store or in construction it's not a word that you use every day is it? 

But imagine the array of questions they might ask you about this hinge you are trying to buy:  "Do you want aluminum or steal alloy?"  "What is the hinge-pin diameter on that?"  "Are you interested in our rewards program?"  "Is that a metric hinge or some weird American hinge.?"  "Do you want a repurposed (used) one or a new one from the factory?"  "Do you want that in a set or just the single one?"

A couple of those questions would be reasonable I think, but I swear, I get the "rewards program" question all the time, and I never get it.  It's ridiculous how many places, little tiny shops and restaurants, have phone-app rewards programs.  But of course you have to fill out forms, and eventually they'll ask you for some government ID number that you don't have because you're a foreigner and they never thought about it.

But eventually, usually, they stop asking the complicated questions that they've been trained to ask every customer and they tell you whether or not they have a hinge that looks like the one you brought in the little sandwich bag.  And then the day is over, and if you're lucky you've only spent two days buying hinges.

But this morning the light in the bathroom just went out, and it's not just a normal light bulb, it looks special, a special size and a special socket, wedged between heat lamps.  I wonder where I can find one…