Trying Not To Be Weird, A New Goal

My time is spent much differently these days.  I spend quite a bit more time at home than I used to when I lived in "The States."  (That's what Americans call America when they aren't there, "The States.")  But in Chinese we call it 美国 (Meiguo or May Go Oh), which is how we usually talk about it.  You'd be surprised how many questions we get about Meiguo.  A lot of them are questions about how much things, like houses, cost, and what foods we have or don't have in "The States."  Honestly it's annoying after awhile.  But that's the price we pay for being foreigners.  

The benefits are many though.  Cute little kids always stare at me, people love talking to me, and a lot of people think I'm beautiful.  I'm trying not to let it go to my head.  Did you know that beautiful people sometimes get free stuff?  Like "compliments of the chef" appetizers.

But I'm not going to write anymore about how beautiful I am, nor will I post pictures of myself here or on Instagram.  It's that "flex-time" that I spend differently I'm talking about.  Our bedroom window looks out over one the busiest intersections in this city,  a couple months ago they started ripping out trees and digging holes, they are starting construction on a new subway line.  I don't know if I've ever mentioned it, but I love subways, but that's another blog entry.  So there's lot's of things to watch outside our window.  I've even recorded two videos from our window and pasted them in this blog.

The first video is a specially fitted back-hoe, I'm sure there's a better name for it, driving steel beams vertically into the ground.  The hole it's digging looks like either an elevator shaft, escalator shaft or the beginnings of a drainage system to support the new subway.

Across the Street to the Right

The other little video is unrelated to subway construction.  This video is something you might see every day here in China.  Something that a local Chinese person would wonder: "Why on earth did he take a video of that?"  It's a video of restaurant staff doing their morning dance calisthenics on the sidewalk.  They do it during the slow times of the day, before lunch around 10, then after lunch at around 3.  I remember the first time I saw them do it was during the winter.  They were dancing inside the restaurant since it was cold outside.  It was a little surprising.  I wonder if any of the restaurants around here will assemble the whole dance team and dance for you if it's your birthday here, kind of like Red Robin.  But I guess if you really like to dance, but can't make it as a professional dancer, you can work at a restaurant here.  By the way the music they play is extremely loud, it echoes off of the buildings.  

Across the Street to the Left

But I didn't really start this blog entry to talk about how "wait staff" is synonymous with "dance team" here.  The only reason I mention the dancing and subway construction is to illustrate how I occupy my time with weird things here.  I'll stand in front of the window and lean my head on the glass and stare out over the street wondering about the lives of the people I'm watching.  I think it's an isolated way to spend your time, and I think it makes you a little weird.

If you've ever thought that someone from a different country who lived in your area was little weird, but you figured it was just their culture or their different customs, maybe even the language barrier, think of me, I'm one of those people.  But I'm not weird because of cultural differences, it's not American culture that's weird, it's me.  It's probably because I spend way too much time with my head leaning on the glass staring at cars as they drive by.  It's probably also because I can't understand what people are saying to me or about me 80% of the time, so I just smile, daydream about something else, and hope it's all nice things.  It's probably because the hot water tank in my bathroom has a schedule that doesn't quite jive with my schedule because I can't program it because all the menus and buttons are in Chinese.  I've looked up the characters but they don't make sense.  The clock is wrong too.  Why do hot water tanks have clocks and remotes here anyway?  I guess it's to save energy.

Of course if you actually know me, you know that I was already weird before I came here, and that I can't blame it on being a foreigner.  But, also, you know that I'm quite happy being weird, if anything I've cultivated it over the years.  But there is a point where I need to draw the line, or so I've recently discovered.  And that's why I started this blog entry, the moment when I realized that I'm officially in danger of becoming "a weirdo."

I was on the bus a few hours ago, on my way home.  Two other foreigners got on the bus right in front of me, they appeared to be from the middle east or somewhere east of the middle east, either way they weren't from here, and they weren't speaking English.  We were all lucky enough to get a seat, for some reason the bus was empty when we all boarded it.  I was actually sitting directly across from the two foreigners trying not to make too much eye contact.  But I noticed that they smelled good.  They were both guys so this was particularly exceptional of them to smell good.  I was trying to think how I could tell them that they smelled good, wondering if I should say it in Chinese or take a risk and say it in English.

But then, that's when it occurred to me.  I was a weirdo.  That's like something a large overweight hairy sociopath says to you in prison after the guard locks the cell door and leaves.  I can imagine the two guys getting home that day talking about it to their friends: "Some weirdo on the bus stared at us for half an hour then told us we smelled good.  We told him to mind his own business in Chinese but he just smiled at us and nodded with a far away look in his eyes." 

But I didn't.  I didn't tell them they smelled good.  And if you're worried about me, don't worry, I didn't even want to say it after it occurred to me that it was weird.  But I guess I'm blogging about it, so I'm still pretty weird.

Couches, Metal Plates, Words, and Stop Signs

I was just wondering to myself what a boring non-eventful day would sound like here if I blogged about it dramatically.  So here it goes:

This morning I woke up a little late.  But that's OK, I wasn't on a fixed schedule today.  Becky woke up a little later or a little earlier than me, I'm not sure because I don't remember because my memory hasn't been working very well these days, I seem to have memory problems, it could be serious!

About an hour later I was on the tan leather couch that came with this apartment, a little grubby around the edges but comfortable.  Now just a second, before I continue, Clifford recently told me that this couch is hard and not soft, I've never noticed.  I wonder why I haven't noticed.  What else have I not noticed? I have kinda forgotten about how hard the beds are here! This could be serious!

So anyway, an hour later I was sitting on the couch, still, working on my latest masterpiece, a bit of computer code that pleases the eye like no other that I've ever typed!  After all I aspire to be a craftsman one day, a master code wielder.  Mind you I don't aspire to greatness, neigh, merely humble craftsmanship, or competence at my trade.  Should any man who works with his hands do less?  But I digress!  It's this chaotic mind of mine.  It could be serious!

I was reminded of the word "Craftsman" when I was visiting a friend of mine who is a leather craftsman, and has a Chinese "Craftsman" seal he puts on his stuff.  He was trained years ago by a Japanese leather craftsman.  Craftsmen are usually trained by older craftsmen.

"Craftsman" in Ancient Chinese (Possibly Upside Down)

With me still on that tan leather couch, Becky asked me if I'd like to join her and go outside and visit one of her friends.

"Outside?"  I thought.  "That's China out there!" I deduced.  "No!  I can do this.  I didn't come here to sit on this tan leather couch with my laptop." said I.  "Yes OK" I said aloud to Becky.

"We'll have to leave pretty soon." She said.  But she didn't say how soon.  So about fifteen minutes later she told me that we'd have to be at her friend's work by 11:00.  I had decided I'd have enough time to fix a bug in my code, but I was wrong!

So into the shower I went, stepping delicately over the little track on the floor that the curved glass door runs on top of, with my bare feet hoping that the silicon caulking that fixed the track to the floor would hold.  You see: bathrooms apparently don't come with showers here in China, they come with sinks, toilets, and drains in the floor.  In our case, we're lucky, we have two drains in the floor, one in the middle, and one in the corner where someone who lived here long before us glued in a glass walled corner shower with a curved sliding door.  It's not huge but it's plenty big for a shower.  Sometimes the water leaks under the glue.  I hate it when it does that.  I always eye that little glue seam running along the bottom outer edge of the shower when I step into it.

If I see a little water leaking, or I like to use the word "oozing", under the shower seam I like to feel strong dramatic feelings of disgust and I imagine myself complaining articulately about it to someone later.  I also feel a little unmanly for being grossed out by a little water.  But then I do nothing, other than wipe up the water, or spray it away with the shower head.  I also forget to complain about it to anyone, at least until this blog.  Now I have complained.  And I feel as I should: Foolish!

So after I got out of the shower, dried off with a towel that always smells kinda funny (not like Downy like it should) and dressed into my air dried clothes which also smell kinda funny, like the wood that my dresser drawer is made of instead of Downy.  (Downy Fresh, I should put ads on this blog yeah?)  So anyway I was almost dressed entirely except for my feet which were bare, and I came out into the living room, where Becky was, to put on my socks and shoes.  And guess what.  Becky was still in her sweat pants!  I had gotten dressed faster than her.  That almost never happens!

So after I put on my socks that have holes in them because I haven't figured out where to buy socks in this crazy town of endless Chinese signs, and my slippers, I sat and waited a few minutes for Becky.  I know I picked up my laptop and looked at my beautiful masterpiece, but I don't remember if I had enough time to finish fixing that bug I was working on earlier.  We may never know if I did, it may always be a mystery.  Actually I'm not even sure there was a bug.  It's my memory acting up again.

After a just a few minutes Becky and I were waiting for the smelly old elevator just outside our apartment door.  Then we were racing up the sidewalk dodging stares, glances, and frowns from the locals who had spotted a funny looking foreign guy walking down the sidewalk with a normal looking Chinese girl. Poor girl.

Within a minute we were crossing turn lanes, walking through the ashes where money had recently been burned for ancestors (Which is typically done at four way intersections) and on the other side of the busy street.  I won't go into the details of crossing two turning lanes and two one way lanes at a major intersection in China.

Actually the details aren't that exciting, what was exciting was the big metal plates on the road covering some sort of holes dug for construction.  The big metal plates I'm talking about are the same ones they use in America when they aren't quite done with some hole they've dug in the middle of an intersection.  Instead of filling the hole they toss a big metal plate over it that can't apparently withstand the weight of a car or a big truck driving over it.  The metal plate I was staring at, part way across the street, looked like it was slowly being shifted away from the hole that it was covering.

My thinking at the time was that those plates are extremely thick and heavy, but then so are cars.  Eventually that plate is going to shift right off of the top of whatever hole in the road it's covering.  It was making a really loud banging sound every time a car drove over it.  Actually it's funny because I can hear that exact plate banging from the night time traffic driving over it right now, from this tan leather couch in our living room.  For the last few days I've wondered what I was hearing, I thought it was some sort of fireworks being set off to scare away the spirits.

After we crossed that noisy-metal-plate-ridden street we starting walking up the wide brick sidewalk in search of some building that we couldn't quite remember.  I have recently realized that a lot of this enormous city looks the same to me probably because I'm basically illiterate.  I don't see signs that say "Spicy Noodles" or "Watch Repair" I just see signs basically say nothing, kind of like a dream, they say you can't really read in dreams.  I don't know if that's true, but I know I can't read many signs here.

It just occurred to me that I've never noticed a stop sign here.  How do they write "Stop" in Chinese?  Do they even have them here?  I'll look into it and get back to you on it.

So eventually I found myself sitting across from Becky and her friend trying to focus on words that I knew here and there in their rapid Chinese conversation.  As I sat there I reflected on what my experience here is really like and how a large portion of it could be defined by a lack of understandable words, on signs, and on lips.  And so I write words here, that I do understand, on this blog to make up for it.

Lions & Tigers & Bars

My feet are throbbing, Clifford is pouring me a beer from a can, a dark beer from Germany, not the lightly colored local beer.  We just got back from the tiger park, a park where you get to ride around an 80 acre reserve in a little bus with barred windows and look at, honk at, and take pictures of tigers sleeping and yawning.  Every once and awhile one of the zoo keepers, or whatever they are called, will throw a chicken out and you'll get to see some action for a few seconds.  Only one of the tigers will get the chicken.

This "Tiger Park" has at least 200 tigers in it, most of them roam the park freely, but many are in little cages pacing and growling.  There are even lions, a leopard, and a liger.  The spell check has a problem with the word "liger", but you know what I'm talking about.

The liger is a huge tiger and lion hybrid, it has faint stripes and a short mane, as well as that little tassel at the end of it's tail, whatever that's called.  But, according to my studious wife Becky, and her research, the liger isn't supposed to exist.  It is difficult for it to be born, nature usually rejects it.  I think Becky said it has a 0.1% chance of being born.  Anyway, once it's born, and becomes and adult, it isn't quite right.  The liger is not a very happy animal, in it's tiny cement cage, biting it's tail and growling at it.  It was attacking it's tail the last time we were there a few months ago too, only last time it's tail was bleeding a little.  I wonder what would happen if they let it out of it's cage.

But I'd have to say that the most exciting part of the day was in the cage right before the liger cage.  Becky was taking a video of a white Siberian tiger in one of the tiny little cages.  The tiger was upset because someone had closed it's gate, it was batting at the wall and growling, and acting like an aggressive animal.

There are two layers of protection between the animals and the humans.  The layer closest to the animals is a chain link fence, just like the ones around the middle school I went to when I was a kid.  After the chain link fence, closest to the humans, is a grid of welded together rebar.  The holes between the bars are big enough to stick your head through, but not big enough for a tigers head.  His paws would fit through easily though.  When we took pictures of the tigers, and the liger, we reached past the bars and put the camera up against the chain link pointing the lens between the gaps.

Now before you get all worried, moms, the humans are about ten feet off the ground too and there are many warning signs that tell you to not put your fingers through the chain link fence.  And Becky didn't have her fingers through the fence, just her phone pressed up against it.  So, to get to the point, she nearly had a heart attack when the white tiger attacked the chain link fence she was pressing her phone against.

And yes, she still has the video.

So I could have titled this blog entry: My Wife Was Attacked By An 800 Pound Tiger Today.  And then in small print: ...but was protected by a chain link fence and bars.

On the way out of the tiger viewing area Clifford and I wondered aloud to each other if they ever check the strength of the fences and bars which are already rusting.  How would they do that anyway?  X-Rays?

What's The Opposite of a Blinking Red Light?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ice City Melting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking Cold Calls

About forty-five minutes ago someone had the audacity to call me on my cell phone.  I was walking along the sidewalk, towards a bus stop, when my cell phone started ringing in my pocket.  I slipped off my warm mitten exposing my naked hand to the cruel freezing air, reached into my pants pocket and pulled out my cell phone which said "David" was calling me in big bold letters.

Normally I'd say David is really nice guy, he and his wife have taken Becky and I into their home for a over two months, he's made us home-made bread, he makes us popcorn, home-made tortillas, among other things.  He runs errands for his wife getting various ingredients that she makes into dinner or lunch for all four of us.  Dave is always helping people it seems.  I've never heard a cross word from Dave.  He makes good jokes and laughs at good jokes too.  What more could you want from a guy?  How about not calling me when I'm outside in the freezing cold Dave?

He asked me if I was with my wife at the moment, I wasn't, then he let me know that he and his wife were leaving their apartment to eat dinner at someone's house.  A very friendly, courteous, thing to tell someone that you live with, or someone that might wonder where you were.  But a very annoying thing to a guy who's walking to a bus in -5 degrees F, with a bone-chilling breeze.  No "bone-chilling" is not the right term, "skin burning" is better.  It might not sound as good as "bone chilling" but "skin burning" describes better, in my mind, what a "gentle breeze" feels like when it's -5 degrees F.   It feels like someone's mixed hydrogen peroxide with rubbing alcohol and wasabi paste and put it on any part of your face that's exposed to the air.

Actually there's no way it's only -5 degrees F out there, I've been in -20, and it didn't feel that cold.  But if it truly was merely -5 degrees F, I'd say: "It's -5 degrees, but it feels like -35 degrees."

I'm pretty sure that jumping into the river that runs through the center of this city would feel warmer.  Remember water, as a liquid, can't actually go any colder than 32 degrees F (or 0 degrees C), it would turn into ice, a solid.  So that's 37 degrees warmer than the air that was burning my face earlier today.

But don't worry, I won't be jumping into any rivers or lakes.  I'm back inside where it's warm and i'm wearing fleece lined sweat pants, a tee shirt, and a fleece lined sweat shirt.  My hands still feel a little funny from taking them out of their protective mittens for two minutes, but I'm not really mad at Dave, I just wanted to brag about how cold it was outside today.  Sometimes when we complain we're actually bragging aren't we?

And really you can't even feel sorry for me because I waited over twenty minutes for a bus in the aforementioned freezing cold.  In actuality several empty taxis drove by with their green "available" lights on,  the taxis are only about $2 here.  I'm just stubborn and I'd rather stand on a crowded bus holding on to one of those straps while the ice that's collected on my eyelashes melts and drips onto my face while I think about how best to describe a gentle breeze at -5 to Becky, Dave and Irene or in my blog.  What's the fun in suffering if you can't describe it properly?  -5 degrees F is just a number.

Three Kinds of Smoke

Today was a long day, I smell like three different kinds of smoke at the same time, cigarette smoke, then the smoke from fake money being burned on the sidewalk for someone's ancestors, and the smoke that's always been here.

The smoke that's always been here was the first thing I smelled when I got here, driving into the city from the airport.  We suspect that this smoke comes from the coal that is burned to keep us warm.  The city seems to be warmed by various "central heating systems", which I think are identifiable by large smoke stacks.  While I worry that this constant smoke is bad for my health, especially in the long run, I am glad that I'm warm.  Today was one of the cold days, one of the days where any skin touching the air burns likes a bad sunburn.  This smoke is the same smoke that I see on the little weather indicator on my phone that says: -15 degrees (F), "Smoke".  That's what they call the "weather" here when the air is bad.

The smoke from the fake money isn't a brand new thing.  We've been seeing it since we got back from Korea about a week ago.  We saw it in Taiwan back in 2008.  In Taiwan you couldn't walk very far on any sidewalk without tripping over a coffee can sized burning barrel full of fake money.  People buy fake money, made from special paper, that they can burn for their ancestors.  That way their ancestors will have money to spend in the spirit realm.  I wonder who's face is on the bills.  I imagine that the exchange rate isn't very good.

Here in China they practice the same burning of money for their ancestors.  One difference though is that they do it in busy four-way intersections, and they don't put it in any sort of can or barrel, they just burn it in a pile on the pavement.  A friend of ours told us that they burn it in the intersections so that when their ancestors come by to pick up the money they can quickly be on their way.  Kind of like a drive-thru I guess.  I imagine people don't want their dead ancestors to stop and visit either.

It's hard to cross the street without weaving through a few burning piles of ash.  So I'd smell like smoke anyway.

The cigarette smoke is new, fresh you might say.  China has no shortage of "No Smoking" signs on buses and in buildings.  But, while I'm not sure of the laws about it, restaurants do not necessarily have "No Smoking" signs.  Honestly I never looked, there's a good chance that there actually was  one.  I guess when it's -15 degrees (F) outside it's even harder to get people to go outside to smoke.

I haven't really experienced this in a restaurant until tonight.  It seems that most restaurants I've been too don't have people smoking inside.  But tonight was a little extra special, the restaurant we went to was a lot more "Chinese", or a lot more of a local favorite than many of the restaurants we've been too, which may have been more like chains or more catered to foreigners.  The restaurant we went to tonight just seemed extra Chinese to me.

The first floor reminded me of a standing auction or something.  It was loud, and full of fish tanks with huge limpets, a cute little turtle, and lot's of fish, the kind you eat.  There were young women wearing red caps standing around with cell-phone like devices in their hands taking orders from people who were standing around looking at pictures of food on the walls.  There were also plates of food covered in plastic wrap set out to look at.  There were at least a hundred cases of the local beer stacked against the walls, and think along the stairs too.  I don't remember anyone actually sitting and eating at a table on the first floor, it was more like a market or a tiny airport.

We were led to this exciting restaurant by our friend.  We had invited him and his wife over for dinner but his wife wasn't feeling well so it was just hime and he couldn't eat fish.  The place we had planned to take him was a fish restaurant.  Needless to say I was kind of surprised that the majority of the food I was looking at pictures of had fish in it.  Not to mention the fish tanks.

The large colorful pictures of the various dishes you could order were not as helpful as you might imagine, but we managed to order four dishes for our little table of three.  We got a table card from some other person, I think she was wearing a black cap.

All the tables were upstairs, there were at least four private dining rooms, lined with low glass windows looking in.  Private rooms seem to be extra popular here.  There were three little kids playing next to windows facing our little table.  Every once and awhile I'd make a face at them or wave.  One of them tried talking to me through the glass.  I said "What?"  Eventually he came out the door so I could hear hime, but I still said "What?"  I said it in English just to be annoying.  That's how I am.

Often times there is something that triggers my desire to blog about it.  It's usually not even the thing that I focus on in the blog, like how this blog starts out talking about smoke.  The thing that triggered the blogger inside of me was the bowl of fish that was set or table, the first thing that showed up.

This bowl, the first dish that showed up at our table, was huge.  It was almost a joke size, It must have been two feet across.  I took pictures of it but the pictures, like the grand canyon, just don't look as big as it actually was.  Maybe it just felt extra big because I was aware that there were only three of us to eat all this fish.  Yes.  Fish.  I'm not sure why we ordered fish when the whole reason we came here was because our buddy wasn't able to eat fish.  Oh well.  It was full of hot peppers and tongue numbing peppercorns, delicious.

Of course it turns out that the bowl was mostly full of bean sprouts with a layer of fish floating on the top to make it look like more food than it was.  Even so it was a lot of food, and there were three other dishes, though not quite as expansive.

The dinner was pleasant other than the two guys sitting right behind us smoking cigarets.  On their second round of smoking our friend started waving the smoke around with his hand.  I told him that waving the smoke around wasn't doing us much good, it didn't have anywhere else to go, but eventually the smokers notices is smoke waving and apologized and moved to some other room or went outside.  I guess waving smoke around actually does help sometimes, and I guess smokers here are pretty nice about it if they notice.

Our dinner guest, who guided us to this restaurant, told a few times us that this restaurant was very popular with the locals and very well priced.  I believed him.  I've heard that the way you rate a Chinese restaurant is by how loud it is, by how many people are in it talking loudly and enjoying their food.

He told us too that it wasn't a popular "foreign" restaurant, mostly local.  I believe him there too because as we were finishing our dinner and as plates were being cleared away one of the "foo woo yen" (waitresses) gave us a small questionnaire.  Initially she gave it to him, since he had done most of the talking, but he asked her if she wanted me, the white guy, to fill it out in English.  She loved the idea.

After I wrote a short note complementing the food and the service I felt like I was the first westerner to ever eat there.  As we were walking towards the stairs Becky pointed out to me that our friend was translating my little note out loud into Chinese for five people behind the counter.

Of course this certainly isn't an every day occurrence in our life here, people usually don't care or even seem to notice that I'm a white guy in Chinese city, but I thought it was fun and I thought I'd blog about it.

So that's the story of why one of the three smokes I smell like is cigaret smoke.  I'm going to take a shower now.

Korea

Well I'm in Korea now.  To be precise: I'm on Jeju Island, South Korea, in the Best Western Hotel.  We will be here for six days total.  Our primary purpose coming here is to get our passports stamped. This resets our Chinese Visas which, although they last ten years, only allow 60 day visits.  So we're technically tourists touring Asia, technically and practically.  I'm not sure where we'll go next.

Before you get excited, thinking that we're seeing amazing sites and drinking fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them, I'd like to point out that we plan to spend a majority our time on Jeju Island in our 13th floor hotel room.

The first time I ever go to a country I start looking around at things, looking for things that I've never seen, new things.  In this case: Korean things.  The first thing I remember seeing Korean was the written language.  Like any airport, there are at least three languages on every sign. Here they have Korean, English, and Chinese.  Anything that's not a sign, or not meant to be read by as many people as possible, is in Korean.  Something I wouldn't really notice back home in America.  In particular I remember seeing lots of Korean writing on two 7ft tall metal boxes with lights on them that flanked the escalators.  We think that they were some sort of security scanners, but we couldn't read Korean.

Then, of course, there's spoken Korean, the language all the airport employees speak to each other.  To a large extent they spoke it to us too, the visitors coming through immigration.  I was standing in the very front of the line, obediently behind the yellow line, watching my wife talk to the quarantine agent ahead of me, when I felt someone squeezing past me in line.

A short middle-aged Chinese woman burst past me, slipping past my wife and the agent sitting in his little booth, and into the area beyond the barriers where only people who had been approved by the government quarantine agents were allowed to be.  He yelled at her in Korean as she ignored him and kept walking.  I felt my eye brows raise as I glued my eyes to her back pack, making sure not to lose sight of her, I expected him to run out from behind his desk and tackle her, or security guards to pounce on her.  But none came.  Eventually, after maybe a minute, she came back and walked back through the line pretending nothing had happened.

As a rule-following oldest child, and according to child-order psychology, I always find it interesting to see what happens when people break the rules.  Usually nothing.  Thankfully international air travelers can rest easy: although she was able to break through the quarantine barrier, she returned to the back of the line with her small yellow form, that she had honestly filled out like the rest of us, with a list of symptoms and yes/no check boxes.  Let's call that a "Korean Quarantine" even though it's exactly the same as an an American quarantine we can call everything "Korean" here because we're in Korea.

After we got through all the check points and retrieved our luggage we were outside looking at more Korean things, like palm trees.  Even though it's just the right temperature outside for snow, Jeju Island is apparently covered in palm trees.  Yes I know that Korea isn't the only place with palm trees, but I didn't see any in China.  So, now, when I think of Korea I'll think of palm trees.

Jeju Island looks a lot like California to me (probably because of the palm trees), mixed with China town, but with that circular Korean script written on all the signs.  In many ways it looks more like China than where I've been living for the past two months.  But it smells a lot better than China, the air is very clean here, and the plumbing and sewers seem to work correctly.  Sorry China, I try not to say mean things about China, but it's the truth: China smells bad.

Becky and I went out for lunch at 3pm, but most places are closed at 3:00 I guess, so we ended up eating fried chicken.  But on our way back to the hotel we saw a tank outside a restaurant full of little octopuses, one my favorite animals, some were stuck to the glass, one was walking all octopus-like across the bottom, and another one was swimming back and fourth.  It makes me kinda sad that people eat such wonderful little creatures, but I also find them delicious.

The thing that surprises me the most is Korea's lack of chairs, they just use the floor.  At the Best Western here you can even get a room with no beds or chairs, just a hardwood floor and maybe a few sleeping mats hidden somewhere.  Everybody sits on the floor.  When we were flipping through the channels on the TV in our room we saw a reality show that showed the inside of a few apartments, everyone was on the floor, there were no chairs in sight.  The dinner table was a foot or two off the floor.  Even as a skinny kid I found sitting on the floor to be a pain in back.  Now as an old fat guy, I'm crossing Korea off of places I could live.  Although I guess I could just buy some chairs and turn down all invitations.  Either that or I could invent pants with an inflatable chair sewed into the butt.

Snow World Part 1 - Freezing Electronics

I always thought that electronics, computers and phones, liked to be cold.  Probably because some super computers have super cooled chips.  But that's only partially true with smart phones, some parts really don't like the cold, like the battery.

A Few days ago Becky, Jessica, and I, put on our warmest long-underwear, our woolen long-sleeved moisture-wicking undershirts, our down-stuffed jackets, you get the idea. Then, after getting a little lost, we met three of our friends, got on a bus for about 45 minutes, then we got off a little sweaty from all the clothes we were wearing.  After getting off the bus we walked for several blocks through the city to the riverside.  It started to get exciting when we saw pillars lining the sidewalk that were made from ice blocks.

Although it has nothing to do with the story, when we got to the riverside there was a big IMAX theater where I thought about trying to watch Star Wars.  Star Wars only came out a couple days earlier here in China and I hadn't had any time yet to go see it.

At this point, standing in the frozen riverside park, we were starting to feel the wardrobe mistakes we had made that morning.  Jessica and I both felt that we'd feel more comfortable if we'd worn more layers of pants, our legs were cold.  My jacket was warm, but I felt little drafts hear and there when the wind blew.  One of our friends asked us if we wanted to warm up in the hotel or start walking to our destination.  It was a long walk.

In the end, although it was barely noon, we had to make a few phone calls and reschedule dinner otherwise we'd have to rush ourselves across the river, see snow world, and rush back.  So, thankfully, we walked towards the hotel.

The hotel was quite beautiful, it's lobby had massive marble columns and a huge sweeping marble staircase.  Along the side of the sweeping staircase there was series of about 50 bathtub sized glass bowls each suspended from the ceiling a little higher than the next.  Each bowl was pouring water in the next bowl until they reached the bottom where the last bowl spilled out into a fountain.  So this was where we hung out for fifteen or twenty minutes, huddled in the corner of this huge swanky hotel lobby where we had found a small sitting area.  There were a few other people there that looked like they were resting too, I think the girls used this time to insert "foot warmers" into their boots.  Personally I felt a little out of place surrounded by all that marble and granite.  But it wasn't long and we were walking across the street towards the river and "Snow world".

There were a few hundred people on the river.  I should point out the temperature was about -10 degrees Fahrenheit, that's 42 degrees below freezing.  (I think 42 degrees above freezing is 74), so when I say "on the river" I mean people that were walking, running, and playing on ice.  I also saw a little marina near by with little boats in it's docks, all frozen solid into the ice.

On the ice there were dogs tied to sleds, horses, snowmobiles, six wheelers and four wheelers with sleds tied to the back of them.  There were people ice skating, playing games, people selling ice cleats, food, scarfs, hats, and everything else.  Then there were six of us walking slowly and carefully across the ice.

I was in the back of the pack walking the slowest.  The ice was smooth and slippery.  I felt like every step I took slipped a little.  After walking about a hundred feet my thighs and legs were already starting to feel fatigued from using my seldom used anti-slipping muscles.

I was starting to worry.  We had to walk exactly 1.0 km on the ice and I was already starting to feel it at 0.2% of the distance that I was planning to walk.  But thank goodness, after another hundred feet the smooth ice disappeared and was replaced with packed snow, a hundred times easier to walk on.  The smooth ice, behind us, had been cleared off for ice skating and stuff.  But I didn't know this when I started walking.  Thank goodness!  I almost back ashore and watch Star Wars in the IMAX.

 About halfway across the river the cold started to get to us.  I kept trying to take pictures but my hands would go numb so quickly, in seconds instead of minutes.  Thank goodness I had mittens so I could make fists inside of them to warm my fingers. We also started to realize that our phones weren't working.  It was too cold, the batteries were dying!  I guess the chemicals inside the batteries were not able to produce enough electricity because they were freezing.  One of our friends who had been around for a few years said we couldn't keep our phones in our outside pockets or they would freeze like that.  So I kept my phone in my pants pocket, which was covered by my big down jacket.

Keeping it there, in my pants pocket, kept my phone working.  But to actually use it I had to take it out, and I had to use my bare hands to operate the touch screen.  At one point during the day I tried taking a sphere photo.  A sphere photo is a camera feature of many phones that allows you to take pictures in every direction then, when you're done, it stitches them back together into a rotating sphere.  It's like being there almost.  It usually takes a few minutes to take all of the pictures to do this, maybe fifty pictures in three minutes, but my phone died completely right after the last picture and I lost all of the fifty sphere shots.  Which is too bad, I liked that one.

And with that sad note I'm ending this blog entry, I'm tired.  I'll add another one about Snow World later.

The Best Way Turn On The Lights

Maybe I'm just in a silly mood tonight, or maybe the word is crass... but I think I'll tell my blog about it.

Becky and I had just started walking down seven flights of cement chairs in an old apartment building when the lights went out.

Normally this would be a little scary, you'd want to slow down and make sure of each step, especially those last few steps when you either think there are no more and you fall an extra eight inches.  The other thing that can happen is that the landing comes up quicker than you thought.  Which feels weird, I think you could fall over if you are going too fast or something.

But we weren't scared because we are not in a normal place.  Either that or this place is normal and the place we're used to is abnormal.  But from the perspective of most people reading this blog, and the one writing it, we are in a fantastic, strange, and exotic place!

Becky stomped her foot loudly which turned on the lights.  The lights in most hallways and stairways are activated by loud sounds here, I'm not sure if it's a clapper.  I think the lights usually only give you about five seconds, maybe less, before they turn off again.  We went down another floor, but this time Becky made an explosive sound with her mouth which worked, the lights went on for another flight of stairs.

Maybe China brings down my maturity level, or maybe it's just me, or just the 12-year old boy in all men, but Becky's noises gave me an idea: what if I farted?  I planned to try it on the next floor.  Why not?  It was just the two of us.

But Becky stomped her foot before I could make any noise.  I quickly told her how she had ruined my experiment.  She understood immediately how important it was too me and slowed down to let me barge ahead.  But then, after half a dozen steps she pointed out that she was behind me and that she no longer wanted to be a part of the experiment.

So now I finish this blog entry with an untested experiment.

But stay tuned, it is just occurring to me that the lights just outside our apartment door are also sound activated!

Boxes of Garbage

Since we've been here, a little over a month, we've helped our room-mates accumulate boxes.  We've procured two air-purifiers, a humidifier, a queen sized memory foam mattress, a computer case, a computer power supply, plug strips, two sets of curtains, and two bedroom dressers.  Most of these things have actually been ordered online (taobao.com), the Chinese version of ebay, and delivered to us through a delivery service in big cardboard boxes.

For awhile we kept most of the boxes, you never know if you're going to need to take it back.  Actually we had to take the humidifier back. It burnt out after only one day of use.  Our apartment is pretty big, three rooms, and two bathrooms, with two couples living in it.

We have a third room that we've been using as a workshop.  Dave has all kinds of tools, a few dozen wood chisels that he ordered on Taobao, a few funny looking saws, a weird looking hammer, and a few other things, just no power tools.  He even built a workbench without using any nails and attached a couple vices to it (also ordered on Taobao).  (Sometimes he tracks sawdust and wood shavings onto the big brown shag rug that sits in the center of the apartment with his socks.)  He also shares his workshop with all of our boxes and packing materials.  That is, until recently...

Recently Dave and Irene moved the workbench to the end of the room, cleaned up all the last remnants of wood shavings, and put that foam mattress they ordered on the floor and made it up as a bed.  We're expecting a guest soon.

For a majority of that day, or maybe it was two days, we had two big boxes next to our door stuffed with packing materials.  Throughout the day extra garbage from the kitchen was added to to boxes since they had the same destination as the kitchen garbage anyway.  I think I threw an orange peel into one of them.  They were getting full fast.

Eventually I had to go somewhere for some reason, either that or I had just been somewhere, and I grabbed one of the boxes, all that I could carry, and carried it down four flights of cement stairs.  There are two smallish garbage cans outside our "lobby" door on the sidewalk, the box was much bigger than either of garbage "cans" so I just set the box next too it, still full of garbage.

I wasn't entirely sure that it was "cool" do do that, to put garbage next to the garbage can instead of inside of it.  Even though I would never describe China as a clean place I assumed that they have rules about these types of things.

One thing that confused me, as I was doing this, was the size of the garbage cans.  There were two, and if I put them together they still wouldn't be as big as only one of those green plastic garbage cans that they have at every house in the U.S.  But these two little garbage containers were for the residents of an entire 15 story building!

But the funny part happened after I got the second box.  I hiked back up four flights of stairs, checked out some network cables on the third floor that were hanging out of the wall, (I think I found where our Internet connection is piped into the building) Then I grabbed the second box of garbage and huffed it down the stairs again.  I used the stairs because I assumed anyone who might be in the elevator wouldn't appreciate sharing that tiny space with a box of garbage, even though it kinda already smells like it.  When I got outside the building to set the second box of garbage next to it's brother, it was gone!  The box of garbage, big enough where I couldn't wrap my arms all the way around it, had disappeared.  Someone "stole" our garbage!  Either that or I timed it just right and the garbage had just been picked up by the Chinese garbage trucks.

Fifteen minutes later I had returned to the apartment, via the elevator, and we were leaving to go somewhere to buy something, or eat something, or whatever, and I looked over at the garbage cans: no box.  Someone had pilfered the second box of garbage too!

I mentioned it to my wife, and whoever else was with me at the time, and we all decided that it was probably taken away by the people we occasionally see going through garbage cans apparently looking for things to recycle.  I've certainly had much slower service at restaurants.  Maybe next time I'll leave a tip.

Sidewalk Games

When I walk the sidewalks of this huge city, this boundless Chinatown, I watch people's eyes.

I don't watch out of curiosity about what they are thinking, but out of self absorbed curiosity about whether they will notice my foreign face or not.  I guess it's like a game I play, trying to catch someone staring.

But this has proven to be a disappointing game, no one looks at me or seems to care about my face.  Maybe the locals are used to seeing foreigners, (which is weird because I never see any), or maybe their eyes don't rove around like mine, or maybe I'm just not quick enough!

But I've been doing something a little different lately: I've been covering most of my face.  At first I thought no one would look at me at all because they couldn't see my foreign features under my black face cover.  Which, other than the cold, was one of my reasons for wearing it, to hide my face.  But, to my surprise, I got way more stares and double-takes walking along the sidewalks.  I couldn't figure out why.

Now that I wasn't playing the game anymore, trying to catch stares.  It bugged me.  I was supposed to blend in.  Why were people staring at me?

Then after a few days of sidewalk double-takes I looked at my refection in a window.  I was kind of surprised by what I saw, by what I looked like peering out over my black shroud.

I looked kinda scary.  My eyes were deep set, peering back at me under the shadow of my pronounced eye-brow-ridge.  The bridge of my nose accentuated my oddness even more, dividing what little was showing of my face in half like a fantastically steep mountain range.  It's a miracle that I can see things directly in front of me!

Of course I might be exaggerating and being a bit dramatic about what I saw in that reflection but keep in mind that I've been looking at almost entirely Asian faces on the sidewalks for the last month or so.  Asian faces tend to have smoother faces, shallower eye sockets and nose bridges, than the average Irish-Norwegian like myself.  But when they see my whole face it must just look like a Westerner's face, a common and not unusual thing to see here on TV, on billboards, and every now and then on the side-walk.  But when you cover the rest of the face and show only the part that differs the most, the eyes and nose bridge, it seems to throw people off when they get close enough to see it.  It all happens too fast when you're walking towards them.  You get a lot of double-takes and stares.

Then again I don't know if I've seen anybody else wearing black fabric over their face like I do.  Maybe they're just staring at the weirdo dressed like a ninja terrorist.

Outside Pants

A few nights ago I stepped through a "hole in the fence" into a gated community.  It was dark outside and I was behind Dave, Irene, and Becky, all of us walking silently in the cold.

It wasn't really a "hole in the fence" like you might normally picture, more of a doorway intentionally built into in a gate with a very high threshold to step over, 18 inches or so.  For some reason whoever built the wall around the community built it with big iron gates that had little doorways for people that remind me of those doors in submarines and navy ships that you have to step over the threshold to get through.  I think they make them like that, on boats, so that they can be closed and sealed against water in case the ship starts sinking or taking on water.  In this case I think they built doorways in the fence with high thresholds for structural reasons, so the gate didn't wobble.  By the way: the gate was built for cars with a little "man door" off to the side, the door that I'm talking about, in case you're trying to visualize it.  The gate is connected to a big thick wall that goes around this particular community of tallish apartment buildings.  One of these buildings had an apartment in it that had a delicious Korean dinner being prepared for us as we marched carefully over the ice.

Of course dinner was delicious and the company was charming.  After dinner I found myself building a little pile of sunflower nuts and a bigger pile of shells on the dinner table.  Our gracious hosts had brought out pomelos and a big bag of unshelled and unsalted sunflower seeds.  Dave, Irene, Becky, and I go through a bag of sunflower seeds almost every day. They roast them and sell them on the sidewalk near our front door.  So there we were chatting it up with our friendly hosts and eating our favorite snacks when Irene started to talk about her pants.

For a low price you can buy special pants, here in the coldest corner of China.  Pants that will keep you warm.  We've been calling them "Cellulite Pants" because of the way Dave's legs look when he wears them under his jeans.  They are made of a thick, maybe an inch, layer of cotton stuffing sandwiched between two thinner layers of fabric.  There are little dimples every inch or so to hold it all together.  A little like the comforter on your bed, but in the form of pants.  I don't own a pair yet but everyone who wears them says that they are incredibly warm.  And, yes, they make your legs look fat.  But it's worth it.

Irene owns a black pair of these cellulite pants, she's had them for a couple weeks now.  And, as I shelled sunflower seeds, she started telling our charming hosts about a conversation she had with her local friend about her pants.  To summarize: Her local friend, a girl in her twenties, politely told Irene that the pants were "Stupid" and that if Irene wore them she would walk far enough behind her so that no one would know that they knew each other.  Irene was asking our host's opinion of what he thought about the pants, and why her friend would say these things.

At first our host didn't understand why our mutual friend, the local girl, would say something like that.  The local girl is a very sensible and friendly person, she must have had a good reason to so harshly shun these warm and wonderful pants.  Keep in mind that when you are speaking foreign languages you generally have no choice but to be blunt, otherwise people won't understand your meaning, and even then, like in this case, meanings are frequently confused.

Our host told Irene that he also had some cellulite pants and that most of the locals wore them as well.  (Although he didn't call them "cellulite pants")  Naturally, around here, no one would be concerned about how fat their legs looked, everyone is bundled up in so many layers, so that wasn't the reason.  But Irene was determined to get to the bottom of this.

I'm sorry I don't remember all the details of the conversation but at some point our host came to understand one important detail about Irene's pants that he, and the local girl, had taken for granted.  Irene was not only wearing the pants outside, out-of-doors, but she was wearing them outside her clothes.  She was wearing only one layer, just the cellulite pants.  His eyes got big and he clearly used the word "underwear" to clarify what part of the wardrobe these cellulite pants were supposed to fill.  Our local friend's shunning of these pants was becoming more understandable.  (Our local friend wasn't there by the way)

Of course Irene was in a state of disbelief at this point, still trying to get to the bottom of this, so she was asking, to clarify, if our experienced host thought that she should wear her cellulite pants outside.  And apparently he did not want to tell her what to do, or boss her around, but he kept saying "underwear".

Irene has been walking around, shopping, riding buses and taxis, possibly teaching an English class, in her underwear pants.  Of course us foreigners already stick out around here because of our faces, but Irene asked our host if she had been further distinguishing herself as the "foreign lady who walks around in her underwear pants".  She even reached down and flipped the upper edge of pants down to reveal that the inside was lined with a leopard print.  Yep, our host communicated, that confirms it even more.  Underwear.

Of course, needless to say, everyone in the room was laughing so hard that we were crying.  I had even stopped paying attention to my little pile of sunflower seeds.

A Spot With A View

A few days ago I found myself standing in an interesting spot, at least I thought it was interesting. 

I was led there, to this interesting spot, by a friend to wait for another friend to go somewhere else.  So I probably couldn't find my way back to this spot on my own.  It was a short bus ride to get there and it was in front of what I'll call a "market street".  This market street looks more like what I'd imagine a Chinese street to look like if I'd never been here.  What I'm saying is that most streets here don't look like this. It even has one of those big Chinese gates arching over the road like you see in China-town in Seattle, and probably in other "China-towns".  I always thought that was just something quaint we did in America to identify where a "China-town" starts, but I was surprised to find these ornate, but door-less, "gates" all over the place in Taiwan, and now one here, in China.  But that's where we ended up, standing near a Chinese gate listening to catchy techno music and the traffic.  I did a few dance moves, but not enough to attract attention.

I noticed something I hadn't seen yet here: tuk-tuks.  I know that's not what they call them here, "tuk-tuk" is a Thailand term, three wheeled, two seated, taxis.  That was the only place I'd seen them until now.  Only here they are completely enclosed, which makes sense because it's really cold here!  You can see a couple of them in the picture.

I thought this spot was kind of picturesque, in an odd way, looking from behind that gate looking out over the wide busy street towards a couple rows of tall slender, brand-new and probably unoccupied high-rise apartment buildings in the distance.  A little pile of garbage piled at next to the gate.  My favorite part of this view was on one of the red wooden round pillars on either side of the gate.  The pillar on the left has a two character message, basically graffiti, penciled across it: 中国.

95% of Chinese characters, graffiti or otherwise, confuse me as they confuse you, unless you happen to be learning Chinese.  Yes I've learned some of the verbal, but not much of the visual: I need to learn how to read those things, I know, I know.  But in this case I was happy and not frustrated because these two characters were very familiar, I knew what they said, they said: "China".

I'm not sure what the message really meant.  I'm not sure why someone would write "China" on a red post in the middle of China.  Most people wouldn't see unless they were standing right there listening to techno music.  I guess that's what you see when you look through that gate: you see "China" beyond that gate, but then again it's also behind you.  But that's what I was looking at anyway, and that's what I was thinking about: China.

I'm trying to imagine someone writing "United States" on some sort of unremarkable landmark, in pencil, somewhere on some unremarkable intersection in Seattle.  On the other hand, I just remarked about it, so now it's remarkable.  I might even find myself awake tonight thinking about it, wondering why anyone would write it, and why they would write it in pencil.

Ice Patches

Today I saw people sprawled out over the tables, sleeping, at McDonalds.  I walked all the way there!

I think we walked a mile or two, that's like 1.6-3.2 kilometers.  Our path was covered with little foot sized patches of ice.  Of course the sidewalks, and roads, are regularly scraped and swept of ice and snow.  For some reason when you try to remove snow like that, or maybe I should say when you do, it leaves patches of black compacted snow and ice. So everyone here becomes experts at walking on ice.  Maybe that's normal, but it's kinda new for me, you use extra muscles when you walk like that, I'm still breaking mine in.  I didn't slip and fall all day, that was my accomplishment.

I've been thinking about this ice.  Some parts of it aren't scraped and swept, like less traveled roads, they have at least six inches of that black compacted ice on them.  It's black for many reasons, there's probably a little garbage in there, and a lot of sludge and dirt.  The sludge here is mixed with many things, stuff you'd normally find a storm drain, and then lot's of stuff you'd find in a sewer, and then that stuff they scrape out of restaurant kitchen stoves.  We take off our shoes here when we come inside.  There is no running back inside to grab your keys or your wallet with your shoes on because you don't feel like putting them back on.  Nobody in their right mind would do that here.

But rest assured, you don't have to take off your shoes at McDonalds!  Actually McDonalds is a nice comfortable respite here.  Come to McDonalds, order some fries, go upstairs with your buddy, do some homework, and then take in a nap.  I haven't done it yet, but I might.  And I might actually buy something there too, instead of just going in with soy milk and a Chinese chicken pie.

Snow In China

We've decided that snow is beautiful in the country but ugly in the City. It snowed for about three days here, and now it's below freezing.  I've really only been out in it once, on Thursday.  We did pass through a University campus where the snow was quite beautiful, but that's not really "city".  Also snow seems to make more noise here for some reason, lot's of squeaking when you walk on it, kinda like the sound you make when you sit in a leather chair.  I'm not sure why it's so noisy, maybe the snow is extra dense here, it doesn't form into snow flakes, more like crystals, and so many people have walked on it, so it's packed down.  Or maybe it squeaks because it's so dry, it doesn't stick at all.

There are hundreds, probably thousands, of people wearing safety orange with brooms and shovels sweeping the snow and trying to scrape it off of the sidewalks.  There must be hundreds of big tractors scraping away at the streets with slightly modified back-hoes, all night.  It's kinda of an eerie sound, that scraping sound, that you hear all night.  I saw waves of huge yellow snow plows plowing, followed by tractors with front shovels (whatever those are called) pushing the plowed snow to the side in big piles, followed by big trucks with scores of guys who'd hop out and shovel snow into the backs of the trucks.

Wow, China is serious about snow.

Also I've got a cold, and I've had it for three days now. It's also taken me more than that long to get back to my blog site. In case you haven't heard, there is a great fire wall protecting China, making it very difficult to type into my blog, which was hosted by blogger.com, a Google service. I've moved my blog to a Microsoft Azure hosted WordPress blog.  Like you care.

Day 1 - Freeze Dried

It's 5:48 am.  Our friendly host told us last night that we'd wake up at 4:00 am due to jet lag. Obviously he doesn't know what he is taking about, 4:00 am was almost two hours ago. I'll correct him in the morning.
Oops, that's sarcasm. Sarcasm is one of those things that usually doesn't translate.  I need to learn how communicate here so I better choose my words carefully. Either that or I can use this blog as an outlet for any of my sarcasm.
Obviously Becky and I have arrived safe and sound.  Right now, as I slowly swipe this blog entry into my cell phone with my thumb, Becky is tucked into bed probably not sleeping either. I'm in the living room sitting on the leather couch wearing only jeans.  ...Just now I was curious if my back would stick to the couch, it's so dry here that I thought it might not, but it did.  Also, don't worry Mom, I'm drinking plenty of liquids.
It's hard to articulate my first impressions of China. It's cold, dry, flat, brown, smells like smoke, and is covered in a thin layer of useless dry powdery snow.  (Snow that cannot be built into igloos or snow men is useless. Also it's flat here, so no snow boarding) There are about ten million people in this area so there are plenty of tallish buildings.  The road near where we are staying is 14 lanes wide, 7 lanes going one way, and seven going the other way, these lanes are completely ignored but traffic flows. Drivers in China like honking their horns outside our bedroom window while ignoring these lanes.
The locals here are very friendly and I haven't seen any other foreigners yet.
Oh, and a fun detail, from Becky, is that fruit here is sold frozen on the streets using the great outdoors as the freezer. Ice cream bars are also sold as street food from cardboard boxes out on the open.
Well the city is starting to wake up and honk at each other, maybe I'll try to sleep some more.

Day Zero Leg 2

Ok, now we're on the plane again, somewhere over China, about two hours left. Becky is playing her favorite word search game on her tablet. "Ricky and the Flash" is playing silently with Chinese subtitles on the little screen hanging down from the ceiling 3 rows up, it looks like Meryl Streep's character has just gotten to know her grown daughter, which she apparently abandonned and left with the father, but is hitting the road again. We lucked out on this flight, we have an entire row to ourselves, and the row in front of us, half the row in front of that, half a row behind us, you get the idea. It's leg room heaven! In a few hours we'll be talking to immigration officials, handing them the little yellow forms we just filled out on the plane. I'm wondering how it will go. I've had a few language-barrier frustrated conversations with immigration officials before about this box or that box on their forms... or at least that's what I thought the conversations were about. I saw something I've never seen before today. I saw a flight attendant attach an aluminum baby cot to the wall in front of the first row. The baby cot had straps and a little pillow and it was attached to the wall a little below eye level of the parents sitting in front of it. It's probably not a Chinese thing, or Tawainese, since this is an Airbus A321-200 and the wall has sockets for it built in, but I've never seen it before. There's not that much else that's interesting that I saw today. Although I was reminded of the Taiwanese custom of having women clean the men's bathrooms while the men are using it. It happened to me pretty often when I lived in Tawain in 2008. At first it was confusing, then akward, then kind of insulting for some reason, then I hardly noticed. And now, seven years later, it's just like old times. I wonder what new customs I will adapt to next. Well this blog entry is getting longish and I can't remember much else that I've noticed so far. I will say one thing, the Chinese food on EVA, a Taiwan based airline, is pretty good, whereas the American style food is about the same as it is on an American airline: not as good as the Chinese food on EVA. Also, note to future self: bring an extra shirt in the carry-on for your next long flight. My green extra largeXbox T-Shirt has EVA Chinese food stains and Taiwanese Niu rou mian (Beef noodle soup) stains all over it. Meryl Streep's character is singing with her band at her daughter's friend's wedding, and her daughter is laughing, it seems that her attempts to form a relationship with her daughter were a success. Oh now her daughter is singing with her. Now I can end this blog entry.

Day Zero

I'm sitting in an airport terminal listening to soft Chinese chatter.  This is my first exposure to what is probably, I'm assuming, the accent of the people of the city where I am going to live for the next year or more.  Of course I have not strained my ears enough yet to understand any of it...

Speaking of understanding: My wife laughed at me about an hour ago when I came back to the table, in an airport restaurant, with a full tray of food.  My second tray.  I only wanted the fried tofu, but apparently I ordered "the meal", which come with little side dishes.  I think it was #8.  

"Here we go again" I said to myself.  I almost forgot about the confusion of ordering from a Chinese menu, pointing and nodding.

But I solved this problem by eating almost the whole tray.  No problem.  My "Xbox Music" T-Shirt, which I found in a give-away pile at work is sized XL.  

We have overcome a few obstacles on the way here.  Overweight carry-ons, a missing sock.  Well that's all that I can remember.

Ok they're boarding! Better go!  I can't wait to fill out immigration forms, or tourist forms or whatever they're called