"Happy Birthday" in a dozen languages

Okay, a dozen is probably over estimating how many languages people used this year to tell me happy birthday, but not by much. Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Creole, Swahili…

 

But instead of boring you with a list of languages, let me tell you about the most amazing birthday I could ever have asked for while living in a foreign country. The morning was pretty typical for me, although I did decide to skip my first two hours of class in order to call home. And we did have a pop quiz in the class I did go to, over material I hadn’t even looked at yet. Oops. But besides that, it was pretty normal.

 

After class, a friend from the Medical University had asked me to go down to his campus to help him with an application. So I headed off on an absolutely ridiculous attempt to take a bus to the Medical University. Let’s just say it normally takes 40 minutes, and this time it took more than twice that. But after finally realizing my normal bus choice has recently changed routes such that it no longer comes my way, then walking a while to find another bus going the right direction, standing on a crowded bus for far too long, managing somehow to get lost between where I got off and where I was headed (construction sites…), and getting soaked in the sprinklers that randomly decided to go off right when I was walking by, I made it there.

 

After a few minutes of “work” there at the school, we decided the weather was too perfect for sitting inside. So we headed down to a beautiful park along a river at the south side of the city. It was marvelous! It was the perfect opportunity to enjoy a surprisingly-not-so-full-of-Chinese-people park. We walked along the river a ways, happened upon the damn upstream that we didn’t know about, and played badminton for a while on an amazingly green lawn.

 

I had no plans for the evening, so was more than willing to spend plenty of time enjoying the park and the perfect weather. However, the guy I was with insisted that he had to be back to his room at 6:00 for something. So at the appropriate time we made our way back to campus. (Not my campus, but the Medical campus. A significant portion of my friends here are from the Medical University and not from my school, so I spend a good deal of time down there.) To my great surprise, the “thing” at 6:00 was a party for me!

 

I was really impressed that they actually managed to keep the event a surprise to me, especially when I found out that several of the others were also surprised to find out it was a surprise! But they managed, and I was indeed not expecting such a thing. But I have to admit that the whole day made me feel so loved and feel so much belonging among these people.

 

The party itself was way better than just a typical birthday party, because it started with a time of singing my favorite kind of songs and some sharing from my favorite book, and then they all asked our Father on my behalf. What an encouragement! But of course, the party would only have been a fellowship if it had ended there. So that was followed by lots of delicious fruit, some delivered Chinese food, and even a cake. (By the way, turns out it really is the thought that counts. Somehow the cake really did taste pretty good, since it was from my friends who cared enough to get it for me, even though it was one of those typical Chinese cakes that really can’t compare to anything back home.) The food, though, had nothing on the other activities of the night. Among the eight of us there, we represented seven countries. Of those seven countries, six of them were in Africa. (Hint: I’m from the U.S., which is not in Africa.) So someone grabbed a guitar and started playing some African P&W songs that I have learned over the course of this year. African songs are very energetic and just make you want to dance. So six of us (minus the guitar player and the cameraman) squeezed into the open half of the one dorm room and danced: South African dancing, Tanzanian dancing, etc. And all to music that is uplifting and encouraging. How fun!

 

However, six sweaty people in a (small) dorm room with no air soon turned into a hot, sticky mess. After we were too hot and tired to go on (or was it that they ran out of African P&W songs that I know?), we decided to watch a movie. It was a really interesting experience for me, though, to sit with 7 Africans and watch a movie about African Americans. We had an interesting discussion afterwards about that.

 

Soon enough, midnight rolled around and it was no longer my birthday. At least not in China. So we all headed back to our homes (a.k.a. dorms) and slept well. (I slept well, anyway. I was worn out after all the unexpected excitement of the day!) But I went home that night feeling very special, very loved, and very much excited about the year that is to come.

You may now kiss the bride

No, don’t worry, I wasn’t the bride. But I did get to see a traditional (Northeast China) Chinese wedding last week! A Chinese friend of mine had an invitation to go to this wedding, because the bride’s mom and his mom are coworkers. But he didn’t know the bride or groom or really anyone else there besides his parents. So he invited me to go along! Of course, I jumped at the chance.

Keeping in mind that China is huge, and so the traditions are pretty diverse in the different areas, I will now go about trying to explain to you what a traditional Northeast China Chinese wedding is like. Difference from the U.S. number 1: Starting time. I had to meet my friend in a different area of the city at 6:30 a.m. Whoa. Didn’t really know that when I jumped at the chance to go. I might not have jumped quite so high if I had realized how early I was going to have to get up. But anyway. So we met about 6:30 a.m. and walked together to the bride’s parents’ house (read: apartment). The bride was there, in her beautiful white dress, getting her hair done. All the guests who were there for the bride were there. Of course, Chinese apartments are not large, so the vast majority of us were actually several stories lower, waiting outside the apartment building. And that’s pretty much what we did: waited. I met some Chinese people who were incredibly surprised to see a foreigner show up. But they all seemed to be tickled to have a foreigner, especially the mother of the bride. She liked me a lot.

Meanwhile, all the guests for the groom were apparently gathering at the apartment that the new couple will be moving in to. The groom and some of his friends had to drive to the girl’s place to go pick her up. This comes from the tradition of a girl being taken away from her own family and joining the groom’s family, although now the “new” residence is actually just for the couple and not the groom’s parents’ place. The groom arrived around 8 a.m. (an hour later than he was expected…) Apparently tradition has it that the bride’s family and friends have to resist the groom before letting him take her away. So the girl by then was sitting on a bed with the bedroom door closed and locked. The groom showed up, and knocked on the bedroom door (since the door to the apartment itself was standing wide open and he had walked right in). “Who is it?” “What do you want?” “No, you can’t come in!” It was fun to watch the bickering back and forth between the bride’s friends and the groom, of course knowing full well that he would eventually be let in. And when he was, the random foreigner was also pushed into the room to be able to see what was going on. Sometimes it’s really convenient to be a foreigner!



In the room, the groom presented the bride with some flowers and asked her to go with him. First she refused, but he managed to convince her. :) Then they had to eat some really really long noodles, symbolizing long life, and eggs, symbolizing fertility.



From there, the groom had to carry a shoeless bride down the several flights of stairs and out to the car waiting outside. In the car, he put her shoes on her. I’m not really sure why she wasn’t allowed to wear shoes out to the car, but apparently that’s the tradition. Maybe it has something to do with when Chinese women had really little feet from binding them, but I don’t know.

While that was going on, the rest of us quickly ran off and climbed into the cars lined up outside, waiting to take us all to the next stop…



Following custom, the groom took his new bride to their new house. Of course, all of us guests of the bride went, too. Upon arrival, the groom’s guests and parents were waiting to welcome the couple with firecrackers (a staple at any happy event in China). The couple went upstairs to the apartment and took some pictures, while the guests were allowed to go in and see the place as well.

I was a little surprised at this point, to realize that we had spent about half an hour being transported up to the new apartment, just to spend about fifteen minutes there. But apparently that’s the tradition. So I just followed my friend back out to the cars, waiting to take us away again, this time to go to the restaurant where the main part of the reception would be held.

Everything that was familiar to me about this wedding was done at the restaurant. The couple came in and walked down an “aisle” in the big hall. Of course there was no pastor, but there was a cheesy MC who apparently has the authority to marry people. But only if he also can entertain the guests. So he would randomly sing weird songs for us and try telling jokes. Perhaps they would have been funnier if I had understood any of them, but whatever. I was just struck by the way China really has no concept of formal, elegant, or classic tastes. During the “ceremony” part of at the restaurant, there was a strobe light going, and the music was mostly oldies love songs. Except the electro version of Canon in D. That was entertaining. Even the way the guests dressed proves the lack of taste: no kidding, there was someone wearing an Adidas track suit. Most people were wearing jeans or any sort of regular daily clothes. Anyway.





The part at the restaurant that resembled the wedding ceremony in the U.S. included some vows, the kiss, the rings, etc. In addition to those things, it also included what reminded me of a Unity Candle… except that they lit a firecracker or sparkler thing instead of a normal candle! And at first I thought it had no religious significance, until they stood back and reverently put their hands together, waiting until the firecracker went out. I didn’t get a very clear explanation about the background of that, so I can’t pass any information along. Sorry.

The couple also had to kowtow (bow) to the parents and to each other, showing respect and reverence. Then they greeted each of the parents, called them Mom and Dad (for the first time – it’s Aunt and Uncle until then), and were presented with red envelopes. Red envelopes are a wedding tradition all across China as far as I know; instead of guests bringing gifts for the new couple, they all come with a red envelope with money inside. Usually the smallest amount would be 200 kuai, something like $30 (although compared to the cost of living, something much more along the lines of $100+). Another perk of being a foreigner: I was told not to bring a red envelope.

After the “ceremony” part at the restaurant, we had what I compared to a regular wedding reception in the U.S. There was tons of food, served Chinese style, of course. Most of the food was meat, which is more expensive so must be served to appear wealthy. The groom’s family is actually the host of this meal, though, and to my surprise doesn’t even get to sit down or eat this food. They were just wandering around the venue talking with people and making the bride’s guests and family feel welcome. The new couple also wandered around, of course, most notably to light a cigarette for every male and any female who smokes, and to give a little trinket to everyone else. Thankfully, I fell into the “everyone else” category.



This picture is simply to prove that I was actually at the wedding. I don’t want you to think that I just got some pictures from the internet and made up all this information for fun. Nope, I was there. The guy wearing the tastefully-chosen blue hoodie and jeans is my friend.

It’s impolite at a Chinese wedding to leave before the bride and groom. But since the whole event started so ridiculously early in the morning, we were out of the restaurant and heading off to our next activities by noon. Wow, what a morning!

My oldest friends in China

Last week, I had the really interesting opportunity to visit a Chinese elderly home. The students from my fellowship organized a day of outreach to various places around the city: two elderly homes, an orphanage, and several *thinking in the upward direction* walks. Twelve of us went to the one elderly home, which happens to be a Buddhist place. Obviously, proselytizing wasn’t so much on the list of kosher things to do while there, although I know there were some good conversations being had nevertheless. 

 

All together, our group saw between 120 and 150 people, and we brought little gifts for each one. (Most of the gift bags had a pair of socks and a little bar of soap, so it was fairly practical and versatile.) I was paired up with a guy from Nigeria who only speaks a few words of Chinese, which meant I was really the one to do most of the communicating. It’s really entertaining to try to talk in a foreign language with old people! But the two of us first went down the hall with probably the sickest people in the facility (most of them bedridden). We finished pretty quickly, since the vast majority of them couldn’t hear, couldn’t speak, or couldn’t do either. That made for pretty limited conversations, regardless of my Chinese ability. :) But it was amazing to see how much a genuine smile can communicate and how touched some of them were.

 

The first lady I met was a hundred years old and has been living there for twenty years! What an interesting life. She was actually quite healthy, at least for being a hundred, so she was sitting up and perfectly capable of communicating with us. The biggest problem with her was that she was still so mentally sharp, she didn’t really care to slow down enough for the foreigners. But we did talk a little about her large collection of Buddhist books that she’s been reading, as well as the vast changes that have taken place in China during her lifetime.

 

Later on, I had the opportunity to meet the oldest person in the facility: a 103-year-old gentleman. He was also sitting up and somewhat communicative, although he slurred his speech a lot more, which made it difficult for me. (Remember, this was all in Chinese. People this old mostly didn’t ever have the opportunity to study English. If they’ve studied a foreign language, it would have been Japanese or Russian.)  But he was eager to take pictures with all the foreigners who had come to see him, and it was fun to talk as much as we could.

 

My favorite lady at the place was a bit younger: 97. But to my great surprise, she was very active and spunky. She and I walked around together a bit, until she told me that I should sit down since my legs were probably getting tired. I told her that I would only sit down if she sat down with me. :) But we talked at some length. She asked me if I missed my mom, and how long it’s been since I’ve seen her. In a sort of sorrowful voice, she advised me that “your mom misses you, even if you don’t miss her.” While I assured her that I do actually miss my mom, I realized that her comments really had nothing to do with me. She was missing her own children. And that’s hard to see, that this lively lady has been living in this facility for some time now because her children won’t take her in (or even visit her there, probably). It was interesting to hear her story, and to reflect on how her story fits into the larger culture here.

 

But I’ll stop here on this topic for now. I’d be happy to share more about my reflections of the larger culture/society and the role of the elderly homes with any of you who are interested. Just ask me after I get back to the U.S. :)

long johns, citrus fruits, and other random things

Putting on my long johns in November was acceptable. December was logical. January was appropriate. February was expected. Putting on two pairs at once in March was a little less than thrilling, but I could deal. But come on now, putting on long johns in the second half of April?! This is truly getting ridiculous…

 

The Chinese concept of “late” and “early” is a bit different than most of us Westerners. True enough, at least a few of the Chinese authorities understand that to a small extent. We in the foreign student building don’t have a 10:30 curfew like the Chinese dorms. Ours is 11:00.

 

What really surprised me, though, was the day I was walking away from campus at 6:45 p.m. I happened to run into a Chinese girl I know, who also lives at my school, and so we smiled and greeted each other. But to my surprise, she then – very animatedly – told me, “Be careful! What are you doing going out so late?!” Really? 6:45 is late? Wow. If those Chinese students only knew how active the foreign student building is at night…

 

One of the more entertaining moments in my Chinese class recently was when we were talking about the possibility of repeated names. In the U.S., repeated first names are quite common, but to meet someone with the exact same name, first, middle, and last, is not so common. In China, however, there are a lot more people and a lot fewer names, which leads to a lot more people with identical names. Here was the sentence from our text (in translated form, of course): “Even if you name your child ‘Big Cow,’ you’re still bound to run into people with the same name.” Wow, that’s really unfortunate! 

 

Growing up I always thought there were four kinds of citrus fruits: oranges, lemons, limes, and grapefruits. Turns out there are whole lot more than that. (Of course, I know about tangerines, clementines, pomelos, and the like. But there are a lot more than that, too!) My newest discovery of a citrus fruit involved a little orange thing that looks almost identical to a grape tomato (except orange, not red). I had seen a lot of Chinese people buy bags of these little guys, so I thought I should try my hand at it as well. Next stop at the fruit stand, and I bought myself some little orange grape tomato things.

 

Having never seen anyone actually eat one of these before (only seeing people carry them home to eat there), I got home myself and just assumed I could figure out what to do. I mean really, it’s a citrus fruit. How hard can it be? So I washed a couple, grabbed my garbage can, and started peeling. Uh-oh. Why won’t the peel come off? I very awkwardly peeled off this peel that was hardly different than the fruit itself, and then popped what I considered must be the fruit into my mouth.

 

Turned out to be mostly seeds. Yikes. The flavour was good, but it was the messiest little citrus fruit I’ve ever tried eating. And the inside had so many seeds, there was hardly any fruit to eat! (Think about it, the size of a grape tomato, with about 6~8 seeds the size of regular orange seeds. That doesn’t leave much room.) A little disappointed, I went ahead to try another one… maybe the first was just a fluke.

 

Nope. Just as messy and just as little fruit. Darn it.

 

That happened to be right before I was having a bunch of people over for lunch, so I decided to put them out and see if anyone else knew how to eat them. Given how many Chinese I’ve seen buying whole bunches of this little fruit, I figured I must be doing something inefficiently. There must be a better way to eat this fruit.

 

Well, none of the foreigners who came that day had any idea either. So those little fruits sat on my table for a few days, got moldy, and I threw them away disappointedly. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

 

A couple weeks later, I invited a Chinese girl to come to my room for something. In good Chinese fashion, she brought me a gift… You guessed it, these little orange grape tomato fruits.  Unfortunately, she didn’t stay long enough for me to offer her some and then study how she ate them! Alas, my only potential teacher left and I was there alone with these fruits who had already conquered me once.

 

But fear not! My trusty American friend came over the next day. To my great surprise, of all the people in Shenyang (including those 8 million Chinese ones), the only person who could actually teach me to each these little guys was an American! She walked into my room, saw the fruits on my table, and was excited because she likes them. I admitted the whole story to her, and she laughed hysterically. I decided to laugh too, because I figured it was better for her to laugh with me than at me. But finally, she admitted of her own adventures in learning to eat this fruit, and she gave me a good orange grape tomato fruit eating lesson.

 

In case any of you ever have opportunity to try one of these strange little orange grape tomato fruits, let me give you a brief lesson. I wouldn’t want you to be conquered by them the way I was. It’s pretty humiliating for a fruit to outsmart you. So here’s what you do: Grab one of those little guys, and wash it nice and good. (Don’t you love my English abilities these days?) Then just bite it! Peel and all, just eat it! (Spit out the seeds, of course.)

 

I had no idea there were citrus fruits that are just eaten with the entire peel, but apparently there are. And they’ll get you if you don’t know that.

 

I also had no idea those little guys were worth so much space on my blog…

Exciting Tombs

“Happy Easter!” I say to the deskie in my dorm. (Of course, I didn’t really say “happy Easter,” but rather the Chinese equivalent.) “Happy what?” And the conversation continued, just as it had with every other Chinese person I had talked to that day. “Easter.” “Oh, we don’t have that holiday.”

 

It was a neat opportunity to share with a variety of Chinese what this random holiday that they know Americans celebrate is actually all about. One day, I certainly hope they stop saying that they don’t have that holiday. I hope they realize it’s the most important holiday of them all, and it’s for them, too.

 

But the Chinese have a different holiday (completely unrelated in the Chinese mind except in time of year). A week ago, they celebrated “Tomb-sweeping Day,” as it has been translated. The literal translation is actually “clear & bright holiday,” but that doesn’t help us poor foreigners understand anything about the day, so Tomb-sweeping Day is a more convenient name. Traditionally, it’s a day to pay respects to the dead. Nowadays, while they still do that, it seems to also be a sort of national Spring Cleaning Day. Haha! But hey, three days off is three days off… except, of course, when you’re in China and they consider a Saturday-Sunday-Monday holiday to be three days off. Let’s be realistic here, that’s only one day out of class!

 

Figuring I should probably honor this my first experience of Tomb-Sweeping Day in some way, but having no dead relatives buried here in China to go visit, I decided to go to the park. The park does happen to be for a dead person – some important person from the Qing dynasty, although he never actually was the emperor. And that important person (who’s name I can’t remember at the moment… obviously, he was very dear to my heart) is buried in a huge tomb in the park, with impressive buildings and walls around the area. The main part of the park costs 6 kuai to get in (about a dollar); the tomb area, with the walls, buildings, and a big mound of dirt that is supposedly his tomb, costs an extra 30 kuai. Clearly, the main part of the park was all the more I needed to see… but Chinese will be Chinese.  The first day I went, I was with a Chinese friend. He wanted to make sure I saw the “highlight” of the park, which happens to be that large mound of dirt, so I had to pay the extra 30 kuai. Convenient.

 

That’s why the second and third times I went to the same park during our three day holiday I went with foreigners. They had enough sense to not pay 5 bucks for a mound of dirt.

 

The most entertaining trip, though, had to have been the last one. We were just hanging out in the park in the evening, after dinner. In fact, my trips got cheaper each time, because the last time we didn’t go until after 6 p.m., so the 6 kuai part was actually free. Woot! But yeah, we were just hanging out, talking, wandering around the largest non-built-up, relatively natural looking area of land for kilometers. (Wow, that just doesn’t sound the same to say “kilometers” there instead of “miles.”) What we didn’t know… oops… was that the park actually closes, and the gates lock, at 10 p.m. Hehe. We happened to still be inside at that point, and no where near the gates to realize that they were being locked. Yeah, it was quite the surprise when we finally decided we were cold and ready to go home and… we couldn’t get out.

 

Climbing over the wall seemed like a good idea at first, but then we realized how high and smooth the walls were, making them superbly difficult to climb.  So we wandered around a bit to see if there might be another gate. That didn’t work either; we just got lost. (It’s actually a surprisingly big park.) Thankfully, in our wanderings we happened upon another lost soul, so we stopped him and asked how we could get out. He pointed us to the security office, but said he couldn’t go with us. What that gentleman was doing there that he didn’t want the security guys to know about, I have no idea. I’m just grateful he was there to assist us.

 

Sure enough, the security office had guards inside. They were surprised when someone knocked on the door inside the park, and then were even more surprised when it was foreigners knocking. They weren’t particularly thrilled to see us, but we just threw in a nice 不好意思！(I’m embarrassed), which is the most amazing phrase in all of Chinese. If said with the right facial expressions, this phrase can get a foreigner out of just about any potentially bad situation.

 

And it worked that night. They let us walk through the office to the outside world, and we were home-free. Whew.

Not all learning comes from a book

The first month of the spring semester in China has just ended, so it seems like a good time to do a little reflection. What have I learned? While my vocabulary might not have improved as much as I had hoped, and my pronunciation seems more or less the same in my mind, I certainly have plenty of stories and thoughts to share from this month of class.

 

Though none of my classmates would ever admit to it, I think the best class we have this semester might very well be our Chinese Culture class. The reason no one would admit it is because the good thing about the class has nothing to do with the subject he lectures on or how interesting it is. Admittedly, most of us are really struggling to stay awake at 8:30 Wednesday morning when we get into that room and start hearing our teacher’s impressively monotone voice (impressive because Chinese is a tonal language). But this is why I say it’s a good class: we are learning first-hand what the Chinese education system is like. We walk into class, sit down, take out paper, and take notes quietly for an hour and a half as the teacher talks. He never stops. He never slows down. He just talks. He tells us what we should know, and it is our job to learn it. Sure, I’ve learned a few interesting bits of information from the content of his lectures, but mostly I’m not too terribly interested in studying the elevation changes across China or the names of all the different changes the Chinese characters have gone through in the past several thousand years. But I’ve learned a lot from his approach, understanding that he is a typical older Chinese gentleman who only knows one method of education (even when his students hardly speak Chinese!).

 

The one interesting topic our Culture teacher discussed was about the 56 ethnic groups in China. Having studied this country for several years already, I obviously already knew some of what he talked about, but I was struck by his representation of the relationship between the Han Chinese (the majority group, constituting appr. 92% of the whole population) and the 55 minority groups, and the importance of the issue at the national level. According to our book, the 8% of the population that is of minority descent controls/lives on nearly 64% of the total land in China, leaving only 36% of China to the other 92% of the population. Furthermore, the 36% that the Han live on is primarily in the Beijing-to-Shanghai area, leaving the minority groups to live on the periphery. All of a sudden, I understand why the government has established so many laws that favor the minorities.

 

I have the same teacher for my Watching Movies class at the end of the week. (Okay, okay, the literal translation of the course name is “Watch, Listen, Speak,” but really it’s just a watching movies class. Woo-hoo!) Most of the time we’re just watching Zhang Yimo movies (he’s a famous Chinese director), but of course our teacher enjoys lecturing so sometimes gets off on various tangents about the movies. I was particularly tickled the other day when he started giving us some photography lessons based on the cinematography of the movie. How bizarre to think I could understand someone talking about such things in Chinese!

 

My Speaking class is what we call “ma ma hu hu” in Chinese. Literally translated, that’s “horse horse tiger tiger,” but that obviously doesn’t make any sense. It just means so-so. Mediocre. Ma ma hu hu. The problem in my speaking class is that the teacher doesn’t like when we speak. At least, she doesn’t like when we speak our own things, when we don’t just use the exact sentences that are in the book. Seriously, our homework this weekend is to memorize one of the texts, word for word. Because clearly, being able to recite three unknown individual’s perspectives on the internet is going to come in handy one of these days. (Sense the sarcasm…) But that’s just one of those “Chinese approach to education” things.  The most bizarre of our speaking classes so far, though, was the day we were talking about the problems related to aging populations (for the up-teenth day in a row) and she brought in a song related to the topic. Not only did she manage to find a song about such a thing, but she brought it in and made us sing it out loud together. Talk about an awkward class!

 

My favorite class, and hands-down the best class in terms of content and teacher, is my Writing class. Every week I have to write an essay in Chinese (400+ characters, which is maybe like a 200 word essay in English? So not too long). It’s been a really good opportunity to get some feedback on writing style and structure, besides being good to get back into the habit of organizing and writing essays. But I really had to laugh to myself the night I had to avoid going out and experiencing China in order to stay in my room and write an essay about alligators. What a strange experience, to write an essay in Chinese explaining to my teacher and classmates how to get away from an alligator if they are ever being attacked by one. Because, of course, that’s likely to happen around here!

 

A few other random things I’ve learned from class this month: There are 100 million people in China with the last name “Li” (Lee). Traditional Chinese music only has the five notes, do, re, mi, so, and la. I learned the Chinese term for unrequited love, which is a term I’m not even sure I know how to use in English. For some reason, using liquid laundry detergent is supposedly better for the environment than using powdered (I just don’t know why). And finally, the cause of every problem in China can be understood by one simple sentence: 人太多！(“ren tai duo!” – Too many people!)

 

Really, my Belgian friend and I have started counting every time we hear that claim as an excuse/cause for some situation, and to date, every single one of my teachers has used it at least once. There was one day I heard it 4 times before noon.

A New Semester

Now that many of you who are students back in the U.S. are already
enjoying or at least anticipating Spring Break, I have finally started
my spring semester classes. It has been a very good first two weeks,
but an incredibly busy two weeks as well. You see, I've run into a
problem. I spent the whole winter here in Shenyang, with nothing to do
per se. So I started up lots of various activities, got more involved
in certain areas, etc. Now that school has started again, I have no
desire to stop doing all those things I started during the winter, but
I also have to attend 20 hours of Chinese class a week (and
theoretically study outside, too!). So I've been a little overwhelmed
with activities… And the real problem is that I enjoy all of them, so
I really don't want to stop anything. Hm. Such dilemmas. :)

As far as my classes go, this semester is looking quite promising.
With the semester change, I moved up to the next level class. The
benefit of that move is that the higher level class has much more
interesting courses. I now get to take courses on reading newspapers,
writing essays, understanding Chinese culture, and – get this –
watching movies! The watching movies class is definitely an enjoyable
one, especially since it's the last class on Friday. What a great way
to start the weekend! Of course, I still have the more traditional
grammar and speaking classes, which are going just fine.

The composition of the class is quite different from my class last
semester. In general, the foreign student population at my university
last semester was probably around 50% Korean (we're pretty close to
Korea here…), and in the higher level Chinese classes, that percentage
increased exponentially. (I.e. in my class, I ended up with a Czech
classmate. And there was me. And Koreans.) However, apparently the
world financial crisis is hitting the Korean currency quite hard, so
many of the Koreans are finding it difficult to afford the tuition and
living expenses in China these days. A huge number of them just went
home. So in my class of 15-20ish, there are only 5 Koreans now, which
is a huge change.

Of course, I have nothing against Koreans. In fact, some of my best
friends in Shenyang are Korean. But it's really fun for me to look
around my classroom this semester and see so many different countries
represented. It really looks something like the U.N.! Korea, Japan,
Mongolia, Germany, Slovenia, Russia… even Belarus! (Ok, I'll be
honest, I didn't really know how to spell that country's name. But I
do know how to write the name in Chinese!) The Belarusian happened to
sit right next to me the first day of class, so we started talking.
When we each heard the other's country, it was really interesting.
"Oh, we don't have very good relations with the U.S." she said. So
true. But don't worry, I'm doing the best I can to alleviate the
tensions between our countries, by befriending this girl here. So far
so good. :)

The reality of starting the spring semester is that the winter
vacation must come to an end. For me, the two semesters and the winter
break just all seem to run together, since I've just been around
Shenyang for the whole time anyway. But many of my friends left for
the winter, traveling off to various places literally around the
world. The last of my friends returned last week, so everyone is
pretty much back now. (The exceptions, of course, are the few people
who were only here through last fall, so have now left for good.) Of
course, it's been fun to catch up with all my friends and hear about
their experiences. It sometimes makes me a little jealous, admittedly,
to hear of all their adventures, but I've had my own here. And it's
all good anyway, because I now have souvenirs from literally all over
the world! For some reason most of them are edible, so they won't be
making it back to the U.S. with me… but for now, I'm certainly
enjoying such things as Belgian chocolate, brought straight from
Belgium; Ghanaian chocolate, which is also amazingly delicious; and
famous Kenyan tea. Just think, all I had to do was move to China to
get all this! Haha!

oh, China

Living in China can do strange things to a person. Really. When I meet Americans living here in China, I can usually get a sense of how long they’ve lived here just by the way they carry themselves, by the way they act, by how much they have become un-Americanized.  So I was thinking about that the other day, and decided to try looking at myself. How un-Americanized, or rather, how Chinified, have I become since living here these six months? Here are just a few of my reflections.

 

For the first time in my life, I have started craving rice. Yeah, strange. I’m not as bad as most Asians about this yet, meaning I can still enjoy a few meals once in a while that don’t include rice (especially breakfast), but once I go two or three days I start missing it. Right now I’m on day four and I’m about to go crazy. I was thinking about just making up some rice for a snack. Weird.

 

(Okay, okay, I know that comment above about “most Asians” was totally un-PC. Sorry, didn’t mean to offend anyone.)

 

I was also astonished to realize that I have only worn two outfits in the past five days. Please don’t get too grossed out by this or think I have terrible personal hygiene. It’s just the custom here. Actually, I am fairly unusual in that I don’t usually wear the same thing two days in a row – I at least alternate two outfits back and forth. But let me tell you, when you have to do all your laundry by hand and nobody really cares if you wear the same thing every day, it’s really tempting to wear things multiple times (even many multiples of times) before calling them “dirty.” It’s also tempting to wear the same pants today that I got dirty yesterday in the slush outside, since that same slush is just going to get them dirtier.  Really, before you judge me too harshly on this one, try hand-washing all your jeans and then letting them hang dry, hoping against hope that they’ll dry before they freeze. It’s not a particularly fun experience.

 

Recently I was struck by the fact that I no longer notice the terrible fashion (or rather, lack of fashion) here. In fact, I was quite surprised a few days ago to actually see a girl wearing a really stylish, sophisticated, well put-together outfit. She looked like she could have been on the streets of DC or NYC, not on the slush-covered roads at Liaoning University. That very well may have been the first classy outfit I’ve seen here, besides traditional suits. While not noticing the bad fashion is convenient for me now, I’ll admit that I’m a little nervous about when I go back to DC! Haha!

 

Another interesting phenomenon in China is that people develop a skill of being oblivious to noise. There is so much noise in this country, largely because there are so many people, that if a person pays attention to everything, they could probably literally go insane. A car horn in China is simply a way to let others know that you exist and are there, talking on a cell phone is perfectly allowable in just about any situation, music blasting out the door of a store is apparently an invitation to come in and shop, and there is always a construction sight within earshot to just add to the background noise. Silence is unheard of, no pun intended. At least, that’s the way it is in the cities, and despite most of you never hearing about Shenyang before I moved here, it does happen to be a city of more than 7 million people. So what am I getting at? I have apparently developed that skill. Not that I’m upset to be Chinified in this way, because it’s certainly a useful skill to have (especially living in China!). But apparently some of my foreign friends have not been so blessed… they’re constantly overwhelmed by the noise around them.

 

One more thing. In Chinese, there seems to be no such thing as a run-on sentence. As long as you throw in a comma, you can just keep going. (Obviously, that’s a bit overstated, but not by much.) I don’t know how many run-ons are actually making it to the final postings on my blog, but I know when I’m writing I’m sure struggling to find the end of sentences! I never used to have that problem…

 

So, it seems I’m becoming Chinified. But only to an extent. I still find certain things strange and bizarre in this place, like seeing the laoban (boss) of my dorm rollerblading through the hallways on a fairly regular occasion.  Or seeing some workers try to create a make-shift drainage system to get the melting water from the roof of a store to flow down into a manhole, when there were already inches of slush covering the ground anyway. Yeah. Strange.

Kimchi fried rice & chocolate chip cookies... Am I still in China?

Sunday marked six months of my being in China, which means I’m also over halfway through my time here! Wow! So I started reflecting on the past six months, how much I have enjoyed being here, and how much I like China.

 

Then I thought about how non-Chinese my experience has actually been. Sometimes I feel more like I’m studying in the U.N. than in China!

 

Take, for example, just the past week. One week ago, I hosted a big lunch for some of my friends. I cooked what can more-or-less be considered “American” food (chili and gumbo), and all the guests were from Africa.

 

Thursday, I got together with my American friend to bake cookies. Yes, that’s right, I baked cookies! First time in six months! It was marvelous. But let me tell you, there’s nothing Chinese at all about baking chocolate chip cookies.

 

And yesterday I was getting ready to make something for dinner, so I opened my fridge. True enough, the rice inside is fairly Chinese. But the kimchi that I fried that rice up with was certainly not! (It was, however, homemade kimchi. Not by me, of course, but by one of my Korean friends. And for those of you who don’t know, kimchi is that famed pickled cabbage that Koreans eat with everything. Unlike many Americans, I actually love it.)

 

So, like I said, the U.N.

 

One of the most entertaining conversations I’ve had this week was with my Chinese friend about chocolate chip cookies. I had been with him in the morning before going to bake the cookies, so I was telling him that I was excited to go bake. He had absolutely no idea what (non-Chips Ahoy) chocolate chip cookies actually are, nor how on earth to bake them. In talking, he said that he always thought “cookies” were just “big crackers.” Only in China can cookies and crackers be considered as one thing! He was terribly surprised when I told him that American cookies are usually soft, not crunchy or crackery. In the end, he decided American cookies must be like a cross between crackers and cake… Not that I would have ever said it that way myself, but I suppose given what he has to compare them to, it’s not a bad analysis!

 

Of course, I gave him some cookies after we baked them, so he could experience a true American cookie.  He said they looked just like he’s seen on TV. Haha!

 

On the one hand, baking cookies with my American friend felt just like being back in the U.S. for a few hours. However, we still knew we were in China as we were mixing up the dough… Butter, for example, comes in sticks here that are a different size than those in the U.S., and they are only measured in grams. The recipe, of course, didn’t give the gram measurement for how much we needed.  Then there was the lack of chocolate chips that ails China. We just bought chocolate bars and broke them into pieces. In the process, though, we managed to buy one chocolate bar that was clearly made in China… nasty! (We discarded that one.) And perhaps the most entertaining was trying to decide how much brown sugar (or “red” sugar, as it is called in China) to use. Of course, the recipe called for a certain amount of brown and a certain amount of white. But brown sugar in China is about six times darker than brown sugar in the U.S. Even with replacing half a cup of the brown sugar with white, our cookies tasted a bit molassesy. We also had to decide what kind of white sugar to use, since even white sugar in China is different than in the U.S. They have two kinds here: wet sugar and sugar crystals. (We went with the wet sugar.) And then there was the problem of the flour…

 

I could continue, but I’m sure you get the idea. It was the most entertaining cookie-baking experience of my life! But somehow – miraculously! – those cookies turned out, and they were also the most delicious cookies I’ve eaten in a very very long time. Mmm.

 

Actually, the kimchi fried rice was possibly the tastiest fried rice I’ve had in a while, too.  I’ve been on a fried rice kick recently, making a different sort of fried rice every day. (Rice is cheap, but I can’t eat the full pot when I cook it. The best way to use leftover rice is fried.) So far the kimchi wins.

Only in China...

Sometimes I forget what it was like when I first came to China. So much seems so normal to me now that I’m sure surprised me – or startled me! – the first time I encountered it. But there are two things that I have never forgotten from the brief introduction/training I received before my first trip to China. To this day, both of those things have been truer than I had ever anticipated.

Number One: “Only in China.”

Many things happen in China that could only ever happen in China. The longer I live in this country, the more of these “only in China” things I come upon. At that initial training, this point was highlighted with pictures that were just incredible to see – almost optical illusionesque. The two pictures above are my own attempts at capturing “only in China.”

As I have been wandering around this week, doing all those things that I do now while I am still on winter break, I’ve been keeping a sort of mental list of my “only in China” experiences. Although some of these could certainly have counterparts in other foreign countries, the point is clear. And besides, they’re funny.

(1.) Only in China can being a white blond-headed girl draw more stares than climbing over a wall, up onto a stairway, over the railing, and then down the steps while carrying two full bags of groceries. It might also be only in China that the security guards can stand by watching a girl climb over the wall and not offer to open the gate or stop her from climbing past the locked gate they are supposedly guarding.

(2.) Only in China can basketball and soccer be played outside all winter long, regardless of how much snow or ice have covered the ground. I’ve actually seen ice six inches thick covering the ground everywhere except for the nicely cleared off circular patch by the basketball hoop.

(3.) Only in China is ping-pong considered an intense workout. Yes, there’s a reason the Chinese are known for their ping-pong team. And there’s a reason girls in China rarely play. It’s a pretty intense game here!

(4.) Only in China can a foreigner who hardly speaks the language have to explain to a native speaker what the leader at the Sunday meeting is talking about when she wants us to tell each other “sha-lom.” (Admittedly, it took me a minute too. The native speaker and I both looked at each other and asked what we were supposed to tell each other before I realized I actually could understand the strangely Chinese-sounding Hebrew word.)

(5.) Only in China can okra-less soup be considered gumbo and Chinese chili powder be used to make “American” homestyle chili. Cooking is a whole different ballgame when you live in China! As a side note, it might also be only in China that I can get away with having 10 guys over for lunch. To be fair, one girl did show up for a few minutes…

(6.) Only in China can a Francophone African girl (who speaks only very minimal English or Chinese) feel comfortable showing up to a lunch party of 10 Anglophone African guys (none of whom speak French) hosted by the random white American girl living down the hall. Wow, that really does sound strange! To clarify, all of us attend the same Sunday fellowship. The Francophone girl always sits with a girl who translates for her. She’s one of the sweetest girls I know, even though I can hardly communicate with her. And don’t be worried by me inviting a group of only guys over for lunch… they all attend the same Institute of Aeronautical Engineering, which to be honest is a male-dominated field. It really was an open invitation to all the foreigners at that school.

(7.) Only in China can it be less than a week before the new semester is supposed to start, and none of the students have any idea when or where to be for classes. Nor what classes they will be taking. Nor how to register for them. Theoretically classes should start again on Monday the second. We’ll see if I actually have a Chinese class again before the Ides of March.

And those are only the things that have happened in the last week and come to mind immediately. The “only in China” count would probably be up to a number I don’t even know how to say if I had actually kept track of them all since I’ve been here.

But that’s just one of the two things that have proven true from my first training.

Number Two: “Be Flexible.”

No, this is not referring to maintaining an appropriate level of flexibility for those unexpected times when it becomes necessary to climb over a wall or through a window (yes, that’s been known to happen, too). Although admittedly, that’s not a bad idea either.

This is referring to the Chinese sense of planning ahead. To put it simply, there is no such thing. Let’s go back to number seven above: It is now five days before classes are supposed to start, and there is not a single foreign student here who has any idea when or where we are supposed to show up. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a single Chinese teacher who knows, either. So, we practice that whole flexibility thing. I suppose Monday morning around 8:30 a.m. I’ll show up in the foreign students’ building and just see what’s going on. I suppose I’ll bring a pencil and some paper, too, in case there happens to be a teacher around who wants to give a class, but I doubt I’ll need it.

Since arriving in Shenyang, I don’t believe I have really effectively planned anything more than about two days ahead of time. It’s nearly impossible to do so. Even traveling, you can’t buy train tickets more than 4 or 5 days in advance without paying exorbitant fees, and you can’t buy return tickets until you are at the city you’ll be leaving from without paying another extra cost. (And sometimes you just can’t do it.) While that makes for great fun for those into whimsical traveling and adventure, those who like to schedule everything in advance might not do so well in this country.

In some ways, this flexibility thing has some value. As a foreigner, I think those who actually manage to adjust themselves and embrace this sensibility learn to really live each day. Every day I wake up, not knowing what to expect, but wanting to make the most of it. There’s always a sense of possibility. But then again, there are certainly foreigners around here who didn’t get that “be flexible” lecture and have not adjusted… so they end up sitting in their dorms all the time, bored and lonely, because they don’t know how to make the most of the time at hand.

So, the moral of my stories is this: if you ever decide to travel or move to China, be flexible and learn to love the “only in China” experiences you’ll undoubtedly happen upon. And, um, if you don’t ever decide to travel or move to China… well, I hope you enjoyed the stories anyway! :)

Stories of Winter

I've done winter before. College in Michigan will do that to you. But winter is a totally different story when you do it in a foreign country, and especially when that foreign country is China. It's been a fun experience! 

I live in a small dorm room, across the hall from a public kitchen. Having a kitchen so close is superbly convenient… it means I can cook sometimes and save time & money by not eating out for every meal. However, the kitchen has no refrigerator. Neither does my room. Solution? After the first month or so of being here, the weather outside cooled down enough that my window sill served as a marvelous refrigerator. I even managed to not have anything fall from my seventh floor sill! What I didn't think through, however, was that the weather would eventually get too cold for refrigerator functions. One day in December, I went and grabbed the eggs from my window sill refrigerator and went to the kitchen to do some scrambling. You guessed it; they were frozen. If you've ever tried scrambling frozen eggs, you know it's not the easiest thing to do!

Needless to say, I stopped leaving my eggs on the windowsill. I talked with the lady I buy them from, and she said the eggs actually stay fresh for 30 days left inside at room temperature. Is that normal? It kinda creeps me out. But, as they say in Chinese, mei banfa (there's nothing I can do about it). 

In a similar vein, I also enjoyed a period of eating frozen yoghurt here in China. Not the frozen yoghurt you're all accustomed to back in the States… No, I mean literally a container of Chinese yoghurt left on my window sill until it freezes. Mmm. Tasty!

So what about the snow here in Shenyang? I was impressed for a long time at how cold it could be while being completely sunny and bright, with no precipitation whatsoever. I enjoyed that period. But eventually the snow came, too. (Thankfully, the bright sunny days are still in abundance!) I was amused, however, by how the Chinese have learned to deal with the snow. For those of you not from Michigan or other snowy areas in the U.S., salt (or sand) is often put on the roads and sidewalks after it snows to help melt it faster and to give traction for those walking/driving on it. China hasn't discovered the benefit of salt yet, apparently. Nor of having snowplows. To my great surprise and astonishment after the first heavy snowfall this season, Shenyang tried to deal with the snow on the roads by sending Chinese people, dressed in bright orange vests, onto the roads with brooms made of branches.  Yeah, that obviously did a lot of good! 

Eventually people started using shovels, too. But that was after sweeping the snow first.

What is winter other than an excuse to stay inside and drink hot chocolate? Unfortunately, Swiss Miss is the same price here in China as it is in the U.S., which means it seems ridiculously expensive. So I have discovered that buying all the ingredients to make my own hot chocolate mix is significantly cheaper… And all my friends have discovered that I know how to make homemade hot chocolate. They also know that anytime they stop by, they can have some. (One of the benefits of instant hot water!) So I've become known as the girl who has hot chocolate, and my room has become much more popular this winter. The most hilarious story surrounding this hot chocolate service I have somehow developed happened right after I served a nice steaming mug of it to one of my married (male) friends.  In front of everyone, he looked at me and said, "So I've been thinking of taking a second wife." 

I've had a number of proposals here, but only one to be a second wife! :)

This winter here in Shenyang hasn't been too terribly bad for me. Although I was warned that it might get to -40C (-40F), the worst we've had thus far was actually just -30C (-22F) or so. Sure, that's ridiculously cold, but I've at least seen those kinds of temperatures before.  Most of my foreign friends here are from parts of the world that don't get anywhere near that cold… Africa, Papua New Guinea, Australia, etc. I feel bad for them, experiencing this kind of winter for the first time. But since so many of them are scared of the cold, and since schools here have six weeks off for the winter holidays, the vast majority of foreign population leaves Shenyang for the winter. And that's just the foreigners.  Of course, all the Chinese students have left my campus as well, since they went home for the holidays (even if home is just down the road somewhere). So life has been pretty quiet these days. Almost nobody is around on campus, my dorm has only about 20 of us living in it anymore, and especially during the Spring Festival all the shops were even closed! 

One of the more annoying aspects of this "everybody leaves for winter except me" phenomenon is that my campus decided not to pay the security guards to stand at the smaller gates to campus. Thus, they locked all the smaller gates. Meaning the only gates that are open are the two gates located the furthest from my dormitory. There's nothing quite like having to walk all the way across campus one direction – in the freezing cold – just to walk out the gate and make my way all the way back the other direction to where the actual shops off campus are located. Again, emphasis on the freezing cold. I like walking, so in the summer I wouldn't mind it. But it's cold!

But I'm a problem solver. Okay, it's not actually my solution; most of the students do it. Instead of walking to the main gate on the other side of campus, we just jump the little gate near us. I haven't decided which is more dangerous: jumping a gate, especially when there might be ice on the ground, or spending an extra 30 minutes walking outside each time I enter or leave campus. Realistically, that would mean I would actually spend an extra 2 hours or so outside every day. That's one major case of pneumonia waiting to happen! So I usually go with the jumping. 

Since all of the friends I spent significant time with during the semester are now outside Shenyang for the winter, I've had the opportunity to spend more time with a lot of other people and make some new friends. Recently, I had a really enjoyable dinner out. There were seven of us total: four foreigners and three Chinese. But every single one of us speaks both Chinese and English, at least to some extent, so we had a blast communicating with both languages interchangeably! We were telling jokes back and forth; one would be told in English and then the next would be in Chinese. It was so fun! And of course, really good practice.

Unfortunately, after that dinner all three of the Chinese people left Shenyang for a while, too. Darn it.

A breath of fresh air

The Chinese New Year season is finally over! Yesterday (Monday the ninth) was the 15th day of the first month on the lunar calendar, so it was Yuanxiao Jie. Literally translated, that's the Sweet dumplings made of glutinous rice flour holiday, but it's usually translated as the Lantern Festival.  Why they don't call it the Lantern Festival in Chinese, I don't know. Maybe just to confuse people. 

The good news is that the fireworks of the Spring Festival are only legal through the night of the Lantern Festival.  Finally, the fireworks have stopped! Admittedly, though, last night was a lot of fun again, to see all the leftover fireworks going off. I had a perfect view from my window of some place that was lighting off huge fireworks for literally three and a half hours straight! I had no idea it was possible to buy that many fireworks!

It was actually about 5 p.m. yesterday before I remembered that it was the Lantern Festival (since it's really an after-dark sort of holiday). Unfortunately, I went out about 5 to run some errands, not realizing everything was going to be closing early. So of my five errands, I only accomplished one. Oh well. On the bright side, I had fun walking back from a large grocery store through some alleyways and housing areas. I'm probably a lot closer to deaf now because of it, but it was fun to see all the firecrackers being set off by individual families and complexes. Actually, if any of you are at all afraid of fireworks, I don't recommend walking through alleys and housing areas in China during the Spring Festival. I'm not afraid of them usually, but I was a bit nervous yesterday. I knew I should start being worried when I saw people walking around outside wearing hard hats! Not because they were construction workers; just because of the fireworks. 

At one point, I walked by two middle-aged Chinese men who were out with sparklers. Now these sparklers are not the short little sparklers we have in the U.S. No, these were more than a meter long each! The gentlemen were amazed to see a foreigner walking by, so they had me join them. I had fun playing with the sparklers! It was just a little awkward after they were all done, though, when the guys asked me to join them going home. Um, no. That didn't seem like such a good idea!

After returning home (having avoided that invitation as graciously as I could, which wasn't particularly graciously at all), I celebrated myself by making some yuanxiao (that's the sweet dumplings made of glutinous rice flour that the holiday is named for). They're really easy to make: you buy a bag of frozen ones and the grocery store and then boil them for five minutes. Then you eat them. Easy. I had fun buying them, too, because I didn't know all the terms for the different filling options. So I ended up picking up two that I knew I would like (black sesame paste filling and peanut filling), and then I asked an employee at the store which of the other two options she prefers. So I took that one. Turns out it's "kernels." I don't know what kind of kernels, but it's tasty anyway. 

So that was my Lantern Festival. I managed to celebrate the Lantern Festival without ever seeing a lantern, but that's okay. I ate the sweet dumplings and I played with sparklers with creepy middle-aged Chinese men. Hehe. (Hey, I got away as soon as it started getting sketchy.)

It's definitely been a breath of fresh air to not have fireworks and firecrackers going nonstop.  But I'm looking forward to the day I can take a real breath of fresh air… sometime after the wind blows all these gunpowder-packed air molecules away.

Pictures!

After nearly two hours spent sitting outside (in the snow) with my laptop, connected to the seemingly random wireless internet that exists in a courtyard area in the middle of campus, I have uploaded some pictures from my holidays here in China.  I won't go into details here, since there are captions with the pictures, but the series starts with American Thanksgiving and goes through what I have experienced so far of the Chinese Spring Festival/New Year.  I used to think the Thanksgiving – Christmas – New Year series of holidays in the U.S. made for a nice long holiday season; that's nothing compared to what I have celebrated this year! It's been fun, and I hope you enjoy the pictures. 

 

Here's the link: http://picasaweb.google.com/vrieland/Holidays

 

On a completely unrelated and totally random note, I had a slight mishap with my adventurism today.  Living in a foreign country (where you only sort of know the language) is only fun if you're adventurous, I think, so I try to live by that.  Usually it's great.

 

Recently I've been having fun trying all the different kinds of milk here in China.  (Don't worry, I know there was that little milk situation a few months ago.  I'm pretty sure what I've been drinking is fine.)  Not only does China have regular milk, they have flavored milk as well.  This concept is not surprising in itself, since we have chocolate milk and can make strawberry milk in the U.S., too.  But the varieties here are beyond comparison.  My favorites so far are the walnut flavor and the coffee flavor. 

 

My least favorite? Grape. 

 

That one should never have happened.

 

And unfortunately, in my zeal for adventurism, I just picked up several new varieties I hadn't tried before without looking carefully at what flavor they were.  If I had seen "grape," I wouldn't have gotten it.  I don't even like grape flavor! But wow, grape flavored milk is especially disturbing.

 

Don't worry though; this little incident has not affected my zeal for adventurism too much.  I just bought a new round of milk (actually reading the labels this time), and I'm eager to try the new coconut flavored one. J

 

(And for those of you who think Canada is cool because milk there comes in a bag, just for your information, milk here comes in bags, too.  Individual size bags, which is superbly convenient for being adventurous and trying all sorts of different flavors.)

It's been quite a day... and it's only noon!

Even though I'm on vacation, I have great motivation to get up in the morning: hot water. The hot water hours don't change for anything… holidays, vacation, anything. If it's a weekday, the morning hours are 6:30-8:30, non negotiable. Furthermore, when they say 8:30, what they really mean is that you shouldn't plan on any hot water after 8:15, and some days you might be pleasantly surprised that it actually goes all the way until 8:30. So despite the holiday, despite staying out late at night since all my friends are also free these days, I still have motivation to be up at a reasonable hour.

Today I even planned ahead. I had to do laundry, which is something I do far too infrequently by any American standards but still more often than most Chinese people. Since my laundry facilities are my bathroom sink and the rod that runs across my bathroom for hanging things like drying laundry, it's always more pleasant to do the chore when my hands can at least enjoy some warm water. (Honestly, doing laundry by hand is ridiculously unpleasant during winter when the only water you have feels like it just melted a moment before it came out of the faucet.) So I got up plenty early today to do some laundry before 8:15.

On the bright side, the warm water lasted until 8:25 this morning, which meant I got to wash a few more pieces of long underwear than I had originally planned.

On the not-so-bright side, somehow my "wet bathroom" turned into just a "wet room." Let me explain. A "wet bathroom" is one of those bathrooms only common in Asia as far as I know, where the shower head just hangs right over the toilet and the sink, without a tub or a shower stall. So whenever one showers, the entire bathroom gets wet. (Hence the name.) Well, I've lived in China long enough to be accustomed to a wet bathroom. I know where to keep my toilet paper so it doesn't get too wet. I know not to keep my cotton balls in the bathroom at all. And I know how to hang my towel so it actually has some sort of efficacy at making me dry after I'm done.

I don't know what went wrong today.

My toilet paper got soaked and my towel was dripping by the time I was ready to use it. Even my cotton balls would have gotten wet if I didn't keep them on the complete other side of my room. Because when I opened the bathroom door, I saw water covering the floor of almost my entire dorm room. Whoa. Talk about an unpleasant surprise!

It honestly took me half an hour to clean up all the water, and even then it took a while for the floor itself to dry. And now my floor is squeaky. Not a good sign.

Makes me glad I live on the seventh floor, where no one is above me. I just hope the room beneath me wasn't unpleasantly surprised by water coming from the ceiling!

So that was my morning. I have absolutely no idea why my wet bathroom couldn't be contained today, whereas usually only the towel on the floor just outside the door gets a little wet. We'll see how tomorrow morning goes. If it's anything like today, I'll be sure to keep you all updated!

While my morning was certainly unexpected and quite an experience, it hasn't been the highlight of my day so far. The highlight came around eleven.

I seem to have made a Chinese friend. Although I have been living in China for five months now, I actually don't have many (any?) Chinese friends. Don't get me wrong, I know a ton of Chinese people. But Chinese people who have any interest in interacting with foreigners always come with some sort of ulterior motive. Most of them want to practice their English or have help getting to the U.S. Then some of the guys have other ulterior motives, if you catch my drift. (White girls in China don't have the most moral reputation.)

But I seem to have made a new friend. Certainly, I think he enjoys being able to practice his English with me and I'll admit that I helped proofread some essays he wrote for Ph.D. programs in the U.S. But all told, it's a beneficial relationship both directions.

So this friend of mine came to my dorm today to bring me a variety of traditional Chinese New Year foods. He brought me a whole bag of homemade jiaozi (dumplings), the most famous New Year food. He also brought several kinds of nuts and some other candies.

Since he came around lunchtime, he offered to teach me how to cook the dumplings. Not wanting to admit that I've actually cooked dumplings many times in the past (because really, I've never actually seen a Chinese person do it), I eagerly accepted. So we cooked up some of the dumplings and had an absolutely delicious meal. Even more exciting, though, was that while eating, he explained a whole lot about this whole New Year festival that's going on right now. I've honestly been quite confused about which days are important, why it lasts so long, etc. But with his excellent English and his inside understanding of the culture, he was able to explain it quite well.

Here's what I learned. The biggest meal of the whole thing is on the last night of the old year (this past Sunday). The meal is planned for the typical Chinese dinner hour, around 5 p.m. or so. After it's all set out and ready, the whole family first goes outside and sets off some fireworks. Then they all go in for a big meal. Starting from 8:00 p.m., there is apparently a famous program showing on TV that most Chinese families watch. (Wish I had known about that before it happened!) As they watch the program, the family sits together, chats, and wraps the dumplings for later. (No dumplings are eaten during the big meal earlier.) Just before midnight, the family eats a few dumplings and then goes outside for the biggest fireworks celebration.

On the morning of the first day of the month, more dumplings are eaten, and often some candy. Some families have the tradition that no one is allowed to talk in the morning before eating some candy. Seems a little bit strange to me, but whatever. J Then that day is designated for visiting the parents of the mother. On the second day of the month, families visit the father's parents. Today is the second day of the month, but my friend was free because his father's parents live in Dalian. Only his dad went down to visit them.

The third and fourth days just seem to be more days off to relax and enjoy family and friends, and then apparently the fifth day is another big fireworks day. He didn't really know why, so I certainly don't either, but apparently I can look forward to more fireworks on Friday.

Then you have the rest of the two weeks of the celebration, until the 15^th day of the month, known as Yuanxiao Jie. There's no good English translation of that. Yuanxiao are little round balls made from pounded sweet rice and filled with sweet peanut, black sesame, or similar fillings, usually served in a soup. I tried some when I was in China before, even though I've never been here for the holiday before. Very tasty, actually. Then Jie is just the word for "holiday" or "festival." Apparently that is the last legal day for fireworks as well. So I'm sure I can look forward to plenty more noise that day!

And that's the end of the festival.

Turns out I was wrong about something else, too, though. I had thought that Yuanxiao Jie was the day everyone gets their haircut. No, no. Apparently the superstition is that you will cause bad luck for your uncle if you get your hair cut anytime during the first month. So I guess it'll be a while before I get the haircut I'm wanting.