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.