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.