feelin' good here

This afternoon, Ben and I made a big round of errands. We walked down to a nearby shopping area and bought a printer at an electronics store. Then we went to Carrefour (yes, again) and picked up some groceries and other things we couldn't get at the local market.

Later, we walked over to the market we discovered the other morning, and bought some fruit and vegetables for dinner tonight (Sam and Zhou You are coming over for dinner, and then we're all going to try out some wines, to help them determine which wine they're going to serve at their wedding in a couple of weeks). As we were walking home after our visit to the market, the sun was shining, and a cool breeze was blowing through the narrow alleyway to our apartment building. I took a deep breath, and thought to myself, "I am really happy, right here, right now."

Today is the first day that I really feel like I'm getting a handle on life here. It's funny, because my sense of comfort is totally tied to my knowledge of where I can buy things. I have my supermarket figured out, and we've found the best place to buy normal-tasting milk (or least milk that tastes how I expect milk to taste). I have my local place for produce figured out. We've found a couple of nearby restaurants where we can go out for meals. It's all coming together.

Maybe it's a sad statement about American culture that the thing that makes me feel most at home is knowing where I can buy stuff. I may be rationalizing here, but all those things I'm buying are actually necessities for life. I prefer to think of my growing comfort as an indicator that my most basic needs are being met, not that I'm addicted to consumerism. Am I just kidding myself here?

Meh. Who cares. All I know for sure it's that I'm really starting to like it here.

discovery: jian bing guo zi!

Yesterday morning, Ben had to leave the house really early. When he came back several hours later, he was all excited because, as he was walking out to the main road just behind our place to get a taxi, he saw all these street vendors along the way. They had never been there when we walked out later in the day. He decided then and there that we were going to get up early this morning and go out and buy some breakfast from street vendors.

Well, we got up (although not really all that early) and headed out to check it out this morning. The vendors weren't in the same place where Ben saw them yesterday, so he started to get disappointed at first. But then we saw one little lone cart on the corner of this little side street, where a woman was making jian bing guo zi.

How to describe jian bing guo zi? They are a bit like crepes, but more eggy and totally Chinese-style. Basically, the vendor pours a little batter onto a hot griddle, and then uses a squeegee-type tool to spread the batter into a perfect circle. She then cracks an egg (or in our case, two) on top of the crepe, and breaks it up using the squeegee. She sprinkles green onion and cilantro across the top of the egg, and then flips the crepe while the egg is still soft, to finish cooking.

Once flipped, she paints chili paste, pickled vegetables, and some kind of sweet sauce (hoisin sauce?) across the crepe. Then, she puts a crispy fried flat rectangle of dough in the center, breaks it up into four equal pieces, and folds the crepe around it, till it's all tucked in nice and tight. Voila! Breakfast is served in a little plastic takeaway bag. The result is the perfect combination of sweet, salty, spicy and crispy. Yum!

I forgot to take my camera with me when we went, and I couldn't keep myself from gobbling the whole thing down before taking a picture once we got home, so I have no photos of the experience (the one at the top is, sadly, not my own). But I have no doubt that we'll be back, and there will be plenty of photo opportunities in the future.

(Incidentally, we also discovered that a complete market exists down the alley just beyond the jian bing guo zi woman's cart--how we missed it's existence before now, I'll never know. I'll take photos and post more on that soon. That pretty much means we don't need to go to Carrefour 17 times a week any more.)

I'm just glad it's not all by hand

This may not be the most exciting post ever, but it is a little slice of our daily lives here in Tianjin. Washing clothes in our apartment is a bit more of an involved process than it is back home. Yesterday was the first time I felt like I had really mastered the whole process, which for me meant that I completed the task without dumping water all over the bathroom floor.

Allow me to demonstrate:

First the washing tub of the machine has to be filled with water. This is done semi-manually. I don't have to carry buckets of water in from the village well or anything, but I do have to turn on the water faucet and keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't overfill, or that the hose doesn't come loose and spray water all over the place.

Then add soap, turn the dial, and wait for the first cycle to run through. That's no problem.

Next, you have to drain the tub. This is where it starts to get tricky. The first couple of times I did this, I managed to get water all over the bathroom floor. You see, most drainpipes in China are not so good at the drainage (don't ask me why, or how, exactly--I'm not sure; I just know that, in my experience, they often don't drain so well). So, if the draining hose of the machine is placed directly into the drain in the floor, there will be water everywhere.

The solution is to drain the water into a bucket. But keep an eye on that. Because the tub holds more water than the bucket can. Also, the last bit of water in the hose won't really drain into the bucket, because it's kind of uphill climb, so you must very carefully transfer the hose from the bucket to the drain in the floor, hoping not to dump out water in the process.

The next stage is to re-fill the tub for a rinse cycle, and then to drain the tub again when the cycle is through. This whole process is pretty much a repeat of everything above. So, again, here are several points when the probability of spraying or dumping water all over the floor is pretty darn high.

After the rinse cycle, you manually transfer the clothes over to the spin-tub part of the machine, and run them through a spin cycle to get all the excess water out. Again, this is another step during which there is a high probability of dumping the spun-out water on the floor, so it is another replay of the bucket/drain process described above.

From here, it's all pretty easy: remove clothes, shake out the wrinkles as best you can, and hang them up to dry.

I've managed to make some pretty massive messes in my attempts to perfect this process. In fact, right after I completed a load in which I dumped almost no water, and I felt like I had become an expert, I did another load of laundry in which absolutely everything that could have gone wrong, did. I dumped water on the floor while draining soapy water. I forgot to set the tub from "drain" back to "normal," so when I re-filled it, I was actually dumping water everywhere...the list of mishaps goes on and on.

It's a good thing we bought a mop and bucket on our first trip to Carrefour.

a misconception

Lately we've been repeatedly encountering a particular misconception. Here's one example:


This afternoon, our landlord (who does not speak English) brought over some bookshelves for the office area in our apartment. I couldn't remember the word for "bookshelves" in Chinese, so after he set up the shelves, I asked him what they were called. He told me: "shu jia." OK--great. Then in the next breath he said (in Chinese), "You put books on them."


Ahem. Yes. You put books on them. I'm not an idiot, man. I mean, these are clearly bookshelves. I just didn't know what they were called in Chinese.



But this wasn't the first time my/our lack of linguistic ability was confused with general ignorance about the world here. Ben has encountered similar situations. For example, when Ben takes a cab, being unable to speak Chinese, he shows the cabbie a card or a piece of paper with an address on it. On a couple of occasions, when he has arrived at his destination, the cabbie has acted completely shocked that Ben is able to read the amount of money he owes the cab driver and give him correct change. No, he can't pronounce his destination in Chinese, but that doesn't mean he can't read a digital display of arabic numerals and match it to the arabic numerals on some paper bills.



I'm not saying this kind of thing doesn't take place in the States. It's like how some people, upon realizing they are talking to a non-English-speaker, just speak English louder and LOUDER. No, they don't speak English, but that doesn't make them deaf. Well, we don't speak Chinese (well), but that doesn't make us idiots.



I don't mean to sound angry about this phenomenon (does it come off that way?). I mostly find it laughable. Just a little quirk of being verbally challenged in a foreign country. Anyone had experiences like this?

next step: learn to read a menu

Ben and I went out to a restaurant for dinner last night. We're on a quest to get to know our neighborhood a bit better, to become familiar with the local restaurants, shops, and other businesses that are within walking distance. So, we went to this restaurant across the street.

The entire experience convinced me that I really should have spent more time this summer learning to read the names of foods in Chinese, and less time reviewing the vocabulary from the lessons in my textbook. I ordered a couple of dishes that looked like something semi-familiar in the photographs in the menu. What we got were:

• A very oily dish consisting of some kind of green vegetable and pieces of unidentifiable seafood (eel? salted fish?)


• A very spicy dish that came in a pot over a flame. It was pretty tasty, but full of peppers and...we soon discovered...some unidentifiable meat item which we think was probably intestine of some sort. However, Ben wouldn't allow me to say out loud that it was intestine. At least not while he was eating it.


• A nice, cold vegetable dish, consisting of greens in sesame oil, and which was absolutely necessary to put out the fire in our mouths after eating dish #2.

So, the task for today is to learn to recognize the names of food items beyond "tang cu li ji" (sweet and sour pork) and "hong shao niu rou" (beef braised in soy sauce). Sorry KU Chinese class, but you've really let me down here.

this place we call home

One of the most positive things about our move to Tianjin is that we really, really like our apartment here. It far exceeds any expectations we had for where we would be living. If you've been following the preparation for the move on my previous blog, then you know that we had some periods of serious anxiety about where we would be living--on campus? off campus? how expensive? how close to campus?

Thanks to the efforts of Ben's employers, and the help of my brother, we have been able to move into a place right next to the campus of Nankai University. Walk about a block north, and you reach the west gate of the campus. Pretty sweet.


(We still don't really know for sure exactly where Ben will be teaching--his employer is a company that matches teachers and schools at the schools' request, on an as-needed basis. But it's very likely that he'll be teaching at a school near this neighborhood. He'll find out soon, probably next week.)


Anyway, this place is big, has great light, is in a nice little neighborhood, has an a/c unit, has decent bathroom fixtures, and has a brand new bed and wardrobe, bought by our landlord upon move-in. It's affordable (the same price it would have cost to have Ben move into the dormitory with me), functional, and quite comfortable.

Here are some shots of our new place:



This is Ben "studying" (read: surfing the newly hooked-up internet) in our somewhat sparse office area. Zhou You's (Sam's fiance's) dad is loaning us a second desk to put in here, so we'll both have a place to study/work. The walls are pretty bare in there--not much to show.








Our living room: fully equipped with the longest sofa ever. The other day Ben and I lay down on opposite ends of it and watched The Lord of the Rings.







Bedroom, with little enclosed sunroom-type area just beyond--ideal for hanging laundry to dry. Let me tell you: that bed is huge. It is also very hard. I haven't quite got used to that, yet. Oh, soft American bed, how I miss you!







Bathroom. Believe it or not, that shower was the selling-point of this apartment for us. Neither of the other two apartments we looked at had enclosed showers; they just had shower heads coming out of the wall, and a drain (sort of) nearby on the floor. Mopping up after every shower can be a real headache, so this was very appealing. In the far right corner, you can see our little washing machine.


And this is our little kitchen. Well, actually, it's just the inside part of our kitchen (cabinets, fridge, table). Just beyond that door at the end of the room is another little room with a cooking area: gas burners, sink.














It's feeling more like home every day.

Here I Am

Well, it seems my old blog is one of the many sites that cannot be accessed in China; for whatever reason, wordpress.com is completely blocked. But, as with so many other situations in China, when one pathway closes down, you just find yourself another, more accessible path. Our experience in China so far has been all about finding "work-arounds," (like circumlocution, for example, which is a skill I find myself using on a daily basis).

Anyway, I wanted to quickly post an update. The past week has been a bit of a blur. We arrived in Tianjin last Sunday (August 17) and thanks to a lot of help from Ben's employer and my brother Sam, we moved into our new apartment two days later. One week and 17 trips to Carrefour later, we are pretty comfortably established there. The only thing we are lacking at this point is internet service, which is supposed to be set up tomorrow sometime. In the meantime, we have had access to the internet only when we go somewhere with free Wi-Fi. Thus, our sketchy communication thus far.

I have a lot to write about: our apartment, for example. And our experience trying to get registered at the local police station. And the girl who sells us our bottled water who has become our new friend. And my brother's fiance's very cool family. But I'll save those posts for another day (maybe tomorrow?). In the meantime, I just wanted to say all is well here. We are healthy and safe, and we've been generally well cared-for. (So stop worrying, mom.)