Today’s blog is written by one of my favorite Chengdu-ren, Stephanie H. She is an OMS (office management specialist) with the Foreign Service and came to western China just a few weeks after us, so we’ve had two years of China-adventures together. Along with her husband and daughter, she’s headed to Nairobi for posting #2. (Yes, I will be going to visit. Africa has a ridiculous amount of animals that I *must* touch!)

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I’m all for new experiences (clearly, because I live in China and believe me, there are some EXPERIENCES to be had here) but one I’ve never felt the need to have? Being stuck in an elevator. We all know the potentially scary scenarios when the elevator suddenly stops and the lights go out. We’ve seen the movies. The cable snaps, plummeting the elevator down…the elevator is crowded and people get hot, crabby and hungry and the bickering starts…two people find love by chance when they are forced to talk to one another….Ok, maybe that last one wouldn’t be so bad. However, to my pleasant surprise, none of those horrific things actually happened. Here’s what actually happened:

I was on my way home from work, schlepping my ginormous gym bag and a big sack of potatoes (for the potluck dish I was bringing to the consulate Egg-stravaganza the next day). I stepped into the elevator with a young Chinese man, pressed the button for my floor and up we went…for about 17 floors. Somewhere between the 17^th and 18^th floors, the elevator jerked to a stop and the lights went out.

Now, in the States, you’d have a little phone that calls an emergency person (or the front desk at a hotel) and someone speaks your primary language to you and immediately dispatches help. In China, there is no such phone. What you have is a button that rings a bell, which in the case of my building, connects to the security office. With a slight crackle, a voice speaking a million miles a minute begins saying something in a language I’m shaky at best in understanding. The young Chinese man (whose eyes have been glued to his phone since our fateful ride began) explained our situation to the disembodied voice. Then, in fairly perfect English, he turns to me and translates what The Voice said. Oh, what joy! I felt I had won the “Who Would You Want To Be Stuck In An Elevator With?” lottery! The Voice said that it would be ten minutes, the power went out in the whole building and they had to reboot (?).

Resigned to forced conversation which was WAY better than awkward silence, I learned my new “roomie” studied photography in the United States for 5 years (hence, the good English) and actually had hopes to return there in the next 5 years to live permanently. We chatted about different states, what he liked about the U.S. (freedom), what he didn’t like about it (food). And then we took a selfie together to commemorate our bonding time.

Ten minutes later, the lights came on…but we were not going anywhere. So we rang the button again. I should mention that while my roomie had no cell phone service, I somehow did. I was texting furiously with my husband (and my best friend, of course) and my knight in shining armor worked behind the scenes to make sure the building security knew that people were still stuck in the elevator. Apparently, word had not gotten around after we rang our little bell that we were still inside.

40. MINUTES. LATER. We hear voices yelling stuff down to us from the floor above. Then the elevator started jerking upward as if someone was manually pulling us up (which they totally were). The doors pried open and we are met by the head security guy and his trusty sidekicks, the hotel engineers. My roomie decided to take a photo of them, probably for his scrapbook. We gathered our things, exited the elevator on the 18^th floor and started heading for the stairs. My roomie lived on the 19^th so he only had one flight to traverse. I lived on the 24^th so I had a few more to go.

We got to roomie’s floor and realized that the doors are locked from the stairwell and there is no door handle so we went back down and ask one of the engineers to let roomie in on his floor, and me on mine. The engineer asked what floor I lived on and when I told him the 24^th, I saw the look of slight panic and dread in his eye. He then helpfully asked if I wanted to take the elevator.

Yes, he asked that.

I looked at him like he’s crazy because I have THE WORST poker face and told him “No, thanks.” He replied with “Oh, are you sure? Because it’s working now.”

“No, no I’m good. I’d rather take the stairs.”

So, I made this poor man who probably smoked at least two packs of cigarettes a day haul his skinny-self up 5 more flights. With a “bu hao yizi” and a “xie xie,” I walked the length of the hall to my home while he decided to take his chances going down with the elevator. Good luck, dude.

After all that, thank goodness my roomie wasn’t a creep-ster.

Today’s guest blogger- Stephanie H. (Sadly, we were unable to track down the elevator-selfie…)

It’s tough to be in your tweens (although that wasn’t a word when I was that age)/early teens, when your list of “wants” far exceeds whatever small allowance you receive. I remember being about twelve and decided that I *must* have a perm for my super long hair before the new school year started, but there was no way I could afford the $80 to get it done at a mall salon, which is what I wanted more than anything. Cutting a deal with my mom, she offered to pay half, but that still left me with a $40 bill, which was unheard of in my twelve-year old budget.  Plus, I was still dying to join the ranks of the cool kids with their Esprit shoulder bags, not to mention wanting a Trapper Keeper to organize all of my classes, now that I had different subjects to keep track of.  With my shopping list quickly growing, I realized that doing a few extra chores around the house was not going to cut it when it came to my funding needs, so I decided to branch out.  Berry picking sounded like a great way to make some summer money and hang out with friends, especially since the berry patch was owned by my best friend’s mom. Candace and her brother had been picking berries for their mom for some time, but as summer rolled around, they offered to let me in on the gig, which meant I could finally get some cold hard cash flowing into my pink, Velcro-closing wallet.

Little did I know at the time, berry picking began when the sun came up, meaning that I had inadvertently agreed to getting up before the chickens throughout my summer break! Since the berry patch was about a fifteen minute walk from my house and we needed to be there at sunrise, I rolled out of bed, threw on some shoes and headed down the hill, water bottle in hand, when I would much rather have been curled up under a blanket, snoozing away for a few more hours. (Going down the hill in the mornings was fine, but trudging back up it late morning, when the sun was out in full force was not nearly as idyllic.)

The other young berry pickers and I were paid by the flat, rather than an hourly rate, a great way to discourage the ever-present threat of a berry fight. (Hey, you put a bunch of 12-15 years olds in a patch of staining blackberries at the crack of dawn and it is bound to happen at some point.) We were paid at the end of each shift, which was definitely encouragement to show up again the next day, as the immediate thickening of my wallet reminded me that I was inching closer to those start-of-the-school-year goals. (Eventually, I did get the much coveted perm and an off-brand Trapper Keeper, but sadly, I was never able to strut the halls of Jefferson Junior High with an Esprit bag slung jauntily over my shoulder. Even after a summer of berry picking, it was not in my budget. Harsh choices were made. Perm, in. Esprit bag, out.)

I hadn’t thought about my berry picking summers in a long time, until recently it came to my attention that the countryside surrounding Chengdu is filled with strawberry farms, which come into season starting in late February. After getting these tidbits of information from several different sources, I decided that it was time to dust off the berry-picking skills and organize a CLO outing to one of these farms.

But, like most CLO outings, our trip became a bit more of an adventure than I had anticipated. We loaded onto a huge bus in the early afternoon, for what was supposed to be about an hour ride outside of town. At about the hour mark, we reached a small village that had several signs up, advertising strawberry fields. Feeling confident that this would not be another endless trip like when we went to the Bamboo Sea in the fall, I announced to the bus we were almost there, just as the driver pulled off to get directions to our final destination. (This is common here- for drivers to have a general idea of the location, but then stop to ask directions multiple times as the destination approaches.)

Hubris- always a downfall!

When we made a U-turn and head back the way we came, I thought we were just retracing a bit of our route to go down a road more suited to our large vehicle (the original one was dirt, muddy and full of huge holes). Boy was I wrong! Apparently, it was decided (without consulting the trip planner- myself!) that we could not get to the original farm with our full-sized bus and we would go do a different field. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue, but the newly decided upon field was on the other side of Chengdu, a hour away!  After a series of back and forths, there was nothing to be done but to continue on to the newly appointed patch.

Finally, *hours* after our departure, we disembarked the bus at a strawberry farm filled with row after row of greenhouses. With cameras flashing, as the huge group of foreigners arrived, we were led to several greenhouses on the far side of the fields, where we were greeted with row upon row of fresh, ripe, wonderfully sweet smelling strawberries. I filled a basket about halfway, really just for something to do, as I hadn’t intended to buy any at all, but watched as families with several kids ended up with multiple overflowing baskets of delicious fruit. The kids may not have loved the long bus ride, but once they hit the ground, the boredom of the commute was long-forgotten, lost amongst the sticky red fingers and high-pitched giggles.

While this round of berry picking didn’t yield a perm (thank goodness!) or a fancy Trapper Keeper and I do still slightly covet that Esprit shoulder bag, it did give me a week’s worth of strawberry mini-muffins and another great CLO outing bus escapade to add to the ever-growing stack of misadventures in the Middle Kingdom.

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