Tag Archives: China

Maybe Ostrich *Should* Be on the Table

Posted
Filed under Travel Musings

Remember a month, or maybe six weeks ago, when I was talking about my lack of cooking ability and how it was fine because being a middle child, I’d never have to worry about being in charge of a Thanksgiving dinner? (No? Check it out here.)  I figured it would fall to the older sister or the only boy of the family, leaving me free to wander in and out of the kitchen, sampling as I pleased and then sprawl on the couch to watch my fantasy players mop-up during the holiday games.  Well, it turns out, Thanksgiving is headed my way, with a vengeance!

(On a side note, you hear a lot of complaints about being a middle child, but I figure, if you play your cards right, you’ve got the best of both worlds. Having on older sister who was good at cleaning got me out of many a chore. I’d do mine poorly and soon enough, they’d get passed off to her. At one point, I remember the bathroom being on my list of Saturday chores. I’d go in there with my oh-so-80’s boom box, turn on the radio with the door shut and “get to work.” All I needed to do was spend about twenty minutes and make it seem like work had been done. By splashing cleaning powder around the tub, the room had the smell of detergent, which means I worked. Occasionally leaving a trace of powder was also helpful, as it showed I’d really scrubbed. I’d be sure to run water long enough that it was convincing and then swirl some cleaning fluid around the toilet with the brush, again, keeping up appearances and smells. With that done, it was time to unplug my radio and move to my next Saturday morning chore.  It wasn’t long before the majority of the “real” cleaning jobs were reassigned to my sister, while my list included the ever-so-important chore of vacuuming the hallway and emptying the bottom rack of the dishwasher.

On the other end of the family tree, is my younger brother, who, to be fair, got away with a lot, but because he is a boy, bigger things were pushed his way, skipping right over me.  Time to haul hay? My siblings were the bale-buckers while I drove the truck, only occasionally hitting the gas just a little too hard or braking a bit too suddenly.

So middle children, have heart! Play your in-between role for all it’s worth. It can be done.)

But I digress. Thanksgiving. Yes, I am hosting one this year. And not a small one. Right now, my RSVP count is hovering right around the forty-five people mark. That’s right. I’ve gone from never having a Thanksgiving responsibility, beyond calling dibs on the wishbone, to planning and organizing an event for nearly four dozen adults and children.

With just a week until the big poultry eating day (big-poultry to be eaten or big day on which to eat poultry? You decide!), I’ve put in my meat order and am quickly assessing the tableware needs. Luckily, Chengdu has an American-style bakery in town that is cooking turkeys, so they’ll prepare the four birds, but at a price. Those suckers cost $92 each! That’s US dollar rates, by the way.  When I mentioned this to my mom in an email the other day, she responded by asking if they were possibly ostrich. She has a point. Considering wild turkeys wander across the ridge near my parents’ cabin on a regular basis, it’s a little painful to be paying so much, but that’s the name of the import game. If it were ostrich, I could get away with just one, rather than the four headed our way next week. Maybe I should consider a larger poor-at-flying poultry for next year’s festivities.

The birds are taken care of, decorations are ready to go (thanks to Thad’s recent State-side trip), a work order for the room set-up has been placed and now it is a matter of side dishes and desserts. The Foreign Service, in some ways, reminds me a lot of the Mormon ward I grew up in. We too are a potluck community! Nearly every event, whether it be a gathering at the Marine House, a back-to-school pool party or a Thanksgiving dinner, hinges on the attendees hauling along a dish or two for the crowd. Our current sign-up sheet is filled with holiday classics: green bean casserole, sweet potato pie, cornbread, as well as pumpkin pie to top it all off.

“I can’t cook a Thanksgiving dinner. All I can make is cold cereal and maybe toast.” muttered the lovable Charlie Brown in his eponymous Thanksgiving special. He and I are obviously twins, at least when it comes to kitchen-skills. (I have much more hair than him and would never wear a yellow shirt with a giant zigzag across the front. Twins in the kitchen, not in the style department.)  I may not be cooking the entire dinner (I did sign up for my old sit-down-dinner standby- rolls, which will actually be made by my ayi!), but I do have a whole lot of organizing and preparing to do in the next seven days so that the Foreign Service Officers and their families can enjoy a taste of America with a traditional Thanksgiving feast.

Good grief, there’s a lot to get done!

Miiiiichelle’s Faaaavorite Thiiings!

Posted
Filed under Travel Musings

They’re Miiiiichelle’s Faaaavorite Thiiings!  (If you read it in Oprah’s voice, you might think a brand new car or luxury vacation is coming your way. They aren’t, but relish in the possibilities, for just a moment.)

As I was flying solo in China last week, Thad half packed a large suitcase and was off to Washington DC for shopping…uhh, eating…I mean training. Yes, training. That is what he was doing. And a lot of it he did do. He spent a week at FSI getting additional instruction on a new portfolio he will soon be taking over, but between classes at the Institute, he made trips to the mall, to Target, to Mens’ Warehouse, back to the mall and back to Target.

Between hamburgers and non-dodgy seafood and a few pitas, he had a chance to pick up a few things for us (by us, I really mean “me”) back in China. You see, we are on the homestretch towards the Marine Ball here in Chengdu.  It will be held the first weekend in December, which means we have less than three weeks until the big event. Squeezed amongst the holiday preparation (Christmas bazaar this weekend, Thanksgiving next week, Christmas parties for the community and local staff…) has been Marine Ball preparation. We don’t have too many reasons to dress up in Chengdu, so when we see the chance coming, we jump on board and ride it out as long as we can.

You may remember I went shopping for a gown last spring while I was still Stateside. That was a good choice. Although there are wedding dress shops filled with frills and froof on every other street corner, the petite size of most Chinese women rules out me ever fitting in even their largest sizes. Plus, as much as I love some sparkle and shine, most of the dressier dresses here just take it a step or two too far. Coco Chanel, in giving fashion advice to women, once said, “Before you walk out the door every day, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” Ms. Chanel would have a heart attack in China. She’d take one look at these dresses and suggest the designers take *all but one* thing off. Some of them are bedazzled on top of pleated on top of being adorned in large flowers (that often look like cabbages to me) and bows, finished off with a bit of lace or extra beading. Too much is an understatement.

But, although I’ve got a gorgeous wine-colored dress hanging in the closet of our spare bedroom, I didn’t plan ahead to accessories. (I thought ahead to it and then figured I’d make that Future-Michelle’s problem. Well, the future is now here and Present-Michelle has had to scramble to take care of it. Sometimes Present-Michelle has a real dislike for Past-Michelle, who procrastinates everything to Future-Michelle.)

Never one to shirk my shopping duties, two weekends ago I headed to the market with a couple of ladies from the consulate to do a little jewelry/shawl shopping. Knowing that it is going to be rather chilly by December and with all of us wearing dresses designed for warmer climates, we were in search of some nice shawls to help ward off the inevitable frostbite that comes with sandals in the winter.  Success was achieved in the shawl department and one of the other gals found the jewelry she was looking for, but after hunting through stall after stall of sparkly things, I couldn’t find anything in a pretty gold. (My shoes are sparkly gold, so that’s the metallic direction my other baubles need to go.)

With no luck at the market, in the following days we headed to two different malls in search of sparkles to hang from my neck and ears. Nothing. Everything in this town is silver, which is ironic for a country that prizes the color of gold so highly. In frustration, I went online to search of something, knowing it was too late to have it shipped, but hoping I could find something at a site with a brick and mortar store near where Thad was staying. I probably scrolled through thirty pages of jewelry before I found the perfect necklace/earring set. It was gold and rhinestones (no need for real diamonds for this girl!), and the perfect statement pieces to go with my simply shaped dress. Excitedly, I sent that pictures and asked him to make a run to the mall to see if they had them in stock. (I figured he wouldn’t mind an excuse for some food court Taco Bell while home in the States.)

The next morning, when I checked my email as I sat on the floor of my living room, eating Cheerios, I was bummed to see that he had gone, searched the whole store and came up empty-handed. The real-life store didn’t have the same selection that the online-one did.

Alas, Chengdu is a hardship post.

I was beginning to think I was going to go to the Marine Ball bare of baubles.

But, on Sunday, when Thad got home from the US, he unloaded his now full large suitcase which was overflowing with goodies from home. After trying on my two new brightly colored scarves and matching gloves, my warm wool-lined slippers with pink puff balls on top, and munching on a tasty Hostess Cupcake, I was presented with the coup d’état- Marine Ball jewelry.

After failing to find the pieces I was looking for, Thad went back to the mall a second night (and for a second round of Taco Bell) and renewed the search for jewelry. All he knew was I wanted gold and sparkly. I don’t know how many trips around the building it took him, but he came home with the perfect necklace! It is gold, with rhinestones in the shape of flowers. Undecided about which dangly earrings would best compliment the necklace, he bought two pairs- one with large teardrop jewels at the bottom and the other with gold, diamond-shaped cut-outs linked by gold chain. Gorgeous!

As we continue to move closer and closer to the big day, my Marine Ball outfit is coming together nicely. I’ve got the dress (which I need to take to the cleaners to be pressed this next week), the shoes and the jewelry. Next up: finding a hairdresser and hosting a mani/pedi party for the ladies of the consulate.  While a single night of fun may not seem worth this much effort, when the days are as gray and polluted as they’ve been lately (today we’ve been running “very unhealthy” on the air monitor, inching its way toward the “hazardous” zone), having something bright to look forward to and chat about is as good for morale as the vitamin D sunlamp that sits in my office.

17 days and counting…

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Avoiding the Elephant (or Donkey) in the Room

Posted
Filed under Travel Musings

Just hours after we as Americans chose our leader for the next four years, am I going to post something political and electoral? No way! I have tried hard to continue to like everyone on my Facebook feed, both those I agree with and those I disagree with when it comes to political topics, so I will try and help  my two and a half readers feel the same way about this blog.  (I have to say, sometimes it was just as hard to like the folks posting on with my same thinking as it was those who see the world through a different lens. A little respect on both sides of the aisle would be nice. And I am ready to go back to a newsfeed filled with pictures of babies and dinner plates rather than any more red/blue,  Republican/Democrat, Yes/No on Props 1 through 3823 or legalize this/criminalize that updates.)

The only election-related comment that I am going to make is that it happened. It happened big in Chengdu with an awesome election-watch party that I was privileged enough to work at. And it is over. So let’s all move forward–that is the goal after all. (At the US Consulate party here in Chengdu, I was tasked with being in charge of our photo station. We had life-sized cardboard cutouts of each candidate, so our guests could get their pictures taken with “the next President of the United States.” That went well, but I’m pretty sure the number of guests who asked to have their picture taken with “the next President of the United States *plus* the blonde girl” checked it at close to 50%.)

So what does one write about when she is desperately trying to ignore the elephant (or donkey) in the room?

Nail fungus!

That’s right. The hot, fasicinating topic of nail fungus. (If you aren’t into such topics, you may want to just skip on ahead to the next blog entry in your Google Reader feed. If you are my older sister, thrilled with all things biologically yucky, read on.)

You see, back in probably April, I noticed that the nail on my left ring finger was peeling away from the nail bed below it. I thought I must have damaged it and that it would grow out and be healthy as time went on.

It didn’t.

When I went home for my mom’s surprise 60th birthday party in early May, I spent a lovely ladies’-afternoon out with one of the most fantastic girls I know, Shannon. Our original plan was to go to a salon for pedicures, but since Shannon decided to turn a corner in her house too soon, stubbing (and breaking!) her pinky toe, our spa day switched to manicures. (Manicures done by none other than an amazing former student of ours, one Ms. Dixie Kent, who is a doll and a half.) At the salon, the techs looked at my nail and suggested I see a dermatologist, which a normal person would have done, but as someone usually only goes to the doctor if death seems a possibility and because I was home for just a few days before shipping out to China, I didn’t make the appointment.

Fast forward five months.

My left-hand ring finger nail has not grown out and reattached as I had hoped. Basically, there is a cavern under my nail. The finger is a little puffy and the part near the cuticle a little red, with some low-level throbbing pain on occasion, but there is no discharge, no smell- nothing really going on.

Then, several Sundays ago, as I sat cross-legged on the floor on my living room, using the coffee table as a manicurist desk, painting my nails like to do each weekend, contemplating if I was going to go with stripes in fall colors to match the season or polka-dots in shades of pink to match my personality,  I noticed that whatever was going on with my left-hand nail had jumped ship and was taking over my right-hand ring fingernail. (Coincidence they are both ring fingers? I have no idea!)

Figuring that the one hand had been suffering from whatever strangeness was going on for more than half a year and now it was spreading, I thought it might be time to get it looked at. I made an appointment with our consulate medical unit to have it looked at. (These are the same lovely ladies who  recently gave me my Japanese encephalitis booster and today added flu vaccination to the needle pricks in my arm, but always with a Garfield bandage to make it worthwhile.)

After examining both nails, the nurse decided a skin scraping was the way to go. Yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. She took a needle and stuck it under my fingernail, scraping some of the skin to look for fungus. I wouldn’t say it was painful per se, but it definitely isn’t something I’d sign up for again. With my gross little skin cells smeared on a glass slide, her educated eye to the microscope detected no fungus.

But, if it isn’t a fungus, what is it? That is the question of the week. With promises to get back to me after a bit of dermatological detective work, I headed home to contemplate the hollowness behind my nails and the possible options for this weekend’s paint job. (Gold with darker tips as Thanksgiving ekes ever nearer or variegated pinks because I always default to pink?)

As the mystery of the odd nail disease continues, as I begin to ponder my nail art options for the upcoming weekend and you wonder why you just read an entire post about my finger deformity, remember, it could have been about the elections. And most days, nail fungus is a better dinner table topic than politics.

 

 

MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend by Rachel Bertsche

Posted
Filed under Book Musings

MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend by Rachel Bertsche

Friendship is a tricky thing. When you are young, it is all about who lives in your neighborhood or who is in your class at school. Kids, for the most part, are good at finding connections within those preset groups. One you get in to middle school and high school, friendships are much more chosen. Kids look outside the few houses surrounding theirs or their homeroom and seek out kids in the school with similar interests or backgrounds. And by college, while your dorm mate might be your BFF for the first few weeks, you quickly find others who are studying the same things, involved in the same activities or hanging at the same places as you do. Your friendship net is able to cast much wider than ever before.  But, by the time we get to be adults, it seems like we lose a bit of our ability to automatically connect the way we did as kids. It can make finding friends, especially close ones, tough to do.

That’s the premise that Rachel Bertsche started with in MWF Seeking BFF. She was new to Chicago and looking for girl friends. She had a wonderful husband, but wanted the chit-chat, reruns of Glee and mani/pedi dates for which a husband just doesn’t cut it. With the need for new girl friends, Bertsche went on a year-long quest to add to her friend Rolodex. She committed to “date” fifty-two girls over the course of the year, hoping to make some genuine connections along the way.

When I first picked up MWF Seeking BFF, I thought I was in for another blogger turned memoirist book. (I have to admit, I love this up and coming genre.  There is something to be said for someone who gains a huge following online and then is able to translate it on the printed page.) And the book is a memoir, but it is more than that. There is a touch of self-help thrown in and a whole lot of research on friendships, along with the humor and storytelling that I prize in these types of books.

Initially I was very turned off by the research included in the book. To me, “memoir” doesn’t scream quotation citation and reference checks. And, to be honest, Bertsche’s use of the research is a little choppy at times. There were moments, mostly early in the book, that I felt like I was reading the world’s longest 8th grade research paper. (Believe me, I’ve read enough of those to know what I am talking about.) The transitions from her story to the quotes by scientists and sociologists were not always the smoothest. It felt like she was told her had to have a certain number of citations, and by golly, she was going to get them.

But, once I got used to this rather unique writing style, I really tuned in to the book and enjoyed it. Rachel Bertsche is just a few years younger than I am, and having recently moved to the other side of the world, (with many more such moves in my future) I get where she is coming from. At 30-something, it isn’t easy to leave behind your BFFs and make new friends, to basically start over in the friend department.  I found her discussion of different levels of friends to be spot-on and her tales of breaking the ice with new person after new person sounded rather familiar to me.

This book was originally recommended to me by one of the members of my book club in Washington DC (and fellow blogger in the world of Foreign Service- you can check out her adventures in Mexico City here), and would have been the *perfect* read for a book club. After finishing it, I am super disappointed that we didn’t get to read it together and talk about the struggles of friendship as an adult. MWF Seeking BFF: My Year Long Search for a New Best Friend by Rachel Bertsche was a fascinating book, in which I saw a lot of my current situation reflected, which earns it a very strong:

Coloring Outside the Lines

Posted
Filed under Travel Musings

I always color within the lines. The precision and prettiness of the picture depend on it. Within those bold borders I can color coordinate to my heart’s content, mixing a deep raspberry with some dusty fuchsia  and maybe throwing in a splash of watermelon to brighten the scene.(And of course, there will be glitter, if it is an option.) Regardless of the color choices made, all 50 shades of pink will fall neatly within the prescribed outline of the princess’ ball gown.

When I go to a job interview and am asked to name three words that describe myself, I don’t, put probably should, put “rule-follower” on the top of that list.  Sticking within those bounds keeps me sane. In the sixth grade, which I would like to say was just a few years ago, but a couple decades is probably a closer estimate, I got a detention. It was my first and only detention I was every privy to in twelve years of public schooling. How does a sweet, shy middle school girl get a detention when she hardly speaks in class? Jake. It was all Jake’s fault and to this day, I blame him for tarnishing my perfect discipline record. (I had a pretty good attendance record going to, but things came up to break that one as well, very few of which were my own fault. Sometimes it was the flu or an orthodontist appointment. My senior year, the streak was intact, until I got wind of  a Clay Walker concert, which I just had to have tickets for. So, Candace, my best friend since middle school, and I decided to take a morning off from US Government and Geometry and Advanced English to  go stand in line at the ghetto-Albertsons in Caldwell to get tickets. Perfect attendance my senior year? Nope. A concert worthy of hypnotizing the moon? You bet! But, even this seeming swerve from the rules was one that was pre-approved by my parents. I would never have dared to ditch school to buy concert tickets, heartthrob in Wranglers or not.)

But back to Jake. It’s a long story, but the short version is that during music class (one of the least favorite periods of the day for this tone-deaf girl), I had slipped my generic-brand Keds off under the desk. Jake took one and tossed it across the room. He got a stern look and I got a detention. Apparently, because it was my shoe, I was responsible for it. (To be fair, there may have been some nuances to the story that my middle school mind blocked out in attempt to justify my seething-anger over the detention, but two decades later, that minutia has been lost in my gray matter.) This all went down on a Friday afternoon, so I had the whole weekend to fret about getting my detention slip signed by my parents. I just knew they were going to kill me, or worse yet, assign me as the sole-pooper scooper for the llama barn until high school graduation. It took me until Sunday night to pull out the yellow and pink pages of that carbon copy slip. In near hysteria, I handed it over to my educator-parents for their John Hancocks. (Other than trying to tell my side of the story through sobs, I don’t even remember what came of the whole thing. I do think I got out of actually serving the detention by telling the music teacher I had piano lessons that night. Again, for a tone-deaf kid such as myself, thirty minutes of piano lessons is probably a harsher punishment than after school detention anyway.)

What I am getting at is that I like to know that things are being done the right way, and rules help set those boundaries. The control that comes along with and the lack of chaos are comforting, so much so that I tend to create guidelines where none exist.

Arbitrary rules are the name of the game in my world. Thad laughs at my rule-creating but usually goes along with the neurosis, even as he makes a mental note of the craziness. There are lots of little daily-life rituals that just work best if done a certain way. For example, when making a burrito, the order of creation should go: shell, sour cream, beans, cheese, salsa, olives. Thad’s mayhem of shell, sour cream, cheese , salsa and then beans is just causing the world to spin out of control!

Some of the most concrete rules, deemed “arbitrary” by Thad, have to do with Christmas, like no Christmas music/decorations until the day after Thanksgiving and then all Christmas music ends the day after Christmas, with the decorations down before the New Year.  Why all the self-regulations revolving around the holidays? Because I love Christmas more than the Grinch after he stole it, had a change of heart and subsequently returned it. I love Christmas like gym teachers love the Presidential Fitness Awards. I love Christmas like the cockroach currently residing in my kitchen loves crumbs. (I had so many more similes I could have gone with here, but in the name of good taste I veered away from any involving things Jerry Sandusky loves or the love bestowed upon the East Coast by storm Sandy. It is quite possibly too soon to go down either of those literary device paths.) Christmas is less special if it is dragged out from mid-September through early February, as retail America has established as the new norm. Christmas is a season. There is a season for everything. (Feel free to bust out some “turn, turn, turn” at this point.)

China has made me toss this rule into the (hazardously polluted) wind. Today, November 3, I spent the day making Christmas cards. Granted, it was a for a good cause, but a tiny bit of my soul died with each sparkly doo-dad I affixed to the card stock, a miniscule piece of my heart shriveled with each ribbon tied and strategically placed to mask a mistake and an infinitesimal sliver of my mind was blown with each sparkly stocking stamp firmly placed on the project.

But, after spending a wonderful five hours with other ladies in our US Consulate community, crafting to our hearts’ content, chatting about everything from Foreign Service bidding to the challenges of schooling aboard to whether a wallet-gutting trip to the Maldives in February is worth it, I am okay that my in-the-box thinking when it comes to the holidays had its corners nicked, just a bit.

There will still be no Christmas station streaming on Pandora for a few more weeks and no hauling out the artificial tree for sprucing up the apartment for another month, but I made red and green cards bejeweled in silver and gold and life is okay.  Just like I was able to bend the rules a bit to make sure I got prime seats for the dreamy Clay Walker’s first Boise concert, I have a strong justification for the early arrival of Christmas greeting- four fabulous local charities.

But now, I’m back on the Christmas regulations bandwagon…for two more weeks. Until the Christmas bazaar rolls around, at which point I will be down and dirty in the muck of holiday madness. (But, probably secretly loving it more than Mitt Romney loves his tax bracket.)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Did I Actually Just Enjoy Halloween?

Posted
Filed under Travel Musings

Halloween costumes can be a walk down memory lane (or at least another block in the search for the end of the sidewalk.) One year I was a mouse, wearing black tights over black shorts, a black shirt and some mouse ears, plus an electric cord for a tail. One year I was a clown with this crazy jumpsuit that came out of my mom’s closet (I have no idea why she owned it in the first place!), added some wild hair and was a clown. And there was the year I dressed up as the Chicago Bears defensive end with the best grammar and writing skills. (I didn’t actually know what defensive position Shea plays, so I had to look it up on my handy-dandy internet, which sent me to his Wikipedia site. You know you have officially reached “it-dom” when you have your own entry on Wikipedia.)

After teaching middle school for nearly a decade, I saw an array of crazy costumes many of them straight out of a package from the store. (Don’t even get me started on the parents of middle school students who buy them *any* costume with the word “sexy” on the packaging. It happens…more that you would like to think.) Maybe it is a sign that I am getting old (that and the streak of gray hair that has appeared on my temple, which my stylist in America insists is white, which I guess makes okay somehow), but I remember costumes being made from what you could find around the house and then adding a detail or two, if needed, from the second-hand store. When I was a kid, costumes were more about creativity and craftiness than the shimmery and skimpy outfits being pushed by retailers. Although, I do have to say I’ve been very impressed with some of the pictures I’ve seen on the internet. People are still creative! But, the thing that all those awesome costumes I see online have in common is they are cobbled together from pieces of this and parts of that, original designs, not store-bought tedium.

Being in charge of this year’s Halloween events at the Consulate in Chengdu meant I was right in the middle of the spooky goodness this year. But you know what? It was great! Since Halloween costumes can’t be bought in Chengdu, families either had to prepare in advance (super advance!) or come up with something from what they had here. I loved that yesterday’s costumes ranged from an Olympic track athlete, decked out in a warm-up suit, race number and medals to the white rabbit in her dance leotard, tights and cute little ears, with some of Mom’s makeup for a nose and whiskers.  Halloween, Chengdu-style, was a bit of a throwback, which was awesome!

To further point out how maybe my hatred of Halloween could be toned down just a tad, a high school friend and fellow blogger (and all around awesome gal!) put together an amazing Halloween display in her yard. As one who professes to not be on the Halloween bandwagon, I kind of, really, wish I had been there to see the spectacle in person. (Check out her blog here.  This whole month has been filled with holiday posts and pictures. The mummy is my favorite!) Her enthusiasm and excitement are contagious, even from the other side of the world. (Could Halloween be like SARS, spreading on the wings of sneezes and airplanes?)

For someone who claims to dislike Halloween so much, it sure seems to get a lot of play time on this blog. Could it be that I secretly love this ghostly and ghoulish holiday? No, that isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but there are parts of it that are growing on me. (Adults in costumes will never be one of them though.)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Not Quite Ready for Italy’s National Cookbook

Posted
Filed under Travel Musings

This is not going to come as a shock to those of you who know me well, but I’m just stating the facts. I am not a cook, a chef, a baker or any other synonym for one who makes food. My idea of cooking is going online and ordering food to be delivered to my house. (I’m so far away from being a cook that even calling in an order on the telephone is too close to actual food preparation.) When I open those steaming packages of take-out, it counts as cooking in my book. Whenever there was a family event that involved everyone bringing something to add to the spread, I always tried to be first to reply to the invitation email so I could call dibs on the potato chips if it was a barbeque or the rolls if it was a sit-down dinner. Either way, the “cooking” involved dropping by Albertson’s grocery store on the way to the meal, running in and getting my assigned item and heading out to where the real food was being prepared. Even Thanksgiving, which we were kind of in charge of on Thad’s side of the family, I got out of the real work by offering up my giant kitchen (which was pristine, since it never got used) and buying the bird and fixings. It was a price I was more than happy to pay.

It was a system that was working out pretty well for me when we were living in Idaho, because I had enough real cooks around me that I could always fall back on their food creations for a  real meal once in a while. My parents are always good for a meatloaf or grilled burgers, especially when my brother, the baby of the family, calls up and requests dinner. All I have to do is piggy-back on his call. My sister-in-law is always trying out new recipes and has a dining room table big enough for a few extra diners.  And I am assuming my older sister knows that all holiday meal gatherings are eventually going to end up at her house. It is part of her predestined roll as the oldest child. (Don’t worry Melys, I’ll bring the rolls!)

But what happens when I am just under 10,000 miles away from home and want to make a homemade birthday dinner for Thad? Usually I just suggest a lasagna dinner from either his mom or my mom, whoever asks about his birthday first. This year, a mom-sanga wasn’t an option, so I thought maybe it was time to step up to the plate and figure out how to make a “real” lasagna dinner myself. (“Real” gets put in quotation marks because everything is relative in China. You do the best with what you have here.)

With the goal of homemade lasagna in mind, I took the subway to a new supermarket in town that has a lot of western goods available. For a price. But that is a whole different story.  Last time I was there, I noticed the butcher block at this store had some decent looking ground beef, so I picked up a few small packages of that, along with lasagna noodles. I already had mozzarella cheese, which we buy in bulk from a different store in town, then cut up into blocks and freeze. My back bedroom, which is filled with random goodies from Costco had a couple jars of spaghetti sauce, which I figured could be a stand in for the tomato sauce. I looked all over but couldn’t find any ricotta cheese, cottage cheese or sour cream, but again, this is China-style lasagna.

Sunday was Thad’s actual birthday, but he wasn’t feeling super great, so we put off the homemade dinner until tonight. I made sure to have everything at work wrapped up right at four so I could skitter out the door and head home to get dinner in the oven. I remember from watching my mom make lasagna about a million times that it is a bit of a process.

It is less of a process when you make the “easy” version. Apparently, the noodles I bought (the only ones the store had) are pan-ready, which means I didn’t have to boil them before making the meal.  That saved me one step! Plus, having less ingredients made the whole preparation a little faster than I expected.

After cooking the ground beef (which was actually decent quality- no chunks of fat or slivers of bone to be found!), and adding the spaghetti sauce, I embarked on the Lincoln-Log-esque process of building the lasagna, layer by layer. I started with sauce on the bottom of the pan, thinking that would help cook these strange oven-ready noodles I bought. Then came noodles, burger-mix, cheese and back to noodles.

Italy isn’t going to come calling anytime soon, asking for my recipe to add to their national cookbook, but I do have to say I was rather pleased with the results. Many times I start these cooking projects with high hopes, only to have my dreams of a homemade meal come crashing down, but tonight, it actually worked out. Not only did the lasagna *look* like a lasagna, but the taste was a pretty decent replication as well. It wasn’t my mom’s lasagna, but it wasn’t a total embarrassment either!

And, guess what we’ll be having for lunch tomorrow. Birthday lasagna- China style! (With just the two of us, I still have 2/3 of a pan left.)

Happy 36th birthday, Thad!

Happy Birthday to My Eyes!

Posted
Filed under Travel Musings

The space shuttle flying piggy-back around the Washington Monument. Baby gorillas frolicking at the National Zoo. My mom’s surprise 60th birthday party. Pandas lazily munching on bamboo. Airports in Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Bangkok and Guiyan. Rainstorms in Thailand. The wedding of two friends. And at least ninety books. (I used my GoodReads.com account to come up with that number, but since I sometimes forget to add a book to my “shelf” after I read it, that is a conservative count.)

What do all of these seemingly random things have in common?

They are all wonderful things that my new hawk-eyes have seen in the last year.

Friday was the one-year anniversary of my LASIK surgery and what a great year it has been! It isn’t as if I was blind before and could suddenly see, which would be a medical miracle, but without my contacts, my focused world consisted of about six inches from my face. Contacts were great, especially the leave-in ones that I would wear for a month (or more!) at a time, but once we realized we were going to be spending the bulk of our time living abroad for the next few decades, I figured it was time to throw away the saline solution.

As I went through the numerous pre-operation appointments, I was warned about various possible side-effects, including problems with halos and night vision. (These apparently were a higher concern for my case, as it seems I have abnormally large pupils. Thad has always made fun of my eyes, saying they were like alien eyes, so he was only too happy to have it medically confirmed!) I had put off the surgery for years, mostly on account of these possibly complications. It turns out, I had nothing to worry about. Within hours of the procedure, I had 20/20 vision and never developed any problems with halos, night vision or dryness. LASIK was a total success!

Now, I can roll up a few sets of clothes, stash them in my bag and head off not only to western China, but whatever random city Thad’s next assignment takes us to. And, rather than filling my consumables shipment with contact solution and cleaner, I can use that space for a few extra boxes of Cheerios and some macaroni and cheese.

(Here’s the blog entry I wrote a year ago, just two days after having LASIK surgery.)

The Hunt for Orange October

Posted
Filed under Travel Musings

It’s that dreaded time of year again. No, it is not Tax Day. Nor is it time for back-to-school dental check-ups that always end in the need to have a cavity filled. It isn’t even the shortest day of the year, when the sun seemingly rises and sets simultaneously.

It is Halloween.

I know some people love this holiday with a passion that most hold in reserve for their spouses and children and baby pandas. I admire those who can look upon this season of spooks and goblins as a blessing bestowed upon autumn by the pagans of years past.

I am not one of them.

Last year, I laid out my argument against Halloween in terms my dislike of most things in costume. (You are welcome to review that good-natured anti-Halloween diatribe here, in “Gourd Sculpting and Arachnid Treats.”) But there is more to my dislike of Halloween than just adults dressed as creatures from Star Trek that follow me around bars in Las Vegas. ( I would like to take a moment  to point out that toddlers and babies are excluded from my aversion to costumed critters. Whether it is a niece dressed as a puppy, the awesome kid who showed up on my doorstep dressed as a UFO in an outfit fashioned from two Rubbermaid trashcan lids fitted with Christmas lights, or a sleeping baby as nearly anything, whether it be animal, vegetable or mineral, I am on board. Little ones in cute costumes are adorable. The distaste starts when the disguised reach middle school. Sorry niece #1- you’ve hit the line this year! Unless, that is, you fathom some awesomely literary costume, of course. Then I will reconsider my arbitrary line.)

Although the costumed creatures are reason enough to not have Halloween on my “favorite days of the year” list (which I don’t have a physical manifestation of, but does exist in my head), I also cannot get on board with the black and orange thing. Black is okay. It is slimming. It makes for a nice little dress. On a car, it can help hide dirt. But, orange? Nope. Rarely is orange a flattering color and it is impossible to rhyme in a poem. It is a waste of a wedge on the color wheel.

Regardless of my personal feelings about Halloween, part of my CLO job is to plan/host events for our community in Chengdu.  Any such day that is uniquely American or culturally significant becomes a bigger deal when you are living overseas. People want their kids to experience Easter like they would in the US, with a giant bunny who delivers eggs filled with chocolate in baskets of plastic grass. They want an abundance of red, white and blue streamers amid which they can eat BBQ while celebrating the birth of our great nation. And, they want Halloween– costumes, trick-or-treating, jack o’ lanterns. ..the works.

To prepare for this festival of ghosts and ghouls, we needed pumpkins, as I am hosting a carved-pumpkin contest next week. (I hesitate to call it a jack o’ lantern contest, as entrants might have to be creative with how they design their oddly shaped gourd art.) Out went the call for pumpkin orders and in they came. With a total required number of orange orbs surpassing the two-dozen mark, I thought I’d get thirty, just to be safe.

With the help of our staff gardener, I headed out to a wet market on the edge of Chengdu, which was great because I love markets! There is something fabulous about seeing all the fresh produce stacked and ready for purchase. The colors in an outdoor market seem more vivid and vibrant. The smells are more aromatic. (This is true for both the pleasant scents and the not-so-pleasant odors that waft on the breeze.) Markets tend to have a different sort of shoppers than supermarkets, which is also intriguing to experience.

Chinese pumpkins aren’t quite the same as American pumpkins. (I am sure there is scientific nomenclature that would trace the lineage of these various gourds, but that isn’t my world. In the US, I see large, round, very orange pumpkins. In China, I see large, squat, toadstool-like, slightly orange gourds trying to pass themselves off as pumpkins.) But, Chinese pumpkins are the only choice, so we’ll do our best with what we have.

After digging through a woman’s enormous pile of pumpkins, sorting out the best, most-likely to be carve-able ones, we had a stack of thirty chosen gourds. As the gardener picked through the stack, helping me along in the process, getting a “hao” (thumbs-up) or “bu hao” (thumbs down) on each selection, he quickly caught on to what I was looking for and supplied a good number of pumpkins to our purchase-pile.

At one point, looking up from my hunt for the next great pumpkin, I glanced over my shoulder to see a crowd of probably fifteen or twenty people, mostly older folks, watching the show. I can only imagine what they must think of the blonde woman in a skirt and galoshes, buying thirty pumpkins. Is there a good story to fill in those gaps?

Thanks to the help of the gardener, I was able to haul my load of necessary Halloween adornments back to the consulate where they were quickly picked up by those who had submitted orders, taken to be carved in to…I actually have no idea.

While Halloween is not high on my list and I’m not a big fan of dressing up, I will be celebrating more than I have in years.  (My current costume plan is to go as the great Chicago Bears defensive player, #99, Shea McClellin, but Thad tells me he is pretty sure Shea never wore gray yoga pants with his jersey.)  And it will be great! I’ll judge funky-shaped carved pumpkins, that I am sure will be extraordinary, since our community is amazingly creative. I’ll hand out candy from the “trunk” of my hot-pink scooter during the “truck or treat.” And I’ll do it all with a genuine smile on my face because distinctively American holidays are just a little more special when you live on the other side of the world.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

With A Side of Smog

Posted
Filed under Travel Musings

Eggs benedict with hollandaise sauce, bacon, pancakes, dragon fruit, tiny oranges, chocolate chip shortbread cake (my contribution to the meal), all with a side of dense, industrial-grade smog.

That’s what we call a true Chengdu brunch.

When I roll out of bed on a Sunday morning, look out my massive floor to ceiling windows in the master bedroom and realize I can barely make out the PLA Hospital that is just a block up the road, I know it is going to be a rough day on the ol’ lungs.  Some days the gray can be blamed on 90% humidity- a fine mist that cools my skin and smears my make-up on my daily scoot to work.

Not today.

Today’s air is thick and gray, not the white of pending rain. Today’s air has the taste of coal and chemicals. Thad suggested that maybe Sichuan is celebrating a new sister holiday to the Spring Lantern Festival, this one being the Autumn Tire Burning Festival.

Of course, I couldn’t just sit on the edge of the bed and marvel at the lack of visibility. I had to know just how bad it really was. So, throwing on my fluffy pink robe and pink, monster-feet slippers, I shuffled out to the living room to fire up the internet and put a number on just how murderous the day would be on my pulmonary friends.

The United States Consulate in Chengdu has a great website filled with information about current events, upcoming activities and the array of American Citizen Services offered by the mission. None of that matters to me. I have the air monitor bookmarked on laptop and on days as hazy as today, go directly there to get the bad news as it is posted.

So, just how bad was the air in Chengdu today?

“Hazardous.”  All day long. (Okay, to be fair, we got a brief respite for about four hours in the late afternoon where the air popped up to the glorious level of “very unhealthy.”) According to the EPA, when the air quality is labeled as “hazardous” by their standards, “everyone should avoid all physical activity outdoors; people with heart or lung disease, older adults, and children should remain indoors and keep activity levels low.”  (If you’re interested, I would suggest a quick trip over to http://chengdu.usembassy-china.org.cn/air-quality-monitor4.html , where the calculations are explained.)

There are a lot of great things about Chengdu.  We’ve got pandas. We’ve got Sichuan Opera. We’ve got lovely parks and spicy food.  The air is not one of those great things. Today, my eyelids feel like they are made of sandpaper. My throat has a scratch to it that wasn’t there yesterday. And the five air filters in my apartment are working overtime.

Sometimes, my lungs sure do miss Idaho.