Tag Archives: China

A Book Club for Two, Please

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Curled up on top of the floor heat vent, under a comforter, on a chilly Christmas afternoon with my brand new hardback copy of Matilda.

Flipping through the pages of a history book that my sister and I dug out of a dumpster at the high school where my dad taught, writing in the answers to the end-of-section review questions after reading each chapter.

Proudly clamping my brand new lamp to the edge of my frilly, white and pink daybed, knowing that now I could stay up way later than my prescribed bedtime to read just one or two (or three, or maybe four) chapters in the lives of the Holt family, from the American Dynasty series, in which I was totally entrenched.

Wandering down not-so-well-lit alleys with a backpack on my back, in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, (the list goes on…) in search of a used bookstore where I could buy a novel or two to tide me over until the next hostel with a “take-one, leave-one” lending library policy. (I must confess my thievery here. At these hostels, I took *WAY* more books that I left. It was out of desperation. Really.)

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Words and stories and books have always played a huge role in my life. From my earliest memories of reading the comics in the morning newspaper as I ate my bowl of Lucky Charms to my current, late-night book buying binges on BarnesandNoble.com, books are always there.

Last night, as I was putting off doing anything constructive, like folding laundry or cleaning up the dinner dishes, I was randomly surfing the internet when I heard the lovely little electronic chirp meaning I had a new Google message from someone.  Toggling over to my open Gmail account, I saw that it was my 6th grade niece, Kelsey, who was just starting her day in Idaho. She must have been ready for school a few minutes early, as she was online and we had a chance to chat for a bit. After talking about how school was going and what her crazy siblings were up to, she asked if I wanted to pick a book to read together and then talk about.

YES!!

Of course I want to read a book together and then talk about it. It will be like our own mini-book club!

I was so excited that she thought of this idea and I was on board before she could change her middle school mind. Thinking she might have an in on what was popular right now, I asked what she wanted to read (it isn’t always easy to keep up with young adult trends from the other side of the world), but she deferred to my English teacher-ness and said to pick.

As Kels headed off to her day filled with math and science and orchestra and dance, I spent the rest of the evening bouncing between BN.com and Amazon.com, looking for the latest and greatest novels to read together, thinking if I narrowed the choices down, she could make the final selection.

Because of this nearly manic need to have something to read in front of me at all times (cereal boxes, owner’s manuals, advertisements around the edges of a map…), our new reading adventure just gives me another outlet for my bookworm DNA.  I’m so excited (and I just can’t hide it!) to get reading together.

Book recommendations have been submitted to my co-reader and I await her proclamation. Next step? An awesome name for our two-person reading group.

 

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Geography Woes

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We’ve all got regrets from our years in middle school and junior high, some of which most of us would probably rather not delve in to, especially in the realm of the clothes we were convinced were “cool.” (Think: Hypercolor shirts, overalls, big bangs, pegged baggy jeans,…oh, the list could go on…) But, as my search for the end of the sidewalk has taken me down paths I never could have imagined when I was wandering the halls of Jefferson Junior High, I couldn’t have foreseen that a bit more effort in Mr. Shake’s geography class would have come in handy.

I dreaded those frequent map quizzes, with just the outlines of countries and mocking stars of capitals. At the time, did I think I would ever need to know the difference between Haiti and the Dominican Republic? (I finally got those straight in my thirteen year old mind by remembering that Haiti is the shorter word, so it gets the smaller part of the island. That is some quality logic! That information became key when I moved to the island of Hispaniola to study abroad during college. With the big and little of it in mind, I was able to safely find myself on the correct side of the island. Most of the time.) Or did I need to know where the Yellow River was in China? (When that is the determining factor for heat in your apartment, you soon figure it out!)

At the time, Bangkok was one of the cities that actually stood out to me when the maps of Southeast Asia were handed out, not because I had any great interest in Thailand, and not even because it sounds like it was named by a prepubescent boy, but because it held the exotic appeal of hard men being humbled and tough men tumbling and references to people and places and events I didn’t understand, but backed by haunting music that clung to my mind like pearls to an oyster.

A score and a few years later, I found myself back in that sweltering city, not for anything as exotic as a global chess tournament, but rather for training with the State Department for my first non-teaching job in over a decade.

I may have sat in a hotel conference room for forty (or more!) hours that week, learning a massive amount about the eight portfolios that make up my position, which was well-worth the trip, but the minute we were released at the end of each day, I was ready to go see the city.  Within moments of being dismissed for the afternoon, I was in our (very posh!) hotel room, stripping off the layers of clothing necessary to keep warm in any conference room around the world (never mind that it was a balmy 90 degrees outside), shucking the tights, corduroy skirt  and cardigan for shorts, a tank top and sandals.

One night, we had the chance to meet up with our fellow ex-Crystal City Oakwood mo-partment mates, David and Ian, who were in town for a brief layover before heading south to the lovely beaches of Phuket. (See, I’m telling you, an entire country named by pre-pubescent boys. Wait until you see the picture of Thad at the Mo Chit Skytrain stop.)

We met up at Cabbages and Condoms, a great restaurant that started as a small NGO, and has blossomed into several locations within Thailand. Other than serving good food and fun, fruity drinks, their shtick is that all of their proceeds to go AIDS prevention and family planning education- both very worthy causes.  While we waited for David and Ian to arrive, we perused the shop filled with all things condom.  I decided against sending the postcards home to my elementary-aged nieces and nephews, but did end up buying both a shoulder bag and a scarf for myself. (Both of which I could have bought at the weekend market for a lower price, but I figured it was a good way to help the cause.) Rather than mints coming with the bill as a parting gift, we were each given a lovely, pink-wrapped condom as our take-away for the night. They have a theme and boy, do they stick with it!

As I think back to that second-floor classroom on 10th Street in Caldwell, the one in which I dreaded the day the atlases and colored pencils were handed out, the one in which I felt like nothing we were doing would ever have any consequence in my own life, I have to laugh. More than any other class (okay, other than English, but I have a natural bias there), geography is the hallmark of the Foreign Service. Capital city names roll of the tips of tongues like poetry off the lips of a bard. Who doesn’t need to know where Dhaka and Djibouti are? Or Dakar and Dushanbe? And if you don’t know them, it doesn’t take long to not only place them on a map, but learn their current state of political affairs and exactly how long it takes to fly from said city to home in the States. These are the places where you find that middle ground between despair and ecstasy. These are the places that will be home.

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A Serendipitous Treadmill?

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I think I may have bought a treadmill today.

Talk about jumping in with both (unexercised) feet! For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about how I really need to make “going to the James,” as Thad calls it, a regular part of my routine again. When we first moved to Chengdu, I went to the “gym” at our apartment complex a couple of times, but it wasn’t a great experience. While the advertisements for our complex include a spectacular list of amenities, including an outdoor pool with sandy beach, a putting green and a well-equipped gym, none of those items exist in reality. The outdoor pool with sandy beach is really about two inches of slimy-algae water surrounded by a gigantic litter box, the putting green is just another section of lawn (which, is actually an impressive feat in and of itself in China and I think advertising it as such would  be a draw for many folks) and the gym, well, it is there. The workout area is right next to the indoor pool, which is very well-maintained and always full, but only for doing laps and swimming caps are an indisputable requirement. The workout room itself though leaves much to be desired. (And this is from someone who is decidedly not a gym rat. I don’t need fancy gadgets and the latest weight-lifting technology. As  a matter of fact, those things just make me more likely to hurt myself.)

So what does the apartment complex’s gym have? There are two treadmills, both of which work, but both of which are usually occupied by octogenarian Chinese women walking backwards for an hour at a time. (There is not an ounce of hyperbole in that sentence. Seriously.) There are two stationary bikes, one of which works and the other of which has a broken strap on one of the pedals, so the rider’s foot flies off at random intervals, creating a rather entertaining experience for those standing around watching, waiting for the slowly aging to walk the equivalent of the equator, backwards. There is a single elliptical machine, but I’m somehow missing the necessary rhythm needed for those seemingly simple devices, so that doesn’t even show up on my gym-dar.  (I don’t think I can accurately express just how spastic I am when it comes to physical activity.) Finally, there are a few random weights.

Really, all I need in a gym is a treadmill, the hardest thing to come by at the one just downstairs.

After hemming and hawing and making repeated promises to myself to try the small gym at the consulate, and then coming up with endless excuses why “today” is not the day to start, I bit the bullet and hauled my duffle bag in to work today. I usually get off an hour earlier than Thad, so I figured I could use that time to work out and then we could scoot home together. (By usually, I mean, on paper I get off an hour earlier. The reality is much more random. Some weeks I am out of there right on time all week long, and then others I end up having a late-afternoon meeting scheduled or people in my office or a report that needs to be submitted to Washington.)

Today was the day.

I packed my adorable pink and navy Nike bag with my kicks, workout gear (apparently called “kit” by those speaking the Queen’s English, which I learned while reading a British fitness magazine at the hair salon in Bangkok), and my MP3 player, filled with all the best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) pop music of the 80s, 90’s and today!

Not two hours in to my day, I got an email from an officer who is leaving post soon. She wanted me to run an ad in the Panda Post, my CLO newsletter, selling her gently used treadmill.

Serendipity!

A quick note to Thad and post-visa line conversation and I had decided to put an offer in on the treadmill before it even hit the pages of the Post.

Once I figure out how to get the rather heavy contraption across Chengdu, I will be the proud owner of a gently-loved treadmill. This means I can run (run/walk is a much more accurate description of what I do) and sing along to my playlist of Backstreet Boys, Paula Abdul and Lady Gaga in the privacy of my own home, with my air purifier on high, trying to ward off the potential for black lung that comes with the territory here.

I may even try out the culturally correct “walk backwards for an endless amount of time” technique employed by the locals…but probably only if Thad is waiting to use the treadmill after me.

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To Infinity and Beyond (or Till Death Do Us Part)

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I am a sucker for weddings.

There’s the massive amount of preparation necessary, which means lots of organizing and planning and  the possible purchase of loads of office supplies to make the organizing and planning more productive and fun. There is the choosing of colors and cakes and centerpieces.  There is flower selection and venue selection and photographer selection. But, more than anything,  I love the dresses- whether long and flowing sheaths or fluffy and  frothy ball gowns or traditional with a splash of color, I could thumb through bridal magazines all day long, critiquing each aisle-bound set of attire. (Just Friday, I was headed home from the consulate, in a cab rather than on my scooter, because it was mail delivery day and we got not only an awesomely large care package from Thad’s sister, but also a couple of his birthday gifts arrived. I know if I were truly integrating into the Chengdu culture I would have loaded it all up on my bike and headed out, but I just can’t put that much on my scooter and expect to make it home in one piece!  I’m doing well to make to and from work each day when I have nothing more than my mere person with which to be concerned. Anyway, as I was headed home on Friday, I noticed, not far from the consulate, a brand new shop had opened up. What kind of shop you may ask? A wedding dress store! I will definitely be heading down there on my lunch on Monday to check out dresses in the windows. Oh, and buy a smoothie on my way, as the new bridal shop is right next door to the new smoothie shop, from which I carry a VIP card!)

But, back to weddings.

I love them.

So, several months ago, when I got an eVite for two of our friends getting hitched in Guiyang, I think I RSVPed before the entire page had even loaded on my somewhat lagging Chinese internet.  Of course we’d be taking the one-hour flight to the capital of Guizhou province to attend the ceremony! (The fact that Thad was the best man, while important, didn’t play in to my decision at all. It was a wedding. I was invited. I was going.)

Thad and I had the chance to attend several wedding banquets when we were in Peace Corps in Gansu, but we never participated in the morning part of the ceremony, which includes the groom breaking down the door to his bride’s parents home, after offering money and promises to do all the household chores; tea being served to the parents and grandparents, followed by the newlyweds bowing to these elder members of the family; the giving of red envelopes filled with money as a gift to the new couple; and the serving of and eating of gooey balls of dough served in a warm soup, called tangtuan.

I was super excited to find out we got to ride with the wedding party in the decorated cars. I see these caravans headed through town all the time, sometimes covered in flowers and other times draped in balloons. We were lucky enough to hop in a balloon laden car to make the trip to the bride’s father’s home and then again heading back to the bride’s mother’s place. I can definitely check that off my Bucket List! (Okay, I don’t actually have a Bucket List, not because I don’t think it is a good idea, but because it has become so much of a fad, I just can’t bring myself to follow the herd that way. I tend to do the same thing with books. As soon as it becomes uber-popular, I am suddenly not interested in reading it, even if everyone tells me it is great.  Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Haven’t read it. 50 Shades of Gray? Too ridiculous. Harry Potter? Only got through the first two before the hype became out of control.  I know.  I should be less of a snot.  But, maybe I’ll make myself a “Pushing Up Daisies” list. That way, not only am I making a set of goals for before I die, but I can adorn said list in every shade of pink and purple Gerber daisy known to man! I think I may just be on to something here…)

The morning wedding ceremonies were followed by a brief afternoon rest, during which I may or may not have gone to the ATM with Thad’s debit card, thinking I knew his PIN, and finding out I was not correct in that thought process only when the ATM gobbled his card and would not give it back after entering the wrong number twice. (Notice it was his card that went in the machine. I need mine for online shopping!)

An evening banquet wrapped up the day’s festivities. There was no ride in a balloon bedecked car, as the dinner was held in the hotel we were staying at, but it did entail a lot of food and even more alcohol.  After walking up the aisle together, Lulu wearing a beautiful knee-length red dress and her hair curled and up in a dainty bow, they addressed the crowd of nearly 200 guests. (Three of which were not Chinese- Jessica, Thad and me.)   A Chinese wedding does not include vows the way a western wedding does, which is, after the dress, my second favorite part of a weddings. Whether it is “Till death do us part” or “To infinity and beyond” (which I think would make a great addition to the traditional American vows),  that part of the event where the bride and groom turn to each other, hold hands and promise to love and cherish and honor and all the other gooey and sappy stuff that brings a tear to the eye of even the most stalwart guest, this is what I missed the most when comparing the ceremonies of the two cultures.

Lulu sang for John and John put together an adorable video, fashioned after the introduction to How I Met Your Mother.   The evening seemed to be a success. Toasts were made and then more toasts were made. And then, a few more toasts were made.

While a traditional Chinese wedding is not a white wedding, and it is true that nothing in this world is fair or safe or sure, I do think Billy Idol would agree that it was a nice day to start again.

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Moaning About Moon Cakes

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In America, around Christmas and the winter holidays, there are always endless jokes about the ubiquitous, yet terrible tradition that is fruitcake. (I will admit from the start, I have never actually tasted a piece of fruitcake. A look at its heavy brown pastry, dotted with candied fruit brings to mind a slab of concrete with large pebbles strewn throughout. Not appetizing in the least.) And while fruitcake may be a uniquely western thing, terrible pastries at a time of celebration are apparently a global phenomenon.

Here in China, the bane of my fall season is a not-so-lovely little treat called the moon cake.

Moon cake shops start to pop up in early September, seemingly overnight. What was once an empty storefront will suddenly be bursting at the seams with fancy, silk-lined boxes of moon cakes, selling for hundreds and even thousands of RMB. Usually these fly-by-night stores also have a variety of bin-cakes, some wrapped, some not, selling on an individual basis. (It is the Chinese version of WinCo Supermarket bins, down to the fact that people dig through them barehanded. I didn’t dare buy goods out of the open grocery store bins in Idaho and I don’t dare do it here!)

These omnipresent snacks are a part of China’s Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival. This fall celebration is a popular harvest festival recognized by the Chinese government as an official holiday, meaning all official businesses are closed, schools are closed and many people go on vacation for an entire week. (It’s like a national spring break, but in the fall, and minus the uber-drunk, itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka-dot bikini-clad college students.

Mid-Autumn Festival dates back over 3,000 years to the ancient times of moon worship in China’s Shang Dynasty. I’m pretty sure some of those original moon cakes are still floating around this place, as they don’t seem to have, or need, expiration dates. (Chinese version of the Twinkie?) While it is also sometimes referred to as the Moon Cake Festival, this is less common, but, it does make me think that maybe we should rechristen Christmas and Fruitcake Festival.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, which is usually around late September or early October on the Western calendar. It is a date that parallels the autumnal equinox of the solar calendar, when the moon is supposedly at its fullest and roundest. The traditional food of this festival is the moon cake, of which there are many different varieties, and yet none that I want to eat. Whether it is the type with an entire cooked egg yolk in the middle or the one made of five different nuts, none of them are appealing. And this is coming from someone who has a deeply-ingrained love of pastries. Last week, I got two care packages from the States, one from my best friend Shannon and the other from by parents. Both boxes had a variety of goodies inside, but the one place their overlapped was in their containment of chocolate pudding pies. (Together, they could make one of the best Venn Diagrams known to man!) So I am no slouch when it comes to the consumption of sweet treats, but when I bite through the thick breading that makes up the outer layer of the goodie, only to find I have a mouth full of mashed red bean paste, I don’t consider that a win in my book

In the Middle Kingdom, Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the most important holidays of the year; a time when, traditionally, farmers would celebrate the end of the summer harvesting season. Customarily on this day, Chinese family members and friends will gather together to admire the bright mid-autumn harvest moon and eat moon cakes under the moon. (As much as I dislike the dense, hockey-puck-like pastries, they really are all the rage here! I even bought a small package of them for my ayi as a thank-you for her wonderful housekeeping skills

With Mid-Autumn Festival right around the bend and moon cakes on every corner, I’ll be on a mini-blogging hiatus as I head to Bangkok for a week of CLO Training, (I need to find out how to CLO better!) and then on to the wedding of a good friend in Guizhou. I’ll be back with tales of Thailand and continued adventures while In Search of the End of the Sidewalk after Columbus Day.

Until then, 中秋节快乐！Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

Colorful moon cakes for my ayi

Po’s Stomping Grounds

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The Valley of Peace sits just beyond our doorstep here in Chengdu, just an hour by high speed train from the city. Once there it is easy to imagine Po popping out from behind a pillar as he watches epic training battles ensue between the Furious Five.  Wandering amid the ancient Daoist temples and through the heavily forested mountainside, it is a short leap of imagination to envisioning Tigress, Monkey, Mantis, Viper, and Crane studying under Shifu and competing to be the best marital artists in all the land, knowing that they must be prepared to defend their treasure from the wicked Tai Lung.

While this “Valley of Peace” may not exist anywhere but in Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda, the setting that served as inspiration for the film is just a short high-speed train ride away from our home here in Chengdu. DuJiang Yan, the inspiration for those awe-inspiring backgrounds detailed so thoroughly in the film, is not only a breathtaking bit of scenery in western China, but also home to a ground-breaking (literally) irrigation project undertaken in 250BC, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Before the DuJiang Yan irrigation system was built, the Chengdu plain was dry and infertile, but the area near the Min River flooded every spring, causing continual hardship for those farmers living nearby who relied on the river to nourish their crops. Li Bing, a local governor, is credited with noticing the annual adversity, although one would have to think the farmers were well aware of the issue long before anyone official decided to “notice” it. (I’ll refrain from drawing comparisons between Qin Dynasty bureaucracy and more modern-day political wrangling we will be forced to ingest over the next forty-three days.)

He knew the frigid water came from the melting snowpack in the distant mountains and realized that the river must stay open for trade via shipping and his army’s mobility, but also saw that something must change if the people were to continue to prosper in the Sichuan valley.  (And prosper they must, as the world was waiting with baited breath for the introduction of the infamous, mouth-numbing Sichuan spices that invade my every meal!) Because restricting the water flow was out of the question, Li Bing knew a dam was not an option and had to move on to bigger and more inventive ways of creating a habitable region for his people.  While the 1970’s overused the phrase “think outside the box” to the point where it is painfully cliché, Mr. Li might have been on that bandwagon long before corporate America’s management gurus thrust their geometrical jargon upon us.

With his son by his side, (and with some legends including a dragon, which just makes the whole story a whole lot cooler)  eight years of toil by more than 100,000 laborers created a levee system like none the world had seen. Bamboo cages were filled with rocks, redirecting sections of the river away from the flood zone.(The current tourist attraction at DuJiang Yan shows some of these bamboo wrapped rocks, looking eerily similar to something upper-middle class American housewives would buy for a premium price at Pottery Barn!)

Unlike many of the things man makes today, Li Bing’s irrigation system has withstood the test of time.(This was definitely no IKEA, no tools needed, home improvement project!)  Not only are his hand-dug river channels still funneling water throughout the Sichuan plains today, helping to irrigate thousands of acres of farmland, but the levees were flexible enough to withstand the rocking and rolling of the land when the area became the epicenter of a massive earthquake in 2008. (This being the same quake that made my newly built cement apartment building, 150 miles north in Gansu, split at the seams and crumble in the corners.)

Growing up in the midst of farms (potatoes, sugar beets, corn, wheat, mint…and the list goes on…), I was raised understanding the importance of having adequate water for the crops to prosper. And as a kid, I endured more than one lecture from a perturbed farmer who was unhappy with the McDaniel kids pulling his syphon tubes. (Our fiddling wasn’t malicious; we just wanted to know what agricultural magic made water flow uphill. And sadly, I still can’t explain it. Yes, I know the basic principles of physics that dictate the water’s movement, but much like I know the theoretical physics behind airplanes, I am still partially convinced that it all boils down to fairy dust and hocus-pocus.)

So, another CLO trip is in the books.  A day out at an ancient irrigation system was the perfect foil to life in a giant city for this country girl. I may not have spotted Po and his evil leopard fighting crew, but I did enjoy a nearly perfect fall day in what was definitely a Valley of Peace.

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Pigs and Pancakes and Pantries

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Somewhere in northern Maryland (okay, not somewhere, Hagerstown) is a gigantic warehouse that is home to the chattel and baubles of American Foreign Service Officers currently serving in far-flung places (and some less far-flung, but still outside the boarders of Home). I’ve never been to this promised land of left-behind goods, but I can only imagine it is more of a complex than a warehouse.

It is somewhere within this massive storage facility that the majority of my HHE still sits, awaiting shipment to Chengdu. Emails have been sent, hallway conversations have been had and there are many sets of eyes anxiously awaiting a reply about when all of our Idaho possessions will begin their literal slow-boat-to-China journey.

But, in the meantime, we did receive our rather small HHE shipment, coming from the Crystal City mo-partment. I may not have wall hangings or kitchenware, but I do have a few items that will make our Chengdu apartment just step closer to being home for the next two years.

Friday’s shipment brought with it my Christmas tree, 75 bottles of nail polish, our winter coats (as fall seems to have hit just this last weekend, I think those coats came right in time), my adorable and colorful Eastern Market bureau and, of course, the goodies from my epic Costco shopping trip.

I can only imagine what my ayi thought when she came to clean the house today and found the back bedroom now doubles as a pantry. After hauling a giant bookcase in there Friday afternoon, I filled it with all of the important things we’ll need over the next two years: 45 boxes of Kraft mac and cheese, 40 packets of microwave popcorn, 108 cans of Mountain Dew, 21 cans of refried beans, 80 Jell-O pudding cups…and the list goes on. (Having been raised in a church that pushes self-sufficiency and emergency preparedness through food storage, I have to say, none of the Sunday handouts I ever got made it look this tasty! Who needs flour and pinto beans and rice when you can have Fruit Loops and Rice Crispy Treats and loads upon loads of Miracle Whip. Wait, wait. Miracle Whip was probably included on the hand outs.)

So, while my HHE arrival wasn’t everything I had ever dreamed and hoped it would be, I am happy to have a few more of our things with us here in the Middle Kingdom, things to make our spacious, but barren, apartment home.

With a newly arrived box of Bisquick and some maple syrup I ordered from the Beijing commissary, this evening we feasted on “breakfast for dinner.”  Granted, I only have my single welcome-kit frying pan, so while the pancakes slowly browned in that, I scrambled eggs in a sauce pan, which may not be a traditional cooking method, but, you’ll not find me complaining.

Granted, if you give this pig a pancake, she will want syrup, get sticky, need a bath and demand bubbles, but she won’t whine about missing photos and office supplies.

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My Lungs Are Whispering Sweet Words of Gratitude

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Lungs like fresh air.  (It’s true. I looked it up on Wikipedia.)

To that end, a day out of Chengdu is a perfect “pulmo-cation” and so I did my CLO-duty and planned a trip to Luo Dai, an ancient city about an hour outside Sichuan’s capital that boasts a mini-Great Wall, horses that take riders around a lake and a tourist-filled street of shopping and photography. (That’s right, I’m making up words again. But, what better way to describe a day long holiday for one’s largest respiratory organ than “pulmo-cation?”)

While the idea was to give people a chance to get out of the city, see some of the surrounding countryside and enjoy the first fall-fall feeling day of the season, the bit of R&R for our lungs was also greatly appreciated. But, instead, some of us decided to punish our lungs with a hike up the small-Great Wall in Luo Dai.  (I always thinking hiking is a good idea. My brain thinks it sounds invigorating and refreshing, but about ten minutes in to whatever excursion I previously thought to be a positive experience, I am mentally cursing myself, with a few of those murmurs escaping my lips.)

As with many Chinese tourist-sites, stairs are the name of the game at Luo Dai. From the base of the hill, Thad and I could see the staircase straddling the ramparts of the wall, headed straight up the mountainside, with no respite until the first large guard tower, which lay at least a million stairs in front of us. At this point though, I was still gung-ho and ready to go! We were out of Chengdu, the weather was cool and misty and I was ready to tackle the challenge.

That all changed about twenty stairs in to the hike when my lungs were starting to ache from (possibly) too much fresh air, my thighs burned with each unevenly spaced stair and gravity started pulling heavier and heavier on my purse carrying our umbrellas, a water bottle, paper for the squatties and other necessities.

But, with more pride than brains sometimes, I continued up the mountain, taking it a stair at a time and pausing every ten or so to catch my breath, shed a layer or sip some quickly disappearing water.

The countryside surrounding the wall was beautiful. Because it had rained overnight, there trees were covered in dew drops and the air had the crisp feeling that tells you autumn is right around the corner. I would love to say it was somewhere we will haul all of our visitors, (you’re coming, right visitors?) but we were sadly disappointed in how commercialized the area is. As we stood to look back at the path we had already traversed (this being between the second and third guard towers on the wall, and really just an excuse for me to let my lungs simmer down a bit), rather than getting an expansive view of the wall, the forests and the sky, we saw rows of tents, set up on the pathway, hawking everything from ice cream and cold noodles to rubber snakes, plastic whistles and canvas shoes. (I think the canvas shoe business is booming on the wall, as I saw more than one Chinese woman ascending in high heels, but then all those coming back down the wall were shod in flats. Maybe one should consider their choice of footwear before undertaking such an outing?)

After the third guard tower, as we faced another steep climb up the final leg of the mountain, my lungs were crying “Uncle” and Thad’s disgust with the endless selling of random crap on the wall got the better of us. We decided it was best to call it a day on the wall and go ride horses instead. Not wanting to backtrack our entire journey (the wall in Luo Dai does not make a circuit, meaning once you reach the end, you must turn around and go back the way you came), so we drew on our Gansu roots and hopped of the beaten (mortared and stoned) path. After crawling down a slick, rickety ladder that went over the side of the wall, we passed through a hole in the wall and found a farmer’s pathway. We knew if we made it back to the lake we would easily find the rest of our group, so down the hill we went, with not quite the grace of mountain goats, but with neither of us ending up on our bums either. (Because of the rain the night before, the dirt path was a bog of red-hued mud that caked on to my tennis shoes, adding a good five pounds to my weight by the time we reached the foot of the hill. I spent quite a while this morning, squatting on the floor of my bathroom with the shower head in hand, trying to get the red-dye of the mud off my cute pink and gray kicks!)

After passing through what was clearly an outdoor chicken slaughter house (the blood and feathers were fresh enough for me to assume the recently deceased chicken was probably the same one staring back at me, comb and all, from a stew placed in the center of our table just an hour later), we came upon the lake and it’s bored looking horses. (Much like a NASCAR driver, these horses spend their days in a continual state of turning left.)

The day continued with a quick loop around the lake on a horse with an unintelligible Sichuan Hua named mount (local dialect, confounding for native Mandarin speakers, which makes it way beyond my subsistence level Chinese abilities)  for me and Thad’s hilariously named steed- Shui Bi (Sprite) and then lunch that included the previously mentioned, recently expired chicken. Then it was back in to town to stroll the “ancient street” in search of Luo Dai trinkets without which I couldn’t survive. (Not surprisingly, there was nothing that fell in to this category.) This old part of town is a hotspot where young women rent costumes from ancient dynasties and then pose in the various courtyards as if they were members of the ruling family. Thad and I were sucked in to numerous photo sessions while we wandered the street. Nothing says anachronism like a Chinese woman attired in a beautiful Qing dynasty gown, sharing the frame with a mud-covered, jean-clad white woman!

While the day ran a bit longer than I had expected, I am chalking this one up to as a CLO-success, as the hour long bus ride back to Chengdu was filled with open-mouth naps, not only on the part of the kids (most of whom scaled the mini-Great Wall as if they were close cousins with a gazelle family), but also by a number of both adults and tour guides. When that many Z’s are needed, I think it counts as a great Saturday!

(And, I am sure our lungs are giving us a standing, pneumo-vation.)

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The Case of the Missing HHE

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It may have taken a few months to get the paperwork sorted out, but just a week ago today I was thrilled to announce that I was “Rolling in the Renminbi.” That windfall (okay, windfall may be a bit of an exaggeration, but at least I have employment and a steady source of income) was a high point of the week, leading to a lovely Sunday outing to ChunXi Lu where I treated Thad to the long-promised Pizza Hut meal.

(Pizza Hut may seem like an odd choice for celebrating a new job, and while Pizza Huts in China are fancier than those in America, with waitresses in long white aprons and fancy decorations adorning the restaurant, that is not why we chose to eat pan pizzas for our personal-sized party. Rather, when we were here with Peace Corps, Pizza Hut was the destination for pizza whenever we happened to be called in to Chengdu for a meeting. It was pricey on a Peace Corps budget, so we would plan carefully, weighing the triple threat of quantity we wanted to consume vs. the quantity our stomachs could handle after being without dairy and grease for so long vs. the amount of cash we were going to drop on a single meal.  Now, here on Thad’s Foreign Service salary and my CLO income, we could eat Pizza Hut every day if we wanted. [Ugh! We don’t want.]  So, falling back in to the DINK category, it was off to Pizza Hut where I promised to buy Thad anything he wanted off the menu- although when he went with the popcorn chicken stuffed crust pizza, I did have to question his taste. )

With the successful deposit of my hard-earned  money into our account I thought we’d have smooth sailing for the foreseeable future.

I should have known better.

Monday morning I was greeted with a long-anticipated email from our consulate customs staff member saying our HHE (Foreign Service speak for “everything that was in my Idaho house which has been in storage for the last sixteen months) had arrived in Chengdu and was ready to be delivered to our apartment.

YES!

For weeks now I’ve been mentally pacing my office, hoping to hear that our stuff is in town. I’m excited for the wall hangings from Idaho to help disguise my cement walls. I’m itching to read the piles of books that I know are in plastic Rubbermaid tubs, just waiting to line up neatly on the shelves of my apartment.  I’m uncharacteristically enthusiastic about the pots and pans and plates and pitchers awaiting homes in my Chinese kitchen. And I’m dying to get my hands on my school supplies to make my office at work not only more colorful, but also more organized and efficient.

With a twinkle of excitement in my eye, I dropped by the cubicle of the staff member in charge of shipment deliveries this afternoon. My excuse for popping in was that I wanted to verify the time of tomorrow’s delivery, but in reality, I just wanted to look at the white board that says “Ross” and “October 14” that hangs in his office, announcing to the world that I will soon have a complete household.

This was a poor choice.

Rather than walking away with the same twinkle in my eye, I walked out of his cubicle holding back a tear. There will be no massive HHE shipment tomorrow. There will be one box.

That’s right. One, single, lonely box.

After a bit of mild panic at Thad’s desk, an almost meltdown in my bosses office (which took every ounce of my power to contain, but as nothing less than a professional, I did my best to hide the tears of frustration with a smile and a whole lot of note-taking) and a few deep breaths behind the closed door of my office,  it was time to get to the bottom of the mystery of my missing HHE. (I really could have used the detective help of Scooby-Doo today. If only that goofy dog and his slightly-stoned partner in mystery-solving were here to follow a green slimy monster through a deserted amusement park, eventually unmasking him as the horrible customs official who was hiding my goods.)

A bit of digging revealed a much more bureaucratic bad-guy: paperwork.

It seems that when Thad scheduled our whole pack-out from the mo-partment, he told them that we also had a lot of items in storage that would need to be shipped to Chengdu at the same time. The operator that he spoke with said that wouldn’t be a problem, so we left it at that. Somewhere between that discussion and the forms though, this extra piece of information was lost in the shuffle and the operator never added the note about our other boxes that were resting in storage.

None of this came to light until today, when I saw the packing slip that was written out for a single box.

After sixteen week in Chengdu, we will now wait another eight (or more…it is hard to be optimistic at this point) weeks to be able to finally settle in and completely make our apartment home.

Tomorrow I will get my giant box of goodies, most of them items I collected on my shopping spree to Costco in the weeks leading up to our departure, and for this I am grateful, as I may need those bulk-sized boxes of chocolate pudding cups and the case of brownie mixes to get me through the frustration of not getting family photos and holiday decorations for another two months.

Here’s to countless more weeks of white walls, pineapple shaped lamps and a set of dishes that rivals those we had when we were first married…

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Rolling in Renminbi

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I don’t want to make money; I just want to be wonderful.  -Marilyn Monroe

 

We’ve been in China for fifteen weeks now, which means I’ve been on the job for thirteen weeks. (Knowing the exact number of weeks we’ve been living in Sichuan has nothing to do with a countdown to another placement or some crazy obsession with days and hours and minutes spent here, but rather a patient ticking off of the rotations of the sun on the prison wall containing my HHE. We got an email from the mysterious Mr. Xu this last week that told us our worldly goods have made it to Chengdu, but won’t be released until someone goes down and pays a rather large sum of cash for them. Customs fees? Bribes? Ransom money? I have no idea, but I feel like maybe this transaction is going to involve a large silver suitcase, a key to an anonymous locker in a bustling train station and a lot of ear-piece wearing folks in dark suits  and Ray-Ban sunglasses. All of this, at least in my imagination, for a quirkily painted dresser I bought at a flea market in DC, some jars of peanut butter and boxes of Cheerios made in the epic Costco run and a few boxes of clothing that I haven’t seen in well over a year and will probably dispose of anyway.)

But, fifteen weeks and thirteen on the job. No big deal, right? Except, I hit a major milestone Thursday.

I GOT PAID!!

That’s right. It took thirteen weeks and no small amount of extra work on the parts of my management officer and the consulate’s office management specialist, but payday has arrived!

Marilyn Monroe may have been content with being wonderful, but I’d rather be wonderful *and* have the cash-o-la to buy a bauble or two to accessorize said wonderfulness. I firmly believe one can never have enough purses, necklaces or shoes. To which end, I’ve been spending Thad’s hard earned paycheck, but now, I’ve got not only his, but mine as well!

I’ve promised Thad a fancy evening at Pizza Hut to celebrate my new-found position as a bread-winner in the Ross household, but our party plans have been put on hold for a few days, as Thad has been serving as the social sponsor for a new family who has moved in to our apartment complex. That means trips to the airport (possibly putting him within yards of our hostage-held belongings), dinners at neighborhood restaurants, trips to grocery stores and cell phone outlets and just general introductions to the fabulous area in which we live. Plus, with the earthquake in Yiling on Friday, he had to go in and work for a few hours today, making sure any Americans in the affected areas are safe and accounted for. Needless to say, payday pizza has been put on hold for a bit. But, pizza and possibly the world’s most elaborate salad do await us. Sometime. Soon.

While you don’t need to call me up if you are gangsta’, I do like fancy and you are definitely free to get dancey, so, like Pink and her pop-punk party crashes, won’t you come on, come on and raise your glass.  I am once again a wage-earning member of society.