The Jetson Mobile
Grocery Shopping
Shao Kao
Dancers at the Park
Feeding the hungry fish at the park
The dog we pass every afternoon on our way home from school
Shopping!
Us
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Sometimes when I'm in my extremely Western-style apartment, eating extremely Western macaroni and cheese that was graciously mailed to me, and watching extremely cheesy chick flicks on my computer, I forget that I'm not in North America. It's a really odd feeling after Zack Ephron turns 30 again, I have to run errands, and I'm suddenly jolted to the reality that I live on the other side of the planet. Usually it happens almost immediately as I walk out the door of my apartment, and "China" fills my nostrils. Who knew one country could have so many overwhelmingly powerful smells... all within a few feet of one another! I have never been to any place that I have experienced such a plethora of odors within a journey of 30 feet! Ha ha!
So from thirty feet out the door, usually Drew and I are headed to our mode of transportation... which right now happens to be a three-wheeled scooter that also happens to look rather like a bubble-shaped hovercraft from the Jetsons! I absolutely think it is the coolest thing ever... Drew has a few issues with it, since it is fairly circular-shaped, and he tends to crack his head every time we go over a bump. We found out about a week ago that actually mostly old people use these three-wheeled scooters, because they are handicapped. So funny! If we have failed to remember that we are foreigners in a foreign country by then, it doesn't take long before we've drawn a crowd! A friend told us a few weeks ago that "foreigner is like panda. Not very many, so everyone want to see." Now imagine a panda driving past you a bubble-shaped-hover-jet. You'd be staring too!
We pass food markets with their fresh rabbits and chickens ready to be butchered in front of you when you buy them, horse-drawn carriages carrying a myriad of things from trash to vegetables, parks full of elderly people playing chess and authentic chinese instruments, and groups of men and women all over town dancing together to get exercise as we weave between buses stuffed to the roof with people, taxis, and bread-cars (really skinny short vans that look like loaves of bread).
Then the adventure of getting errands done becomes a reality. And yes, it's always an adventure! Buying chips at the grocery store becomes a debate in your mind... do I really want to try seaweed flavored Pringles, or should I stick to something more familiar, like roast-beef flavored potato chips (which impressively taste a LOT like roast beef!) Ordering furniture at the furniture store... well let's back up a step. Trying to explain to the taxi driver that you want to go to the furniture store across town and not the one a couple miles away, then trying to be as friendly as you can with the little Chinese you know when he wants to strike up a conversation, then finding the furniture you want, trying to decide whether you really want a color within pointing distance or if you should try to attempt to say the word in Chinese and find out what color you REALLY said when the furniture arrives, explaining your address, giving your phone number and hoping you'll be able to answer their questions when they call you... oh it gets much more complicated than this! We have come to learn that what takes an hour in America, takes at least a day here in China... at least until we can speak the language!
Now the language burier... that is the REAL adventure! We know just enough of the Chinese language to get ourselves in trouble! I have ordered a can of Sprite (in Chinese) at restaurants three different times now and have somehow managed to receive two different kinds of pens, have an entire discussion with a waiter (mostly me just staring blankly at him) about whether I wanted a giant bottle or a can, and a bewildered smile from a waitress who responded to my request by saying she couldn't speak English.
Drew's goof-ups are the funniest to me... for some reason the words for you, me, and he or she, have been jumbled in his mind. So far, he has called a child's mother beautiful (in attempt to call the child beautiful), told a waitress that she wanted chopsticks, and asked one of our friends if his wife was Drew's wife! But at least he's willing to go for it! He's my hero. Always the one to get things done when I'd rather just crawl under my covers and pretend that our scooter will magically be fixed by morning and the internet will be set up by itself if we want it bad enough!
At the end of the day, I love China. I love its strange smells, its funny old people that think we're funnier than they are, its food (which is awesome), and all of the funny interesting scenes we like to write home about. But it's always good to know that my extremely Western apartment, full of macaroni and cheese and corny chick flicks are always waiting for me to come home to.
So from thirty feet out the door, usually Drew and I are headed to our mode of transportation... which right now happens to be a three-wheeled scooter that also happens to look rather like a bubble-shaped hovercraft from the Jetsons! I absolutely think it is the coolest thing ever... Drew has a few issues with it, since it is fairly circular-shaped, and he tends to crack his head every time we go over a bump. We found out about a week ago that actually mostly old people use these three-wheeled scooters, because they are handicapped. So funny! If we have failed to remember that we are foreigners in a foreign country by then, it doesn't take long before we've drawn a crowd! A friend told us a few weeks ago that "foreigner is like panda. Not very many, so everyone want to see." Now imagine a panda driving past you a bubble-shaped-hover-jet. You'd be staring too!
We pass food markets with their fresh rabbits and chickens ready to be butchered in front of you when you buy them, horse-drawn carriages carrying a myriad of things from trash to vegetables, parks full of elderly people playing chess and authentic chinese instruments, and groups of men and women all over town dancing together to get exercise as we weave between buses stuffed to the roof with people, taxis, and bread-cars (really skinny short vans that look like loaves of bread).
Then the adventure of getting errands done becomes a reality. And yes, it's always an adventure! Buying chips at the grocery store becomes a debate in your mind... do I really want to try seaweed flavored Pringles, or should I stick to something more familiar, like roast-beef flavored potato chips (which impressively taste a LOT like roast beef!) Ordering furniture at the furniture store... well let's back up a step. Trying to explain to the taxi driver that you want to go to the furniture store across town and not the one a couple miles away, then trying to be as friendly as you can with the little Chinese you know when he wants to strike up a conversation, then finding the furniture you want, trying to decide whether you really want a color within pointing distance or if you should try to attempt to say the word in Chinese and find out what color you REALLY said when the furniture arrives, explaining your address, giving your phone number and hoping you'll be able to answer their questions when they call you... oh it gets much more complicated than this! We have come to learn that what takes an hour in America, takes at least a day here in China... at least until we can speak the language!
Now the language burier... that is the REAL adventure! We know just enough of the Chinese language to get ourselves in trouble! I have ordered a can of Sprite (in Chinese) at restaurants three different times now and have somehow managed to receive two different kinds of pens, have an entire discussion with a waiter (mostly me just staring blankly at him) about whether I wanted a giant bottle or a can, and a bewildered smile from a waitress who responded to my request by saying she couldn't speak English.
Drew's goof-ups are the funniest to me... for some reason the words for you, me, and he or she, have been jumbled in his mind. So far, he has called a child's mother beautiful (in attempt to call the child beautiful), told a waitress that she wanted chopsticks, and asked one of our friends if his wife was Drew's wife! But at least he's willing to go for it! He's my hero. Always the one to get things done when I'd rather just crawl under my covers and pretend that our scooter will magically be fixed by morning and the internet will be set up by itself if we want it bad enough!
At the end of the day, I love China. I love its strange smells, its funny old people that think we're funnier than they are, its food (which is awesome), and all of the funny interesting scenes we like to write home about. But it's always good to know that my extremely Western apartment, full of macaroni and cheese and corny chick flicks are always waiting for me to come home to.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
