I love Sundays.  Especially after a long week.  One day out of the week where I don’t have to think about studying Chinese character flashcards, or rush off to an appointment.  Just me and Jay and the whole day.  I think there may be a game of Scrabble in the future for today…

It’s warming up outside, so all our windows are wide open.  It’s nice to hear all the sounds of our neighborhood enter our apartment while we do our normal day-of-rest routine.  Of course, you can’t go a day without the Chinese grandma hacking up some phlegm while you eat breakfast.  It’s just part of the charming atmosphere for us now!

We were going to go see the new Terminator movie at the theater, but checked out some reviews online that said it was pretty lackluster.  Anyone seen it?  We may still try to see it as it may still be interesting enough for us with our mediocre level of Mandarin.  Lots of things blowing up and people yelling “RUN!” (I do know how to say THAT in Mandarin, at least).  I can handle that.

About once a week we’ll hang out at a friend’s house ’til really late and catch a cab home.  It’s sort of funny how some of the cabbies on the night shift do up their cabs like mini nightclubs.  All neon lights and really loud techno music.  It’s kind of a fun way to end a day, and it keeps the entertainment going right up to your front door!

Someone gave us a box of Trader Joe’s Organic Macaroni and White Cheddar Cheese and we are forever thankful to them!  There was much reveling and celebrating over that weekday meal.  Yum.  It doesn’t take much to please us.

Jason found this exercise routine that trains you to build up to doing 100 consecutive push-ups…it came with an exel spreadsheet of our workout, so I was on board.  It starts off with a test to see how many push ups you can do to assess what level you’re starting off at.  Doing full push-ups, good form and everything, I could do the grand total of…2.  Yes, two.  So, the training begins tomorrow.  We will see…

For our first couple of years here, the only type of bread you could find in the grocery stores and bakeries (Chinese-style bakeries) was white, enriched flour bread.  We were whole grain-ers in the states and we really missed the taste and all the health benefits that came with it.  I asked a few friends where I could find whole grain bread, but they responded like I was some sort of back-woods country girl.  “No one eats that type of bread anymore.  Only people who live in the country eat that.”  Loving all things new and modern, most city-dwelling Chinese eat white bread, because it’s “new”, relative to grains that are ground by hand.  So, though the white bread tasted great, I always felt like I might as well be eating spoonfuls of sugar and white flour.  But, slowly, some bakeries and then big grocery stores began carrying whole grain bread.  You had to go out of your way to buy it, but you could get it.  And, a few weeks ago, I saw it at my neighborhood grocery store, one loaf of whole wheat bread!  I quickly snatched it up before anyone else could get their hands on it and thought, before I got my hopes up, that it was probably a fluke.  But I went back the next week, and there it was again!  Whole wheat bread, people!  This back-woods country girl and her arteries are thankful.

Whole wheat bread, people!!

Yes, I know.  It doesn’t take much to please us.

We saw Star Trek at the theater last weekend.  It was great!  Gotta love that J.J. Abrams.  It was all new to the Chinese audience we were watching it with.  They, sadly(?), don’t have the 40 years of Star Trek TV history that the US has.  The first time they used the transporter, one audience member, in a very confused tone of voice, asked, “What is he doing??”  The best part was when Spock pulled out his Vulcan hand gesture and said “live long and prosper” and everyone in the audience all tried doing it themselves.

Live long and prosper.

Mmmm…almost every city we’ve visited in China has their own special version of food on a stick.  In Beijing it was silk worms, centipedes and scorpions…on a stick.  In Xian it was deep fried bean pastes and mashed up vegetables…on a stick.  Here in our hometown the specialty is lamb…on a stick.  Kabobs to be more accurate.  But you can sit and have an entire meal consisting of all kinds of food on a stick.  Mushrooms, bell peppers, cilantro wrapped in strips of toufu pasta, and of course lots of meat.  This was a new one we hadn’t seen before…

As, um, appetizing? as this looked, we passed and opted for chicken and lamb on a stick instead.  It was one of our less adventurous days, but I’m sure we’ll have a chance to be adventurous and try it before the Night Market closes for the winter.

Our floor is fixed!  We’re not quite sure what happened there.  According to my brother, the construction scientist, it’s a foundation problem.  According to the carpenter who came to fix it, our floor simply “exploded.”  I know my brother’s explanation makes much more sense, but I just like telling people that our floor exploded.

Living in a concrete jungle where it snows 9 months out of the year leaves little room or time for trees, bushes, flowers, grass…ya know, that nature stuff…to grow.  But, Spring is here and our tiny rectangle of a courtyard has that green stuff growing in it along with a little pink and purple that smells so nice…I think those are flowers.

This was around Easter when things started blooming and we were all still in shock that there was actual nature in the city…

Here’s a close up of the flowers in our courtyard.

Spring also brings a bounty of all sorts of fruit and berries.  We love to eat all of them, but our favorite are mangoes.  Here is a shot of a girl in our neighborhood chewing on what’s left of one.  Her leggings are adorable.

We’re also enjoying the start of the summer movie season here.  We went to the theater with some friends to see Wolverine, which was ok.  I think it was more fun hearing some of the comments made by Chinese movie-goers.  One saw the Canadian Rockies and exclaimed, “Wow, those mountains are so tall!  Is that real?!”  Another was very moved by the scene where the elderly couple gives Wolverine their son’s leather jacket and said with much emotion, “Oh, that’s so good.”  Star Trek is showing now, so I think we’ll make time to see that this week.  It should be a good language learning time…after all, it’s very important that we learn how to say “Vulcan mind meld” in Mandarin.

I woke up startled this morning to loud popping and cracking and we found our floor tiles in the living room looking like this…

We have a carpenter friend who will most definitely be getting a call from us tomorrow.

When we first got here, I was often taken aback and sometimes really hurt by comments made toward me about my appearance.  But, eventually I learned that commenting on someone’s appearance is just one way the Chinese show they care.  I was walking out in our courtyard yesterday and ran into Mrs. Zhao, an elderly woman with purple hair who lives upstairs from us.  She grabbed my hands and said, “When you first moved here, you were so fat!  But now you are too skinny!”  There was a time I would’ve quietly retreated back to our apartment and cried, but, instead, I responded by commenting on HER appearance, “Oh, Aunty!  You are looking healthy.  Your leg looks all better after your injury.  But you look tired, are you feeling well?”  She LOVED it!  She was beaming and I’m sure felt very cared for.

Here are a few other comments I’ve heard come my way:

“Are you an actress?”  Yeah.  Me and Angelina Jolie.  That’s the same.  But it still felt really nice.

Our housekeeper exclaims “Meena!  You’ve gained weight!” (translated straight from the Chinese it sounds like “You have too much flesh!”) and then grabbed my hips.  Ouch.

Two sales clerks whisper to each other thinking I can’t understand them, “Look at her eyes!  They’re so big!  And her nose is so pointy!”  A pointy nose is considered to be attractive, so I decided to take it as a compliment.

I met a new friend the other day and one of the first questions she asked me was if I had ever seen the TV show, Friends.  For someone to know about Friends  is very, very odd here in China.  It might be on 5 times a day on TBS in the states, but hardly anyone knows about it here, so I was a little surprised when she asked me about it.  Of course I’d seen the show Friends.  It was really popular.  She goes on to tell me all about Joey and how much she wants to go to the U.S. so that she can meet him and would really like to marry him.  I laughed and joked with her saying that he was already married.  When I looked at her face, I could see that my laughing was a mistake.  She was perfectly serious.  I think I squashed that dream pretty hard.  Oops.

My really good friend, Elizabeth, has a bit more of a solid head on her shoulders, but still has a little crush on Michael Scofield from Prison Break.  She asked me last week if I had heard anything about him being gay.  I said I really didn’t know, but a lot of times stuff like that is just a rumor.  She looked relieved.  She watched the most recent season with her mom over the winter break.  They watched it in English with Mandarin subtitles, and I guess her mom was able to learn a bit of Prison Break English.  Keep in mind that her mom lives in the country and can’t speak any English.  Elizabeth’s mom can now say, “There is only one thing left to do.”  Can’t talk about the weather or exchange pleasantries one bit, but she’ll be prepared for that one situation when, indeed, there is only one thing left to do.

At some point after living in China for a while, you resign yourself to the fact that there are some things you will just never understand about life here.  There is a lot that can be accomplished towards bridging the gulf between cultures by studing language and having local friends,  and immersing yourself as much as you can.  However, an amount of mystery will always remain so that, no matter how long you live in another country, you will find yourself in situations where you are simply scratching your head.

Most of the trees that you will see in the city are painted white up the trunk about 3 feet high.  I’ve asked a lot of people about what this is for and have received just as many answers ranging from “It just looks nice” to “It’s to keep the pests from destroying the tree” to “It’s so drivers can see where the edge of the road is at night”, all usually given with a hint of uncertainty.  So, anyone willing to venture a guess?

It’s been a long time, but last summer when Meena and I were back in the States, some of the best time back was with my Dad and my brother Brian fishing for redfish off the jetties at Port Aransas, Texas.  In one word:  awesome!  Our family has been doing fishing and hunting trips since before I can remember, and this was as much fun as when I was a kid.  In fact, both Brian and I both were laughing like little boys when we hauled one of those beasts in.

In the afternoon, we would walk out on the jetty for about a mile, then set up shop.  We caught our bait fish off the side of the rocks, and then used them to reel in a total of three 30 lb. redfish.  Even at the end of the 10ft rods we were using, it felt like fighting a bear at the end!  15 minutes of adreneline rush, then gasping for your breath while you pose for a photo.  It was such a great time with my Dad and Brian and really just made my summer.

In an effort to take our Chinese study “to the next level”, Meena and I have recently taken a big jump.  Based off of our own experience as to what most benefits our Mandarin study, and some help from the all-knowing internet, we decided to convert our lives to Mandarin as much as possible.  For instance, right now, we just finished dinner while watching “The Mummy” dubbed in Mandarin.  All of the music on our mp3 players are local artists (if you can call Hong Kong local relative to way out here).

We’ve even begun to switch over what we read to Chinese, hence the photo here of the awesome find at the book store the other day.  I loved Shel Silverstein when I was a kid, and now going back Ican see so much more even than I did then.  After we got home from the bookstore, I opened it up and read the first poem and haven’t gotten past it yet.  Don’t really remember how it goes in English, but I completely relate to being a 阁楼上的光.

We spent Valentine’s Day soaking in a lot of sun and, literally, stopping to smell the roses…or, rather, tropical flowers.  We got up and had a fabulous French breakfast at the MeiMei Cafe and then made our way over to the city’s tropical flower park.  We spent the entire day there, complete with a picnic lunch packed by our friends at the Mountain Cafe, and then had dinner at a patio-style Thai restaurant.  I think St. Valentine would approve.