I Like Mike

Nancy, this one's for you.

I like my "Mike" ironing board.
You know, Mike.... the mouse?

Gee, ya' think Disney will mind?

Office Shipment

You know that saying "a picture's worth 1000 words"? I give you exhibit "A". This is Rob's office shipment. What would it have arrived looking like if it DIDN'T have "fragile" stickers all over the box? Apparently they handle shipments about as well as they drive.

Chinese Mannequins

What's up with the mannequins here? First off, wouldn't you think that since just about everything is made in China, the Chinese people would make mannequins that look like..... Chinese people for all their stores in China? And what's up with the hair? On many of the mannequins you see these really cheesy bright colored afro clown wigs. Seriously. Why? And we're not talking at the local Wal-Mart. Yes, they have a Wal-Mart here. We're talking the upscale stores similar to Nordstrom's.

Then there are the poses. This one just made me laugh. Every time I look at it I laugh all over again. As we passed it I told Rob I'm sure everyone here is going to look at me like "why is that crazy American taking a picture of a mannequin?" but I'm so glad I risked my dignity so I could share this laugh with you. You're welcome. As I look at this guy holding his stomach in an all out belly laugh if I were a guy I would be standing there laughing too, standing there in my red speedo underwear looking at my buddy in his long john P.J's - probably complete with the little button open trap door in the back for those middle of the night trips to the bathroom. I don't care who you are, that's funny.

Rosetta Stone & Learning a New Language

And now a few thoughts about Rosetta Stone: the language tool used by fortune 500 companies and the US govt for learning languages quick (or some tag line like that the advertisers of Rosetta Stone tout). Here's what you learn on lesson #1. How to say dog, cat, horse, and... elephant. Yeah, 'cause when I first land what I need to be able to say is ELEPHANT. Unless one escapes from the zoo, is running down the street, and they come past me and ask which way the elephant went, this is probably not a word I'm going to need my first day here. And if I'm at the zoo I don't need to be able to read the elephant sign. I will readily be able to accurately identify the elephant just by looking at him. Here's a word that would be helpful in lesson 1: TOILET, or bathroom. Yeah, Rosetta Stone. Where's the bathroom!? Or how about a glass of water!? I'm on lesson 12 and they still haven't told me how to find a bathroom or get a drink. If it weren't for the kindness of strangers and my wiley instincts I would be dead by now, Rosetta Stone.

What I have found useful about Rosetta Stone is how to pronounce words. I think if you spend some time on it and supplement it with some classes or a book with Chinese words it could be very useful. The whole concept is that you're learning language the way we learn naturally - like as children - where we don't know any words and we learn by conversation. Here's the thing. We're not little kids learning to talk for the first time, and we DO have a grasp of a whole plethora of words. So as you're looking at your Rosetta Stone lesson and they say a phrase, you're looking at 4 pictures and you have to click on which of the 4 pictures you think they're talking about. It took me 6 times through one of the lessons to figure out that we were talking about the color of the HAIR on the people in the 4 different pictures. (o.k., so maybe I'm a little slow on the uptake. Now that I think about it, that lesson was the one on COLORS.) But my point is you're staring at 4 different pictures, and they say a phrase, and then you sit there looking at the pictures trying to figure out what we're saying about the pictures. It would be a wonderful tool if you had a tutor or instructor in the room that you could periodically ask "what does this word mean?" Also, I need to know a few basic words before I'm ready to be forming complete sentences. A few key words and some lively sign language and I'm in business. But I must admit, after spending many hours on Rosetta Stone, now that I'm learning some individual words, all of that time I spent listening to that is really starting to click and come back to me. It's also been a HUGE help as I'm learning words with being able to pronounce them at least in the ball park. But having a driver that's very bi-lingual and a few friends that are bi-lingual is also a HUGE help.

Locker Rooms and Fun with Shampoo

One of the things to get used to here is personal privacy - or lack thereof. When you go to the gym to work out or swim you are quickly sucked back into that high school experience of standing there in front of your locker trying to dry off and get dressed as quickly as possible without too much "sharing" with the other ladies in the locker room. Their comfort zone, on the other hand, is very different. They're all standing around there naked as a jay bird (I have no idea what a jay bird looks like, but I think I heard my grandma say that once) chatting with each other, walking around the locker room, coming and going from the sauna and hot tub like they're home alone. I, on the other hand, am not there yet. I'm still standing in the corner trying to figure out how to dry off with one end of the towel while holding the rest of the towel over as much of my body as possible. Then the REAL fun begins. Trying to get dressed standing on a wet floor while wearing shower shoes, getting your legs through the legs of your jeans without getting them wet (or on the wet floor) and without your bare feet touching the floor with God only knows what living in the moisture on the floor, all the while trying to hold the aforementioned towel as much in front of you as possible. Who needs a yoga class?

I hear from my friends who have been here a while that the fitting rooms are equally fun. A room full of naked women all just standing around trying on clothes like they're alone in their bedroom trying to decide which outfit to wear today. Gee, I can't wait to go clothes shopping with my new friends! Talk about REALLY getting to know each other! Maybe I should rethink joining that yoga class after all....

(And now we interrupt this blog for a China factoid:
A size small in the US is a size extra large here. Great!
And now... back to our blog entry....)

But wait! There's more fun in the locker room! If you want to take a shower they have provided those lovely liquid soap, shampoo, conditioner dispensers in each shower stall. Nice! Here's the problem.... I figured out the conditioner is in the middle, but is the shampoo the one on the left or the one on the right? It's labeled in little Chinese characters. I have 2 problems with that. #1, I don't read Chinese characters. #2, it's written really tiny, so even if I DID read Chinese, I'm not in the habit of wearing my READING GLASSES in the shower! Hey, ya' think my driver will come in the ladies locker room and interpret that for me too? All that to say, I may or may not have washed my hair with liquid body soap and my body with shampoo. Luckily I have my Chinese bottle of Pantene in my apartment shower.

But wait.... there's MORE fun with the Pantene! Again, it says Pantene on the bottle, but everything else is in Chinese. This Chinese/American labeling is like a Chinese game of charades. I purchased a 2-pack with a large bottle and a smaller bottle. My guess from experience at home was that it was probably a shampoo with a smaller bottle of conditioner. Who knows? They're marked in Chinese characters. So I get in my shower and squeeze some from the larger bottle into my hand. Hmmm. Very creamy and conditioner-like. No lather on my hair. So I try the smaller bottle. Also very creamy and conditioner-like. So I call out to Rob (so as not to track water all over our white floors creating even more of a magnet for dirt) to bring me one of our bottles of shampoo we liberated from the hotel the week before. Ah, hotel shampoo, for that "nappy headed ho" look! I then proceed to wash my hair 3 times with the hotel shampoo (yes, it takes 3 times with the junk they give you from the hotel), then turn to my larger bottle of Pantene to condition my hair. Here's the thing. Apparently it is a cream formula of shampoo that just takes a little more working and water to get up a good lather. But on my now CLEAN hair I have enough lather to wash half the heads in China! So now I'm washing my hair for the FOURTH time. Now time to find out what's really in the smaller Pantene bottle. Is it really conditioner (which I desperately need at this point after the hotel shampoo), or a smaller size bonus bottle of shampoo suitable for travel? Let's find out, shall we? Much to my delight, it was conditioner, and my original guess at the store paid off. I am happy to report my hair was back to "normal" after 10 days living in the hotel using the hotel shampoos and conditioner. Now at least I'll have good looking hair the next time I'm in the ladies locker room doing the flamingo shuffle with my towel.

White Floors

Our apartment is absolutely beautiful. So are the off white wood floors. They're lovely with the French provencial furniture. What is not so beautiful is keeping them clean. Every hair, every piece of lint, well... everything shows. They are a maintenance nightmare. I told Rob the only people that should have floors like this are neat freak couples without children or pets, or people that have a full time cleaning staff. (Althought the neat freak would also see every hair, piece of lint, etc. and be driven to madness.) Then they're beautiful. It makes you wonder what's on our floors (and carpet - yikes!) at home while we sail through our daily lives in blissful ignorance! Unlike white cars that don't show dirt the way black cars do, the same is not true of white floors. I can hear my mother-in-law's phrase talking about having floors or counters "the color of dirt" and having a whole new appreciation for the wisdom of that in keeping your home looking as clean as you hope it is.

I vote we hire a cleaning person to come in once a week to do the floors and some light cleaning. At a little over $1 an hour US money I think we can probably work that into the budget. Rob doesn't think it's a big deal to maintain them ourselves. Unless he wants to spend his leisure time mopping floors (this is a big place) there is way too much exploring and fun to be had while we're here to be a slave to cleaning. Besides, there are SO many people here that need jobs. Let's give someone else a job while we're here. It won't put a dent in our budget, but it will make a difference to them.

Beware of the Bathroom

Sorry to our readers with a delicate constitution, but I'm "going there".

My first experience in Chinese bathrooms was on our preview trip here in the Beijing airport. After being up for 24 hours, and getting off my flight I decided I had time to swing by the bathroom before boarding our last one hour flight to our town of Dalian. So I made my way innocently to the ladies room, which was labeled clearly enough for me to understand which room to go in. As I quickly swung the stall door open I was stopped in my tracks. The first thought that popped into my mind was "aw, HELL no!" Notice the picture on the outside of the stall of the feet on each side of the standard Chinese style squatter toilet? I'm not sure at that point if I wanted to cry, wait until our next flight, or what. But I was beginning to question what this life in China would be like and wondering if choosing to come here rather than stay home was going to be as fun as I had hoped. So as not to make any hasty moves, I stepped back and decided to see what was behind door number 2. As I stepped to the next stall door I saw a picture on the door of a western style toilet. Ah, this is looking promising. Sure enough, as I pushed the door open in optimistic caution I was met with a "normal" toilet. Ah, much better! So now I knew. Check behind the stall door until you find the style toilet you prefer. Cool! I get how it works here.... or so I thought....

Next airport. More bathroom surprises in store. I find the western style toilet and I'm in business now. Until I "finish". Uhhhh, where's the toilet paper. Great! NOW I find out we carry some with us in our purse - just in case. Yeah, where was THIS in the relo info they gave us? As I'm washing my hands I proceed to the paper towel dispenser. As I peel off some paper I think to myself "gee, this is a lot like.... toilet paper.... wait a second... this IS toilet paper!" o.k., so you get the toilet paper out by the sink BEFORE you go into the stall. So this begs the question. How do you know how much you're going to need before you go in there? And what if you get in there and find out you needed more than you thought you were going to need? Being the eternal optimist, at this point I'm still not allowing myself to go into the "this place sucks" mode and I'm still trying to view this experience as all part of the adventure, but I must admit, my sense of humor is being tested. I'm thinking to myself - "so it happened to me once, but now I know how it works here, so I'm all set now. I know how it works here"..... until the next step on the learning curve.

It could have been worse. One of our female friends here had to do the health check for living here and they had her pee in a cup. A less than enjoyable experience in a "normal" bathroom, but even more fun in China. The only toilet was the "squatter style", and the floor was, let's just say, not clean. So after trying to negotiate aiming for the cup, the pants not touching the floor any more than necessary on the less than clean floor, and the squatting (remember, we don't have the squatting muscles developed the way people who have lived here their entire lives have) she came out with her sense of humor pushed to the limits. THEN she was met with no place to wash her hands! She came out screaming "where's the Purell!?" To hear her husband tell the story (in his southern accent), she was NOT a happy camper. Ironically, her experience was much like..... camping! It reminds me of that famous saying "one day we will look back on this and laugh". So far her husband is doing more of the laughing than she is.

One of the wives here was telling me that she will only go to 3 areas of town - near 2 hotels she is familiar with and one store she is familiar with where she knows there are clean western style bathrooms. o.k., I'm not THAT bad, but I can't lie. I'm pretty adventurous, but I'd rather SCUBA dive in waters where there might be sharks (and have) than brave the Chinese style bathroom. That's one thing I think I could leave China without experiencing and feel I got my money's worth.

Tide... with bleach?

We have a washer and dryer (about big enough to do a pair of pants and 2 shirts at a time), so we needed to purchase some laundry detergent. Back to the trusty American brands we're familiar with. Again, the bag says Tide on it, but nothing else in English. There are many bags of Tide to choose from. Our driver assures us that Tide is good and a lot of people use it here. He said it's really good for getting shirts white (that's a big deal here). So I'm standing in front of my washer with my new bag of Tide and not knowing how much to use as I'm looking at the bag looking at the picture of the 2 and 4 spoons but not knowing what size spoon and if we're talking about different size loads, different size washing machines or what, and that's only part of my problem. It strikes me that the different bags of Tide are a little different colors and if memory serves me correctly the packaging for Tide with bleach and the regular Tide are in different color coded packages. Then the words of my driver run through my head. "It's especially good for getting shirts white." Hmmm. Am I about to wash my black jeans with Tide with BLEACH? So I decided to do the socks, underwear and white towel load, and wait until our driver dropped us off the next time and have him come in and read the package to us. Of course, he's a 26 year old guy, so he could kind of read what some of the package said, but was a little sketchy on understanding what I was asking. Just to be on the safe side, I picked up the Tide in the other packaging before washing our darker things. The pictures on that package at least showed some bright colored clothes. So far I haven't filled the room with soap suds using our little front loading washing machine, making our apartment look like a scene from an I Love Lucy episode and all our clothes seem to be coming out o.k.

After the clothes are clean it's time to dry them. Chinese people don't use clothes dryers, but we were allowed to have one if we wanted one. I decided that as fun as it would be to try hanging out the clothes and really get into the spirit of the culture here, there would also be times when it would be nice to have clothes dry in less than 2 or 3 days (it's very humid here). Although the drying rack on our back laundry area is really cool. There are 2 long rods on a pulley system. You crank it down, hang your clothes, then crank it back up. It's really pretty cool, and we've been having fun playing with it. But sometimes we like to use our new dryer. You would think a dryer would be simple enough to use. There's only 3 buttons. How hard can it be? Of course, they're in.... Chinese. And the numbers are metric. I can make it work, but don't know what settings I have it on. Again, between being a guy and not being familiar with this American clothing drying machine our driver was not much help trying to translate the buttons. So it's fine drying some things, but I don't want to dry other things on hot and wind up with pants the size of a kindergartener. So I have a new Chinese girlfriend who's going to stop by my apartment on our way to a shopping outing that we're going on that's going to help me figure out how to work my clothes dryer. Ahhh, the things we take for granted at "home".

Adventures in Grocery Shopping and other Chinese Food

There is quite a learning curve in the grocery store. Not being able to read the packaging is only part of the fun. There are a couple stores here that have a few "American" foods and brands, and you would THINK you would be safe buying those products. But you know that old addage "read the packaging carefully"? Well, that's fine if it's in ENGLISH. But what if the name of the product is in English, but nothing else on the package? We bought a box of Ritz crackers. It said Ritz right on the box, and looked like our Ritz box at home. Then we got them home and opened it. I looked at Rob and said "oh, I guess these are the filled ones". You know the ones that look like the Oreo cookie sandwich? They had an orange colored filling. Cheese filled, right? Wrong! They were orange filled. That's right. Orange! Upon careful inspection of the packaging "look, there's a little picture of an ORANGE on the package!" Arggghhhhh! Buyer beware. Picture this. Remember those orange flavored Creamsicles? Now picture that taste in the middle of 2 Ritz crackers. Talk about confused tastebuds! Your brain doesn't know if you're eating an ice cream confection, a piece of orange candy, or a tasty cracker. Interestingly, not as terrible as it sounds, but not something I'll intentionally buy again. I've been warned by a friend here that they also come in lemon filled. Mmmmm! Yeah, not going there either.

When we moved in our relo people gave us a little care package of foods and goodies to get us started. Among the package were ketchup (because we hear Americans love ketchup I guess - it was in the American section of the grocery store so they must) and blueberry flavored Lay's potato chips. Yes, blueberry. I have one question. Why? Again, not as totally disgusting as they sound, but leave the potato chip alone. It's good the way it is. It made the bag of cucumber flavored Lay's potato chips they gave us almost seem normal. Again, not a great idea, but at least palatable if you're hungy enough for a snack.

They also gave us a little spice bag of salt. But not salt like you know salt. It's very fine and the consistency of damp sand at the beach. I'm not sure how one is supposed to use this salt unless you're measuring it cooking with it. It's nearly impossible to sprinkle on food unless you want clumps of the sea sand like stuff on your food. And do we put it in a sugar bowl type container and use a little spoon, or how are we supposed to use the stuff at the table? So now I'm in search of a salt shaker which I bet comes already preloaded with..... salt! Either way, there's going to be a learning curve with dispensing this fine damp powdery substance out of a salt shaker.

So as you can see, we have a lot to learn about food and shopping here. So far I'm just trying to stick to what my driver tells me are beef and chicken and then moving on from the meat department. Not ready to try the various sizes of eyeballs or the chicken feet, which my husband tells me are a lot of work for a little bit of meat - kind of like chicken wings. Yeah, I'm gonna take his word for it. And I'm not ready to tackle the food out on the street yet either. One of the offerings on the street are chunks of breaded meat on a stick. I have no idea what kind of meat, but I'm steering clear of it. I've been lovingly calling it "dog on a stick", although my friend assures me that they would never put dog on a stick because it's much to stringy - or something like that. Nice! Somehow that doesn't reassure me.... and how does he know the consistency of dog!? Hmmm?

Pictures of Our Apartment & Building

Intro to our China Adventures

Instead of a barrage of emails from us, it is our hope that this blog will serve as an opportunity for us to share you all of you back home what's going on in our lives while we're over here in China. As often as possible we will be adding posts letting you know what's been going on over here, and photos. We have had a lot of fun and funny things happen this week. We just need the time to get them typed up and posted. You can check our blog periodically at your convenience for new postings and photos rather than having constant email "books" thrust upon you. If we're happy with this web site, and you have ease using it, this will become our official place for most updates and photos.

Many of the names have been changed "to protect the innocent".