Just another reason I love living here

Just one more reason I love living here: Tonight I was planning to make brownies for a reward for some of my students. I started putting things in the bowl and then realized I was one egg short. We have a small store in the basement parking garage, so I put shoes on and head down to get some more eggs. I get down to the basement where the store is supposed to be and it is gone. Again. I need to get back up to my place because I’ve already started mixing things. I really don’t want to go out across the street to the grocery store and wait in a line for half an hour just for one egg. I start thinking, can I make brownies with 3 eggs? What will happen? I start walking back towards the elevators for my building when I heard someone ask, in Chinese, “Teacher, teach my daughter English?”

I turn around and there’s a mom and her daughter standing there. I ask her where the store went, and she doesn't know. She asks me if I can teach her daughter and I reply, “I’m sorry, I’m already a teacher at an international school. I really don’t have time to teach extra.”

Then she asks if I have a boyfriend. “No,” I reply, “I have a husband.”

“Can he teach my daughter?”

“I’m sorry, he’s not a teacher.”

“What did you need to buy?”

“I need eggs. I need 4, and have 3.”

“You need an egg? I can give you one. Come up to my apt.”

I follow her and her daughter up to their apartment. One building over, 3^rd floor. Hers is on the front side of the building, a building I’ve often looked at before and wondered what the apts look like. It was beautifully decorated. She showed me around her apt, pointing out everything. Her shower looks like mine, with the blue tiles running down the middle. She’s added lots of closets. Her kitchen is miniscule. I’m talking one meter across, but several meters long. Barely room to turn around. She could cook eggs and lean against the back wall.

She asks, “How many eggs do you need?”

“Just one. I need 4, and have 3 already.”

She hands me 2 eggs. “Are you sure you don’t need more?”

“No, 2 is plenty. Thank you so much.”

While I don’t have time to teach her daughter English, I do have time to make a new friend. I suggested we get together next week for dinner. Her eyes lit up. “Yes! We can go out for duck.” She has a car, so who knows where she wants to go.

We exchanged numbers. She put mine under my Chinese name. 袁梦 It took a while to get the right characters because she was using handwriting recognition. There are a lot of characters for “Yuan.” Her daughter was trying to figure it out, too. I ended up typing it in my phone to point out to her.

I tell her I need the eggs to make a cake. (I don’t know how to say brownies in Chinese) She is impressed, and says to buy a cake at a bakery costs more than 100 RMB. I think I’ll make her a cake sometime and show her what good cakes should taste like. Not like sugarless angel food cake. (not sugar free, sugar LESS-big difference). Not with unsweetened whipped cream frosting. You know, when you don’t put enough sugar in your whipped cream? Yuck.

She asks where I am from. “America.”

“Oh, America is so much better than China. Things are so expensive here. Eggs are expensive. Fruit is expensive. Clothes are expensive. Apartments are expensive. Driving is expensive.” And in some regards, yes, that’s true. But our money goes a lot farther here than it does in the states. Apartments and cars are more expensive, but some things are cheaper than in the states. It’s a trade-off on many things.

Anyway, I may have made a new friend tonight. And my Chinese will HAVE to improve because I can’t communicate any other way. I think God gave me some of the words today because I struggle with Chinese sometimes, and it flowed effortlessly out tonight.

Maybe I won’t have time to teach her daughter Chinese, but I could suggest some sort of language exchange dinnertime or something. She’s in the next building, so hopefully it won’t be too difficult to meet up.

My Dog Kala

No, I don't have a dog. However, I notice that more and more people do. It seems as though long gone are the days of outrageously pirced Gou Hu Kou's (or dog registrations). Only a few years ago, people were keeping their dogs unregistered. Therefore forced to walk their dogs only at night and not without great fear. It used to be that dog walkers would stand out in the wee hours, socializing all the while, and at the first sign of blue and red flashing lights, would snap up their pooch and run as if it were a five pound bag of cocaine. Though, today, as I walk around Beijing, it seems those years are a file for the past. Little dogs, big dogs, run about with their owners in broad daylight--labs, retrievers, huskies, poodles, you name it. Yesterday, I watched a man with two dogs, one lab and one tiny yapper dog playing fetch. Traditional sticks and tennis balls? To heck with them! He threw empty plastic bottles this way and that, time after time and bottle after bottle. The dogs playing and wrestling, and having more fun than a canine should be allowed to have.

Next pithy thought: slapping...

Something Fresh

Often in Beijing, one requires something new and fresh to keep a certain balance in sanity. Not to say, that I would come home crazy, but to be social, I joined some fellow expatriates to see a Saturday Matinee at the theater. Being males, we went to see The Expendables, and thoroughly enjoyed it for its simple appeal to our id. However, that was not the something fresh I found that day. Along with our movie tickets we were given a free gift... a tube of toothpaste. Tiger Toothpaste, Tiger Fresh! Always looking for something fresh.

Breakfast of Champions

"Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."

This morning, I haunted my newly found and newly favorite dumpling shack for breakfast. Dumplings, I thought, surely are the breakfast of champions. However, I was wrong. As I sat down on a short stool in a one room fits all (including the stove, work counter, cahier, A/C, TV [all in the confines of half of the room you are currently sitting in]), I noticed what the gentleman across the table was eating for breakfast. Dumplings... and beer. Yes, at 8 in the morning, he pounded back a 22oz bottle of beer in 10 minutes and went off to work, shouting on his cell phone all the while.

Beer: Breakfast of Champions. And so on.

Welcome to sit at IKEA Restaurant

Over the course of a week, we have collected enough adventures in our minds, I'm sure, to fill a short novella. All of which were most amusing to us, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. This adventure regards our trip to that blue and yellow store we all know and only mildly love.

We made our way across town to take care of a stash of paperwork with the intent of perusing through IKEA afterwards to find some small furnishings for our newly rented apartment (story to follow). However, we arrived a full hour and a half too early. The doors to the lobby area were open and low and behold, we were not the only ones milling about in high hopes of early shopping.

Sauntered about, drank some free juice, got stared at, perused the catalog and sat bored until 9 am, when the announcement was made. "Welcome to come sit at IKEA restaurant and enjoy breakfast while you wait for the store to open" (please enjoy my accurate Chinglish translation). The rush was on, like cattle up an escalator. But for what you ask? IKEA breakfast? YES! Serving a Chinese breakfast of dumplings, soup, fried doughnuts, rice porridge--a set breakfast all for the low price of 4 kuai (0.59 dollars). I will say it now and say this many times... that is cheap, and the Chinese people know it.

So I say, "Moo." Line me up in the cattle car.

But IKEA is so much more than just breakfast, it is for people watching. Watching the Locals take naps in the beds, under the sheets and blankets. Eying them as they open up their picnic baskets on the dining tables. These are truly living dioramas. To this we say, "Why not?"

But we only go for the fitted sheets (found nowhere else in the whole of China).

The Important Introduction of Formalities

The onslaught of requests for a blog came, and thus we felt the need to oblige. So to those of you out there who have blog rolls, rss feeds or are otherwise just curious, we do this for you. Our goal is to show you what our lives are like on a not so daily basis--to entertain and educate in a pithy manner that is above all short enough for the Twitter-sized attention span. Looking into China through a blog is akin to looking into the depths of Lake Houston, occasionally something emerges out of the murky silt water that makes sense, and the longer you stare the more heads and tails you will recognize. However, the fundamental means of experiencing China is in person with time and an open mind. Those of you who wish to make the trek across the ocean are welcome to join us, but for those who cannot, here is an inspiring peek into our ever expanding universe.

-Daniel & Sharee'