More In-depth Sleeper Bus Account

Since the lowlight of our Yunnan trip seems to be the most interesting to people, you can read more about our nightmarish sleeper bus experience here. "Beautiful Country Person" is a literal translation for the Chinese word for "American" and she's my alter ego at work. You can also see a little bit of what I do for Ctrip.com, though I must warn you that the website is getting an overhaul and it's really ugly right now (I could use one of my brilliant graphic designer friends over here...JK and AH, China needs you). More later.

Yunnan Report and Happy Boxing Day

That is a late Merry Christmas to all our dear friends and readers. We had a very strange Christmas in a very strange place. We only returned a few hours ago and are blurry with the lack of sleep and general sensory overload that comes with travel. We have been to Yunnan Province in the far southwest of China. We flew into Kunming and traveled by bus to Dali, where we spent most of our time before heading north to Lijiang and back to Kunming (and Shanghai) just this morning.

The weather was glorious with full sun and the bluest skies we've let into our lungs in months. Temperatures were in the high 60s and low 70s, which was a real treat for December. When we flew into Kunming it looked gray and concrete, which is what we had just left, so we got on the bus and went straight to Dali, a small traditional town in a setting like Salt Lake City with a giant lake to the east and a long front-like mountain range shadowing over to the west. Dali is China's backpacker paradise with many ex-pat run bars and cafes serving up pancakes and burritos and all the comforts of home. It's also the traditional home of the Bai--one of China's minority groups, who entertain foreigners with their colorful tie-dyed outfits and outrageous headdresses. The hippies love it there with all that color and the cheap marijuana that traditionally dressed older women sell out of beaded fanny packs. We couldn't help but get sucked in with all the good coffee and English menus, so we stayed at the Bai Family Inn--a nice family-run place with rooms set around a courtyard with a lovely collection of potted camelias--for three nights at just over five dollars a night. We also got hooked on an Indian restaurant, where we had a great Christmas Eve feast of daal, chicken masala, veggie pakoras, and plenty of naan.

The Chinese seem to think that Christmas Eve is the actual holiday we celebrate and Dali has its own special tradition, where children in Santa hats run through the streets after dark attacking people with silly string and cans of Christmas tree flocking. No one seems to know where this original take on Christmas tradition came from, but we joined in with retaliating cans of foam we hid in our sleeves, so when kids came up to us yelling "foreigners, foreigners" and sprayed us point blank in the face with flock, we could surprise them with some spray of our own.

We eventually left Dali and spent Christmas day in a bus for a beautiful four-hour drive north through the foothills of the Tibetan plateau north toward Lijiang, another traditional village (this one inhabited by the Naxi minority group). Lijiang is a beautiful town with a maze of traditional slate-roofed buildings and a 20,000 foot glacier-clad (including the southernmost glacier in the Northern Hemisphere) monster of a mountain backing it. The town is unfortunately overrun with Chinese tourists (yes, it is their country after all, but the Chinese have a very different way of traveling--think Disneyland, senseless photography, megaphones, and matching ballcaps--that doesn't suit the Western sense of adventure). We got out of there after a few hours and took the sleeper bus back to Kunming.

This is becoming more of a travelogue than I intended, but I have to talk about the sleeper bus as it was a lowlight of our trip. Having had positive experiences in sleeper trains in China, we thought the sleeper bus would be just as pleasant, but we were definitely wrong and spent the night snuggled up to three Chinese men in the equivalent of a king-size bed with nothing to separate us from their greasy jackets and rotten-teeth bad breath. The bus had forty bunks in two levels and that added up to 80 stinky feet, 80 hacking lungs, and about 40 cigarettes. The smell was unbearable and I slept with my dust mask on (little help) and Peter hung his head out the window almost the whole time (pretty damn cold on those mountain passes). The worst part (well, hard to say what the worst part was) was that the advertised 12 hour ride was several hours shorter, and we ended up in Kunming at 4:30 in the morning. We were allowed to stay on the bus and sleep until 8:00, but without air moving through the window, we couldn't handle it and decided to head out into the city. Well, the city was of course dead and we were too, so we took a cab to the airport and got on the first flight to Shanghai we could (with a three hour pit stop in industrial river-town Wuhan).

Shanghai never seemed so clean and orderly and we're happy to be home, though the clean air was undoubtedly refreshing and the naan and espresso soothing to our souls. It was certainly our strangest Christmas but since we couldn't be with our families this year I'm glad we had an adventure.

Negligence

Working girl has been such a negligent blogger. I apologize. I have been busy and sick and writing final exams and my European friends have suckered me into joining Facebook, threatening to not invite us to anymore parties if I don't, and all that has cut into my musing time considerably.

We are finally into winter here as evidenced by the fallen gingko leaves (men on campus beat them off the tree with brooms so we didn't get to spend very much time enjoying the delicate yellow fans), the legions of sweet potato vendors, and nighttime temps in the 30s (Fahrenheit that is). It feels more like what we would call fall and it's pretty nice. However, we will be escaping the brutal Shanghai winter by heading south to Yunnan province for Christmas. Yunnan ("south of the clouds") is home to China's eternal spring with trees beginning to blossom in January. Supposedly they've figured out how to get at least one kind of tree to bloom every month in Kunming, the capital. More about it, of course, after we've been there. But we're very excited to travel again and to spend Christmas someplace totally different. Please God, don't let there be Santa Claus there.

Shanghai is feeling homey and boring, so we are trying to have little adventures here and there to remedy that. Last weekend we accidentally found one of the oldest parts of town--a maze of muddy streets and tile roofs. It was market day and fish were being beheaded in the streets and vegetables we had truly never seen before were being sold for pennies. Great refreshing stuff when you're used to the big city that doesn't feel so adventurous anymore. Just to prove that Shanghai is certainly still an exotic place here's a local menu and a baotzi steamer almost as large as I am.

Corporate

Maybe I made it sound like I was really enjoying teaching and my open schedule and coffee with Peter in the morning and all that. And maybe I let most of you know how I never wanted a full-time job again and maybe I complained a lot when I had one about how much my back hurt and how I didn't have time to write and stuff. Well, maybe I misled some of you into thinking that I wasn't going to consider that travel website job, because you may be surprised to find out that I took it. Only 20 hours a week though, so don't worry about my students--they're stuck with me.

I am now an English editor at Ctrip.com, the travel website for Chinese by Chinese, now for foreigners too with help from some foreigners. I work with a team of three other English editors and a handful of Chinese translators. We're trying to bring the insider Chinese travel info to adventurous Westerners and ex-pats living in China. The website sucks right now, so I won't send you to it yet.

Here's what it means for my life, though. Three days a week I ride my bike for 15 minutes (20 with an icy Siberian headwind), cram into a lightrail car for 50 minutes (sometimes it is so packed I can't even get my hands to my mouth to eat my breakfast), switch to the subway at one of Shanghai's busiest stations for my 20 minute subway ride, then I walk to my building, where my fancy e-card gets me in the door. I'm on the sixth floor. My building has six floors and six thousand employees, so I'll let you do the math for how many people that means are in cubicles on my floor. That's right--cubicles. No offices. I had to leave a bread crumb trail to find my desk after going to the bathroom the first time. Luckily, whoever had the desk before me left hello kitty stickers all over the computer and phone, so it's pretty obvious where I'm supposed to be. (This is not uncommon in China--the whole stickering thing. Our refrigerator came covered in cartoon stickers. Super attractive and grown-up.)

I will get into answering your questions of "why" later. But for now, just know that I'm enjoying corporate life again (though this is significantly more corporate than my last job, even though it doesn't have a no popcorn policy). I'm learning a lot about China and what it means to have an office job in Shanghai. The money's good, too, so maybe we can go out for burritos sometime at one of those fancy ex-pat Mexican cantinas everyone is talking about. Pictures of my work environment to come...though I don't think my lens is wide enough to capture 1000 cubicles in one frame. I already have a little regret though, which I'm going to express to you with this image I took in downtown Shanghai last weekend.

This is not an uncommon sight here in Shanghai. When people aren't at work, they want you know they aren't at work, so they wear their pajamas around to prove it. This is one of the better examples I've seen, though.

And yes, of course I'm glad Peter's back.

Shout Out

This is a shout out to our friends B & A in St. Louis who sent us the most awesome care package last week (our first), full of whole grain goodness granola bars, organic chocolate, magazines galore (including Alabama Heritage, my old editorial stomping ground), and a festive Turkey centerpiece, among other treats. You guys are the best, so I dedicate this photo of the best billboard I've seen in a long time to you. Think of it as our deepest-felt thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy American holiday to all. I told my students the epic story of the first Protestant visitors to America who ran out of food their first winter and were bailed out by the friendly natives who shared their hoarded corn and squash and stuff and how the pilgrims and Indians all held hands and were best friends forever. I think they bought it.

In return I got this nice e-mail from one of my students and I'd like to pass off the greeting to you all, since I think it really sums up the spirit of Thanksgiving:

"It's the life make us to know each other and I should be thankful to the life and to you as well. Thank you for all the happiness you have brought to me.

In this beatiful Thanksgiving day, I may not be aside with you, however, please do take the deepest wish from my heart to you. Happy everyday, and keep in touch. No more distance is longer than the distance between heart. Have fun everyday."

Couldn't have said it better myself. My tryptophan-induced dreams are of you this holiday season (yes, we have turkey in China...my students say it is poor-people food, though).

Tribute

This is a short tribute to Louise Robertson, Peter’s grandma, who passed away this weekend. She was the perfect grandma, always concerned about us staying warm, fed, and comfortable. She called us regularly no matter where in the world we happened to be. I already miss her interview-style questions about our lives, her genuine curiosity and attention to detail. When I was away at graduate school she wrote me regularly, her barely decipherable handwriting--on beautiful notecards usually with Audubon-style avian scenes on them--asking me about life in Alabama. She read the magazine I edited, Alabama Heritage, even though the articles in it had nothing to do with her life in Idaho, just because she was proud of what I was doing. When she started to lose her eyesight, we spent more time on the phone with her and she made us describe the world around us in a level of detail that sometimes seemed ridiculous, but succeeded in making us note verbally the beauty in the things we were experiencing. She was the last one we wanted to tell we were moving to China, but even though she was as worried about us as only a grandma could be, she was excited for our adventures and I think truly enjoyed our stories from the Far East and also the descriptions of the normalcy of our life here: what we had for dinner, the amount of blankets on our bed, the color of our bikes. Hours before she fell ill I was describing to her the inside of the spa we go to in Shanghai--the skinny Chinese girls, the rose water pools, the TV in the sauna--and she was interested in it like it was the most remarkable place in the world. She was nothing but pure goodness to me and Peter and loved me like family. My heart is broken at the thought of losing her phonecalls and thoughtful gifts. She was one consistent presence in our ever-changing life, and I already feel a little unsteady knowing she is gone.

Peter is home in Idaho with his family, and I am feeling farther away from home than ever, so I needed at least this public space to mourn Mimi’s passing, remember her kindnesses, and wish her restful peace.

Dream Job

In English PIE, 304, J-Zone, and JJYY (my Communincative English classes) we've been talking about dream jobs. It is a concept most of my students have never thought about. What is it that I really want to do? If I could get paid for something I love doing, what would it be? In the U.S., at least among my friends, we talk about this a lot. Most of our dream jobs are to do nothing at all or to travel or to write. Last week I interviewed for an editing position at chinatravel.net, the latest English endeavor of a company called C-trip, which is the largest online seller of travel in China. The job sounds awesome. The site is an online guide to China directed at ex-pats and adventurous foreign travelers who want to get beyond Shanghai and Beijing. I would get to research all the great places to visit in China and work with Chinese travel agents and translators to create descriptions and details about every place worth seeing in China. Eventually there will be opportunities to travel around China and write feature articles and blog entries. It is essentially my dream job...except that it's in China.

I would be one of three foreigners working for a company of literally thousands of Chinese employees in one big building full of tiny cubicles, like a giant ant colony of travel agents. The commute would be almost an hour and a half by bike and metro. At the end of my interview, I was so fired up about the job I wanted to stay in Shanghai for years and years just for the opportunity to really get to know China. (Oh yeah, free language classes at lunch, too.) But then I stopped to think: didn't I leave a really great job because I wanted more of an adventure than the adventure travel business could offer me? I had a job where I got to learn about the whole world with remarkable travel opportunities (South Georgia!). But working full-time is not for me. I don't know what I was thinking applying for another job when I work 12 hours a week and make enough money for both of us to live a really fun life in Shanghai. I like sleeping in and drinking coffee and listening to podcasts with Peter in the morning and going to the dumpling shop for lunch before we have to go to school. I like to have time to work on my book and write, which was put on hold the whole time I was working full-time.

What to do? I have to decide next week. I think I will offer up my skills part-time. I know I can't commute for three hours every day of the week. No dream job is worth that to me. I would be working with a Canadian journalist and a fellow American MFA (my first MFA I've met in the wild). The pay is really good and it would be an opportunity to work for a Chinese company and the learning experiences and quirks that would offer.

Any advice would be appreciated as I face this decision. In the meantime I have a pretty sweet baby-sitting gig watching Winston every now and then. Gina pays me in homemade granola, which is worth its weight in gold to me.

The Great Indoors

Sometimes I get these overwhelming urges to go camping. It has been several weeks since our trip to Huangshan, which helped curb my craving, but it has been months since my last camping trip. I need to get out of the city. It feels urgent. I spent a large chunk of time yesterday looking for places I could get away to. I looked up all the natural parks in China, and I must say none of them seemed like they would satisfy. There are some incredible places in China. There are whole forests of rhodedendrons and colorful pheasants and somewhere, supposedly, wild pandas. There are bamboo forests and misty mountains with buddhas carved into their sides. But I guess I'm homesick, because none of those seems right. I need some ponderosas or blue spruce or red cedars. I need a river that is freezing cold and cuts banks the way I'm used to. I need golden hills, enormous vistas, and a canyon. I need a moose, a coyote, or even a white-tail deer.

Perhaps it will help to tell you that Peter is Idaho right now and I am in Shanghai and it's raining. But that's not all of it. I felt this way in Seattle, too, so much so that once I drove to Mt. Rainier in the middle of the week and called in sick so I could just stay on the top of a mountain by myself for a few days and chill out. It was one of the best trips of my life. But there is no Mt. Rainier here. It is days and days to the closest place that could be considered wilderness. There is no way to escape except a mindshift into appreciating the urban jungle of a large Asian city.

There is a new store close to our house called Outdoor Store. They sell imported camping gear and the inside looks like a small-town Chinese version of REI. Shaved log banisters, some pine sprigs here and there, etc. They have all the name brands: Marmot, Arcteryx, North Face, SmartWool, Nalgene, etc. A windproof fleece there costs more than our rent, which is probably true in the U.S. too, but here nothing costs as much as a month's rent, nothing comes even close. A pair of SmartWool socks costs twice as much as an entire evening for both of us to go to dinner and the spa with a massage. Peter and I can't help but go in there and look around whenever we walk by. We touch everything. It feels like it should: warm, lightweight, waterproof, breathable, technical. Downstairs there are tents and sleeping bags and campstoves and carabineers. We wonder what they would charge us to spend a night in the display camp, use the warm down sleeping bags and cook breakfast over the not-backpacker-friendly charcoal stove and eat with the lightweight aluminum chopticks. Sometimes we think we might be able to sleep in that dark tent and pretend we're home.

I'm always planning my next vacation. I've got several lined right now, more than we can possibly accomplish if we want to come home in July and spend time in the Bitteroots or the Owyhees. Right now I'm hooked on Hokkaido, the northernmost (undisputed) part of Japan, where in winter, you can stay on a wooded peninsula jutting out into the sea enjoying thermal pools while looking out at the southernmost extent of the sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere. Stellar's Sea Eagles come down for the winter and small brown bears--distant cousins of our grizzlies--are hiding somewhere in dens.

Yesterday, I lay in bed watching a Planet Earth marathon while it poured what I'm pretty sure was acid rain outside. It was a kind of medicine, a therapy. Me and David Attenborough contemplating the world and its untouched places and that fine line between knowledge of the world and destruction of the world. It helped a little, but I still got out of bed and went to the computer to see how much it would cost to get to Hokkaido if I left tomorrow. Turns out I'd have to have Sir David's salary to get there, so I got on my bike and rode to the closest person selling roasted sweet potatoes and enjoyed the smallest, cheapest thing I could find that would make me happy in Shanghai.

Say Something Nice

I feel like I've been a little hard on China lately in my posts. Yes, the signs are ridiculous; yes, my lungs hurt; yes, my students have the stupidest names; but there are lots of good things about living here, and so to copy my sister-in-law's recent blog entries (10 things to be thankful for in China), I will spend some time saying some nice things about China. Okay, deep breath (cough, cough), here it goes:

Snack food: The food in China is good overall. It's greasy, but full of veggies and fruits--in season and local, so that's nothing to complain about. But we've been digging all the crazy snack foods. Crackers come in a staggering variety of flavors, and while we usually stick to simpler flavors like sesame and black pepper, we can't help but sample the chicken curry or mexican beef or italian meat pizza flavors. The Chinese also have a propensity for seeds and I'm hooked on cinnamon-flavored watermelon seeds and salty roasted lima beans.

Street food: This is a separate category from snack food. What I'm appreciating here is the accessibility of food. When you are hungry, there is always something fast and delicious nearby. I love the men who sell sweet potatoes that they roast over oil drums they wheel around the city. In the summer there was melon on a stick. Kebabs of all sorts are on every block along with a boazi shop, selling fluffy rice dough balls filled with pork, greens, root vegetables, or red bean paste. And there are convenience stores everywhere, so you can wash your street food down with bottled water, all manor of iced teas, milk tea, coffee milk, fizzy orange juice, or cola.

Old people: Chinese old people rock. A few of them are grumpy, but man are they healthy. The look twenty or thirty years younger than they are and are out and about doing everything. In the very Chinese neighborhood next to ours, the retired people sit in circles on these little tiny squatting stools and just talk or shuck beans or play cards. They stay social and active and live with their families, so it is so unlike a depressing nursing home. Nice work, China.

Babies: They are so cute sometimes it almost makes me cry. And they wear these awesome split-pants (no need for diapers--what a waste), and while it's gross when they pee in the middle of the bank line, they look really cute with their butts hanging out. But what I don't understand is why the Chinese bundle up their kids ridiculously in winter (like now even though it is almost 70 degrees, it's November, so there's a dress code), they have this crazy cold breeze right in their crotches. Also, the Chinese adore children. They are always giving candy or toys to Winston when we go out with him or play games with him or teach him Chinese. And while he sometimes can't deal with some of the old ladies who get in his face (he swats at them if they're not careful), he always seems to find himself an adopted grandfather whom he will adore for a few short minutes (makes me jealous).

Bikes: Man I love riding my bike in Shanghai. I love living in a bike society. Stupid Seattle with its spandex-clad white guys, riding to work like it was the freaking tour-de-france, had nothing on Shanghai. Everyone rides a bike everywhere. It is a vehicle; it is a tool; it is a part of life. There are big bike lanes everywhere, fenced off from the dangerous streets. People haul stuff on bikes; people take their babies on bikes; even the mailman rides a bike. And all the bikes are pimped out with racks and baskets and fenders. I love that it's not a status symbol; it's totally functional. It's not a statement (I hated when I told people I rode my bike to work in Seattle and they would say "good for you.") It's not excercise. It's life, and it will be hard to go back to driving a car when we move back to the states.

Laundry: It doesn't matter how small your apartment is or how poor you are, everyone in Shanghai has a washing machine. No laundry mats exist. You have this little washing machine in the bathroom and you hang everything out the window to dry. I never want a dryer again. Think of the energy being saved by not encouraging 18 million people that they need to dry their clothes electrically. Sure our clothes end up smelling like pollution, but we've come to expect nothing less.

Is that enough? These are the things I will miss about Shanghai when we're gone. In many ways, even though this is one of the biggest, most industrialized cities in the world, life is simpler here. We only go where our legs can take us. We only eat what we can afford to bring in from local farms. We can only wash a week's worth of clothes at a time, so our wardrobes are smaller. We can only say hello and goodbye and thank you and sometimes that's all the interaction we need to have. We smile a lot when we don't understand and the Chinese smile back. Our apartment guard calls us friend and a bottle of beer costs twenty-five cents. I guess there isn't much to complain about.

Chinglish

I wouldn't want you to think that we're holding out on all the great Engrish we've seen in China. It's true that you get so used to it here that you really stop noticing all the gross misspellings that surround you, but we did manage to capture these great examples over the weeks. Enjoy!

Feastival

Today is, of course, the hardest day of the year for us to be away from our friends and family. Feastival--the most important holiday of the Roman calendar--is passing us uneventfully here in China. Somehow the thought of eating enchiladas until you throw up, wearing three completely different, elaborately-made costumes, and knocking on strangers' doors begging for candy (or toilet paper or ramen) seems just as foreign to the Chinese as putting raw meat into a shopping cart and eating golden retriever seems to us. We are trying to put together a celebration for this weekend with our international friends (hopefully even making enchiladas with the tortillas Bijou and Will sent...thanks, guys!), who I think will be game.

But for today, we keep all of you in our hearts. It is the best day of the year. I will introduce the traditions of Feastival to my students this afternoon, and as I ride through the streets of Shanghai with my asthma mask on I will at least pretend to be dressed up as a bird flu-paranoid Asian traveler. Wish you all were here or that we were there and that there would be dancing and wine and way too much food.

Incidentally, today is also the day Peter and I celebrate our anniversary. Seems like just yesterday a nineteen-year-old Incredible Hulk bench-pressed a twenty-year-old wonder woman into the air in the middle of a crowded room. Actually, it seems like a very long time ago. That was my first Feastival, back in the last millenium, and it has been a nonstop party ever since.

Eat, Drink, and Be Sweaty in Your Costumes!

Thanks, China

Well, we haven't even been here two months yet and I am officially an asthmatic. Living in the rapidly industrializing second world is taking its toll on me already. In some ways I feel like Morgan Spurlock, who intentionally ate as much McDonalds as he could to prove what he already knew: that the stuff is really bad for you. I guess I knew that the pollution was really bad in Shanghai, but I didn't think that seven weeks into my year here, I would have developed a new disease. Kind of like that scene in Supersize Me when he just starts throwing up. Suddenly I realized I really couldn't breathe. So, one day after my return from the top of a blue-sky mountain, I am using an inhaler to cope with the coal dust, diesel exhaust, cigarette smoke, chemical vapor, and mold spores that make up what we in Shanghai consider air. On the bright side, my visit to the doctor cost me thirteen cents and prescription drugs here are almost as cheap.

Huangshan

The saying goes something like this: If you climb all seven of China's famous mountains, you can skip the rest of the mountains in the world; and if you climb Huangshan you can skip the rest of China's mountains. This is according to our Norwegian friend, Jo, who is a bit of travel expert, having hitch-hiked across most of China last spring break. Jo called us the night before our friend Alicia from Seattle was supposed to arrive for a five-day visit on her way to Hong Kong to ask if we wanted to tackle Huangshan over a long weekend. We were so desperate to leave Shanghai that we told him to go ahead and book three train tickets, so when Alicia arrived we said, surprise, welcome to Shanghai, we're leaving for a mountain in the middle of China tomorrow night.

And so with two Norwegiens--Jo and Maurius, our dear Colombian friends--Sylvia and Filipe, and Alicia we headed to Anhui province on an overnight train. The train was fun, but our Chinese travel companions were up at 4:30 coughing up last night's nicotine, drinking tea, and talking in the ridiculously loud way that only the Chinese can. From the town of Huangshan, we took a one hour bus ride through tea farms to the base of the mountain, where a Mr. Hu suddenly appeared in our bus. Mr. Hu is one of those resourceful Chinese who know enough English to both exploit and help travelers. He seemed to know all the restaurant owners, hotel managers, and bus and taxi drivers on the mountain, not to mention the fact that he claimed to be related to President Hu. He hooked us up with the cheapest accommodation on the top of the mountain: a room behind the hotel worker's housing with seven bunks, no running water, and two outdoor squatties out back. We were roughing it and the room suited us just fine. Besides the rickety bunks and mildew-spotted sheets, the room was perfect with a concrete landing that served as the coolest patio with an incredible view of the surrouning peaks covered with the extraordinary colors of fall foliage.

Huangshan means Yellow Mountain, and all those famous Chinese landscape paintings make a lot of sense now that we've been there. The mountain is a series of naked granite peaks with maples and other deciduous trees draping their bases and bonzai-shaped umbrella pines clinging to the rocks. Huangshan is famous for its clinging mists and low clouds, but we had two days of full sun and crisp autumn air, which was incredibly refreshing coming from the smoggy humid air of muggy Shanghai. Our last day was shrouded in fog, which prevented us from seeing any vistas, but provided a very Chinese atmosphere of dense, sound-deadening air full of contemplation.

The highest peak in the park is just over six thousand feet, and you can walk all the way to the top up a flight of stairs that is several kilometers long. This is a strange way to explore nature and somehow walking up a never-ending set of stairs is much harder than walking up the side of a mountain the way we're used to. No switchbacks; just one foot after the other, plodding up and up at a hypnotizing pace. We took a cable car up to the top, then hiked all over for two days: to the East for sunrises and to the West for sunsets. We managed to sneak off the stairs for one adventurous hike up a valley, only to be caught by the guards when we popped back up a ravine on the wrong side of the fence. He asked what we were doing, and our Norweigen-accented translator told him we were hiking. The guard told us it was very dangerous to leave the trail and lined us up on a wall. We thought we were going to get a good scolding, but instead he seemed quite charmed and told us how strong we were and couldn't believe that girls could climb up the side of a mountain like that. He shook our hands and we walked along the paved path back to our room.

On our last day we decided to hike down to the bottom on foot the long way, which was a seven hour hike mostly down a giant flight of stairs, but which also included some surprisingly difficult steep climbs upward. It ended up being quite grueling, as even the men who climb up and down the mountain daily carrying up to 100 kilos of goods on their shoulders admit that going down is much harder than coming up. I guess I forgot to mention that all of the supplies for the resort on the top of the mountain are carried by stringy Chinese men who shlep their loads on bamboo sticks over their shoulders for ten dollars a day. It's hard to believe your eyes when one of these guys races past you up the steepest stairs you've ever seen carrying six or eight cases of beer or a broken refrigerator. When Maurius asked why they didn't use the cable car, they said that it would take away too many jobs. Of course.

Our legs were shaking when we got to the bottom and we had to cram ourselves into a minibus with our packs on our laps for a harrowing ride back to town. Our nervous Norweigen translator screamed in Chinese whenever our driver started to pass on a blind corner, "This thing that you are doing is not okay!" To calm our nerves we sang an original version of The Wheels on the Bus, with verses like "the people on the bus are scared to death, scared to death, scared to death..." and "driver of the bus goes ha ha ha, ha ha ha, ha ha ha, whenever we start to scream." The driver said that he liked our singing very much and we kept coming up with more and more ridiculous verses.

With aspirin and beer nightcaps, we slept like rocks on the train on the way back to Shanghai and our legs were so sore we almost collapsed when we crawled out of our bunks this morning. It is a bit disappointing to be back in the big city after such a lovely vacation. It's nice to know that most of China is stunning and that it is just Shanghai that's ugly and noisy and unpleasant. We are anxious to see more of China--even though we officially don't have to go to any of the other mountains in the country. And we continue to feel blessed by our incredible foreign friends who are tackling this other-worldly country with us week by week. I must say we are quite happy with our life here today.

Blog on Vacation

It's been a busy week with our first out-of-town guest visiting and now we are headed on a long weekend trip to Yellow Mountain--a UNESCO World Heritage Site about 10 hours from here. We are excited to get out of Shanghai and there will be lots of catching up to do when we get back. In the meantime, all is well in China. I leave you with two images: a neighborhood cricket fighting ring on the rooftop next door, and my freaking cute nephew--who is certainly one of the best things about China.

The Curse of the Fitted Sheet and Other Tales of Domestic Life in China

It seems we are cursed. When we came to China, we brought one set of sheets with us to get us started, but we accidentally showed up with two fitted sheets. It was really hot when we first got here, so it was okay to sleep without covers for awhile. Eventually I went to the store to buy a flat sheet, but all the packaging was in Chinese, so I couldn't tell what was a duvet cover what was a flat sheet and what was a pillowcase, so I went to Wal-Mart (unbelievable that I have spent most of my life avoiding Wal-Mart and now it is our neighborhood store, where we go sometimes three times a week...the world is indeed getting too small), where the packages were clearly marked in English. I bought a "Flat Sheet," brought it home, opened it, and found elastic at all the corners. With my language skills it is impossible to return anything to Wal-Mart, so we kept it and now we had three fitted sheets, which piled on our bed were warm enough to get us through the cooling fall nights. Weeks later I went to a textiles market with Gina where you can pick out your fabric and have sheets made. Now that the weather has really turned to autumn I thought it would be nice to have some flannel sheets, and since I haven't seen them in the store (and have given up on buying linens at the store entirely), I picked out a fabric and for ten dollars had a set of sheets made while we were at lunch. Gina's Chinese is excellent and she did a great job explaining that I needed a fitted sheet and a flat sheet, but maybe I don't even need to tell you that when we got home (a 20 minute bus ride, followed by a 40 minute subway ride, followed by a 15 minute bike ride), I went to see if the sheets fit on the bed and discovered that he had made two fitted sheets. So, now we have a grand total of five fitted sheets and no flat sheets and I think I'm going to sleep in my sleeping bag for the winter.

Similar to the sheet story is the story of our front door key. Our apartment only came with one set of keys, but people make keys all over the city, so we went to a locksmith and had our keys copied. We have three keys: a key for our building gate, a key for our apartment gate (which is also guarded by a golden lion head), and our front door key. All the keys here are weird. There must be fifteen different templates. Some have four edges like a philips screwdriver, and our front door key is carved on the top and the bottom flat edges rather than along one thin edge like we're used to in the States. This is apparently a difficult key to make and our expensive copy didn't work. Even with a script from Gina about how to tell the man that the key he made us didn't work, many things came between us and getting our key fixed. Weeks passed. Last week we found ourselves in a part of town we'd never been to--a place four blocks from our house where it seemed like no one had ever seen a foreigner before. Shanghai is full of these twilight zones, and while we were exploring on our bikes we passed a stall with key-making equipment, so we stopped and gestured that we wanted our key copied. There was a boy of about 14 working and he really wanted our business so he kept us there even though he didn't have the right equipment to make our unique key. He disappeared into the back and returned with a small rice bowl full of Sprite for us, which we drank and took as an apology. We continued our exploration and came across a small pedestrian street full of vendors, one of which was a locksmith. We watched him work for ten or fifteen minutes on our key. The street was full of food vendors, an outdoor barbershop, and shoe-shiners, and we were stared at by everyone who passed, but the man appeared to be meticulously copying our key and we left happy with our brush with pedestrian life in China and our new shiny key (half the price of the first one we had made). Long story short, it didn't work either, so now we have three front door keys and only one that works. Will we try again? Stay tuned to find out.

Finally, there is the story of the buzzing contraption in our kitchen. It is some kind of gas detector (the natural gas here has no odor, so there's no way to know when there's a gas leak...no smoke detectors either, so there's lots of potential for domestic disasters), which is attached to the gas line into the kitchen. It emits a staticky buzzing noise every morning, which we can't turn off because if we disarm it, it turns off the gas to our house. We're pretty sure it's malfunctioning, but maybe we have a gas leak, but only in mornings? Who knows? Also I think we have a ghost who deep fries in our kitchen when we're gone. Every time we come home it smells like someone's oily Chinese dinner is ready on the table. Gross and creepy.

Magical Tongue Party

Sometimes I think of teaching in China as just a job. It's just a way to make some money so we can enjoy life in Shanghai. But that's what I always think about teaching, until I'm actually doing it, until I'm actually in front of the class, interacting with young people with interesting lives and elastic brains, which is when I remember just how much I love it (and love getting paid for something so easy and enjoyable).

My students are charming. They are all first-year master's students at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics with majors like investment banking, sports marketing, and public accounting. They know way more than I do about these things, but their English is not very good. That's why they take "Communicative English" as an elective.

Most Chinese students have been studying English since they were about 12. Some learned from foreign high school or college teachers, but most learned from heavily accented English-speaking Chinese teachers. Most of their native-English exposure comes from shows like Prison Break, which they watch voraciously on bootlegged DVDs with the subtitles on. For many of them, I am the first native-English speaking teacher they've ever had.

Most of my students have English names, a tradition most foreign language classes have. Just like I was Pilar throughout high school Spanish. Their English names become their alter-ego and some keep the same name from middle school, while others change their English names every year as their interest in pop-culture changes and their self-esteem changes. Here is a short, but representative list of some of my students' names:

Agnes

Ivy

Yolanda

Eleven

Young King

Nancy

Doris

Cherry

Rainy

Shiny

Shinysun

Simba

Yo Yo

Rink

Alfred

Knight

Chaucer

Silence

Devil

Happy Baby

I try my hardest not to ever call on Shinysun or Happy Baby, because I can't say them without laughing. Some students had never had to choose an English name and wanted me to name them. They all want something meaningful, but I told them that English names don't mean much. They ask what Jennifer means and I tell them it was the most popular name in 1979 and also the name of the main character in a popular movie in the late-70s, and that it doesn't mean anything. Sometimes I ask them to tell me their Chinese name and I pick the name that sounds closest to it in English. Pei Pei became Peggy, etc. But one student really wanted a "meaningful" name, so I asked him what he was interested in. He said money, so I named him Rich, which I said was a common English name but also meant wealthy. The next week he came to me saying that while Rich was a nice name, he had decided to go by BMW instead. Another student whose Chinese name means "time," is thrilled with his new name, "Eon," which I am quite proud of myself and think is a very cool name.

For one of our first assignments, I had my classes choose a new class name. This was a marketing exercise and a way to get them to creatively collaborate ("brainstorm" was one of their vocab words), but I also told them that I didn't think that "Communicative English" was very indicative of what the class was about. So they had to choose a name that would effectively convey what the class meant to them. I told them we would use the name every week to refer to the class. This was also a way for me to distinguish between my four identical class full of forty identical faces and identically ridiculous names. The assignment was mostly a success. It enabled me to hear some of their goals for learning English this semester and the importance of English they anticipated in their professional lives.

My favorites were Mouthstorm, English Dream Studio, and the Magical Tongue Party, but I was out-voted in every class and now I am the proud instructor of English PIE (Participation, Improvement, and Enjoyment...and because pie is tasty and makes us feel good), the J-Zone (named after a popular China Mobile ad campaign...of course the J stands for Jennifer, whose personal life they seem to care more about than learning English because I am the only foreigner most of them have ever known), 304 (our classroom number...no marketing majors in that class, but I think it's catchy like a product number or something...very functional), and JJYY (which stands for nothing..."you know, like Google" they told me).

Peculiar Cultural Traits

We are getting used to living abroad, and while China will never feel like home, our sense of what home is changes with each passing week. Already we are thinking about where we will go from here. Anywhere in the world would be easier than China. There's a lot to learn when your new home is in a totally different culture, and that's, of course, where most of the adventure lies. We weren't prepared for Chinese life. If we didn't have family here, we wouldn't have had any expectations. Peter's school didn't tell him what day classes started, how to get to campus from the airport, how to register for classes....nothing. I only had my brother to say, now, when you get off the plane, here's how to get in a cab, here's what to say to the cab driver, etc.

So, now that we are thinking about our next move already, we are looking into living in other countries. We will return to the States eventually, but for now, the world is ours. We are feeling especially drawn to Scandinavia. We have been impressed with all the Norweigians and Swedes and Danes we have met and in just a few minutes of preliminary research, Peter came across more than one website devoted to preparations for moving to a new Scandinavian country. Norway, for instance, makes sure that you remember to budget for all the thick sweaters you will have to buy upon arrival. And Sweden has a site that thoroughly explains all the "Peculiar Cultural Traits" of Swedish life. Swedes are punctual, law-abiding, and respectful, it explains. It is also important to know how to form queues when you go to the bank or the grocery store: "The habit of forming queues may in part stem from the importance attached to egalitarianism in Swedish political thought and practice which, in turn, has permeated most aspects of Swedish society. This is reflected in the large number of women represented in parliament and government but is also apparent in everyday occupations."

No such website or philosophy exists in China. No one can explain so succinctly how Chinese politial thought and practice can be reflected in everyday occupations. And if there were such a prepatory site, I think it would only encourage people to stay in their country of origin. If we had been forewarned that we might be spit on and called "foreign devils" and pushed off a subway car into the swiftly closing doors as part of China's peculiar cultural traits, we would probably be in Oslo right now.

So, here is a short list of China's peculiarities that I would have liked to know about ahead of time.

1. The Chinese like to throw raw meat directly into their shopping carts, so choose your cart carefully and never put your jacket or purse or anything that you care about into the shopping cart. Along the same lines, it's probably best to avoid the bulk raw meat bins entirely--where people can dig through meat chunks with their hands, selecting the pieces they want and throwing them in their carts and discarding the pieces they don't want back into the bin.

2. Spitting, coughing, burping, farting, and littering are all socially acceptable in any situation.

3. It's okay to wear your pajamas, underwear, and/or slippers out in public.

4. Don't look for the eggs in the refrigerated section of the grocery stores. They're not there. They're packed in straw in the middle of the store.

5. Street lights, lane dividers, stop signs, etc., are purely for decoration. They have no significance.

6. Cars and trucks have the right of way. Car drivers are richer, bigger, and more impressive (even though they themselves were simple bicycle riders just a year ago) than bikers or pedestrians, therefore they can do whatever they want and you need to get out of their way.

7. You don't have to worry about separating your recyclables in China. There are people who get paid to dig through your trash and sell your glass and plastic to recyclers. Separating these items for them only undermines their garbage authority.

8. It's okay to urinate wherever and whenever you want. And if you're from the countryside, number 2 is okay too.

Consider yourselves prepared and properly forewarned.

Golden Week

This past week has been a holiday week. The October Golden Week is a week-long holiday celebrating Chinese National Day--the day the People's Republic of China was founded. Schools were closed and the Chinese traveled all over the country, but everything else seemed to be business as usual with lots of appliance sales and celebratory consumerism.

The holiday was a bit of a surprise to us, and we were both informed about the week off just a few days before the vacation started. We were also surprised to learn that we would have classes the weekend before the week to make up for classes missed during the week off. We didn't have enough time to plan a trip, so we decided to spend the week getting to know Shanghai.

Peter celebrated National Day with his first Chinese haircut. Things in China are changing rapidly, but it's nice to know that some services are still available on a very local level. This barber shop is located in the neighborhood next to ours. One night we were riding home at around 10:30 and noticed the barber's door was open and he was watching historic soap operas. Peter pantomimed that he wanted his head shaved and for 50 cents the man obliged.

We also took in some of the sites. We visited the fabric market where I found the man who made Peter some hats almost two years ago. He remembered the request and hand-tailored three more. What a wonderful service. He sews everything by hand and they are just beautiful. We also visited a buddhist temple, which was a peaceful repose from the throngs of people everywhere in Shanghai for the holiday. The temple was beautiful--a taste of what China looks like apart from the modern sky-reach of Shanghai. We visited with our friend Alejandra who is Buddhist, but because she is also Chilean is not a vegetarian.

At the end of the week, we went on an excursion with Grant and Gina and Winston to a park, where we actually saw the ocean that was reported to be nearby. The sea is easily forgotten in Shanghai. We never smell it and we never see it. The semi-unobstructed view of the horizon was refreshing, but the sea here is no Puget Sound. Imagine all the industrial waste from the mythical Yangtze toilet flushing into a body of water jammed with the some of the world's largest container ships. It was nice to get out of the city nevertheless and we experienced a very authentic cattle-car type Chinese ferry ride on the way back to town.

On Friday night we took our South American friends to a large "spa," the expanse and scope of which I don't have the time to describe here. It started out normal enough with naked soaking with Chinese people in rose-water pools, but eventually we were in matching pajamas, drinking Reeb in a row of plush recliners, watching Russian women dance poorly in costumes (thonged costumes). No cameras allowed, I'm afraid. Ah China.

Back to school again today and just in time as a new typhoon is pounding Shanghai and vacation is officially over.

I ger, you ger, we all ger for Uighurs

Ever since Peter and I arrived in China, we have been obsessed with a region in the far northwest called Xin Jiang, home to an ethnic minority called the Uighurs (pronounced Wee-gers). Xin Jiang is a land of high deserts reaching toward ice-capped peaks over 10,000 feet high. In the valleys, sheep graze in green melt-water meadows and the land is fertile enough to grow melons and grapes and fruit orchards. It is a dusty place with fantastic rock formations far far away from the urban jungle of Shanghai. It sounds exactly like Idaho, which is maybe why we feel so drawn to it.

Xin Jiang is a disputed province, a semi-autonomous region where the Uighurs culturally identify more with its neighboring central Asian countries. I won't get into the politics of it here, but to us it seems like the perfect part of China. Meaning not very Chinese at all. And that's why we want to go there. It is a 50-hour train ride though, and we don't have the time now to go, but in the meantime we have discovered a Uighur restaurant near our house. Uighur food is delicious: a mix between Mediterranean, Indian, and Chinese food that tastes very different from anything else we've eaten here. Lots of lamb and naan and hand-pulled noodles and wheat-flour dumplings filled with greasy meat. The Uighurs are also famous all over Asia for their melons and grapes which are in season now. It is the closest thing we have to a Mexican restaurant (good god what I wouldn't do for some refried beans and tortillas) flavored with cumin and cilantro and tomatoes and bell peppers. I could go on and on.

Here is Peter enjoying a lovely dish we had this week, which was a kind of tomato-based lamb stew served over flatbread (yes, with chopsticks).

We Call It Football Now

Well, since we arrived in China, we have become avid women's soccer fans. This was mostly because it was the only thing on TV that we could understand, and because the World Cup was being held in China it was on almost every night. At first it was better than the show where the guy is dressed like a monkey, but the more we watched, the more impressed we became with the players and the more we wished football was on in America, because it is a great sport. We watched almost every game, and it became an excuse to invite our new foreign friends over (such an international sport). Grant was watching too and throughout the games we didn't watch together we texted each other about the plays and frankly, it's the most caught up I've been in a sport since the Crimson Tide gymnastics team won the NCAA championship.

As a thank you gift to Grant for being so helpful during our first few challenging weeks in China, we bought tickets to the final game in Shanghai. The U.S. played Norway for third place and the Chinese were all cheering for Norway because they didn't want the Americans to win. Very strange to have all those black-haired fans for a Scandinavian team, and how disappointed they were when we won. Finally, Germany played Brazil for the championship, and the Chinese couldn't decide who to root for. They are dazzled by the Brazilians' fancy footwork, but when Germany started scoring, their cheers changed from "Ba-zi" to something that sounded like "Deutch-land." Many had their faces painted with both teams flags. They always want to be on the winners' side. I think large sporting events like this are new to the Chinese. They are just beginning to have the expendable resources to attend sporting events and they are learning from the foreigners how to act at such events. For instance, I have never seen such an intense version of the wave in all my life. It went around the stadium four or five times and even though the game was just about as rivoting as it could be, they seemed to enjoy watching the wave of cheering go around and waiting impatiently for their turn to stand up and yell. Very endearing. It was one of the best nights we've had in China so far, learning how big the international community really is and watching the Chinese get ready for the Olympics, which will be more of a trip for them than it will be for any foreign visitors.

Some pictures of us

I realize we don't take enough pictures of ourselves in China, and maybe you want to see our familiar faces every once in awhile. We finally have friends who take pictures of us and send them to us.

So, here we are with our new Colombian friends, Sylvia and Felipe. We met them for some moon-gazing on the night of the Mid-Autumn festival, but by the time we got to the park, all the Chinese were already drunk and passed out on benches, so we went to a noodle shop for a late dinner, followed by a walk in the moonlight.

My students like to take pictures of me with their camera phones while I'm teaching, which is incredibly distracting. I told them I would pose for pictures after class if they would quit disrupting class. Here is a picture one of my students sent me from an after-class photo shoot. Her name is Jennifer too and she thinks that "we will be best friends." She kept insisting that we hold hands for the picture, but I kept insisting that I wanted to keep my hands firmly pressed on the podium.

Time Marches On

Well, believe it or not, this weekend marks our first full month in China. We still feel new, we still feel like we are on vacation, but many things that at first seemed so strange are beginning to seem normal. I hardly notice funny signs in bad English anymore; I've just come to expect them. We are still enjoying Chinese food, but are getting tired of the similar flavors. Maybe this is because we only know how to order about four dishes and eat two of them for lunch and two for dinner almost every day. Last night we caved and went to a Western-style restaurant (more like a Western theme restaurant) called Babela's Kitchen and ate spaghetti just to mix it up. It tasted Chinese, but it still hit the spot.

I am happy to report that Gina has returned to China. I went to pick her up from the airport on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, which seemed appropriate. It will be nice to have her here. Last night we went to get side-by-side hairwash/massages. This is a Chinese luxury. For one to three dollars, you can get your hair lathered up into a beehive of shampoo for about ten minutes, followed by a face, neck, and arm massage. This is a cheap, relaxing evening activity here and the massage is full of unique Chinese techniques we've dubbed things like "the arm jumprope" and the "finger snap." We will make this a weekly occurance.

I have also just completed my first week of teaching. I have one graduate-level Modern American Literature class, four graduate-level "communicative English" classes and two freshman "oral English classes." The literature students are my favorites. They all love Jane Austen and I'm about to blow them away with a T.S. Eliot/Pound lecture followed by some Hemingway and Faulkner, eventually leaving them in the dust with Barthelme. I hope they enjoy the ride. The school is a business/finance school, so the graduate students are all studying economics or accounting or other financial majors I know nothing about. Their biggest goal is to get a job with an American or international company, so we do lots of lessons on resume writing and interviewing skills. They are all very smart, but their English is not so good and they only have one semester to work on it. I keep telling them I'm not a magician, but they seem to think I can transform them all into native speakers by January. The freshman I am babysitting for a colleague who had to return to the States. I only wanted to take them on for a few weeks, but I have gotten very attached to them already. They are so unlike American freshman. No drinking or sex or fraternities; just studying. They are from all over China and I am learning so much about every province. We are all new to Shanghai, so we spend a lot of time practicing English and talking about this "vibrant, international" city (they love that word, vibrant).

So, things were going pretty well for our first month until we recieved some bad news yesterday. One of our new Danish friends committed suicide Wednesday night, shortly after Peter's last conversation with him. This was really a blow. He was set to become one of our closest friends in China. Peter and I both instantly liked him. He was Peter's weight-lifting buddy and we had invited him to live with us while he waited for a room in the foreign students' dorm. As with any suicide, we are left with many, many questions. It's hard to imagine why someone would set off on an adventure like this, moving to Shanghai to start a new life, only to want to end it in a few weeks. We are very saddened by the loss of our friend, but clearly this is what he wanted.

Sorry to end on a downer, but life in Shanghai is not all funny signs and turtles in the hallway (they're still there, by the way). It's like life anywhere else, "full of ups and downs"--an idiom my students love. We press on. We are making many new friends and next week is a holiday, so we are excited to finally have the time to really explore Shanghai and the surrounding areas, expanding our world away from the university.

Moon Festival

Tomorrow is the Mid-Autumn Festival in China, also known as the Moon or Mooncake Festival. Trying to pin down the origins of this holiday has proved difficult. There are many legends, including one about the day when ten suns appeared in the sky and a skilled archer was hired to shoot down the nine extras. He was rewarded with an elixir that would bring him eternal life, but his wife stole the elixir and was banished to the moon. Or, in some versions, she is a good wife and swallows the elixir just as she is about to be killed by her husband's enemy and is so immortalized in the moon. There's also one about a bunny who jumps into a boiling pot, sacrificing himself to feed some starving monks, who reward his heroism by inviting him back to the Moon Palace to live forever as the Jade Bunny.

Anyway, strange roots aside, the Mid-Autumn Festival is today a time to celebrate the harvest. Traditional foods include round fruits like grapefruits, melons, and pomegranates. Of course, the Moon Cake is also served. These are a huge deal here, sold everywhere from Starbucks and Walmart to street vendors. They are very expensive and wrapped extravagantly. In fact, China is trying to cut down on the wasted packaging of Moon Cakes, marketing some in simple recyclable packages as "green Moon Cakes." I received some of the ridiculously packaged Moon Cakes as a gift from the dean of my department. They were in two huge boxes in a huge bag. Each box held five Moon Cakes nestled in a satin liner. Each Moon Cake lies in a small dish, wrapped in plastic, and wrapped by yet another box. A knife and chopsticks are included in each box. I guess harvest time is a time of gluttony. The cakes can best be compared to western-style fruitcakes. They are dense and oily and filled with red bean and other unidentifiable pastes.

The reason I am telling you about the Moon Cake Festival is that its most important function today is to reunite families and friends. The roundness of the moon symbolizes the wholeness of families (among other things including fertility, which is why September/October is the most popular time to get married in China). Most Chinese try to be with their families for this holiday, but if they can't, they gaze at the full moon--the brightest of the year--and think about their loved ones. Which, if it's actually clear tomorrow night, is what we'll be doing. There are lots of nighttime activities and celebrations. We'll take a walk and hopefully it won't be raining (there's a lovely Chinese saying: "The Moon in the home sky always shines brightest," which I imagine, given the air quality in Shanghai, will be true for both me and Peter, having looked at the forecasts for Spokane and Boise). We'll spend several minutes unwrapping a Moon Cake, cut it into diagonal squares and sink our teeth into its pasty, oily density and think of the brightness and excess of our American home.

I leave you with what is printed on each and every one of our Moon Cakes:

Tasting the Delicious Food

Just Like Tasting the Wonderful

Life of Yours

3 Images from Sunday

Bubbles: Poodle: Dumplings:

As seen on TV

All is well in China on a Saturday afternoon. We went to a flat-warming party for some of Peter's Danish classmates. We were the only Americans there but everyone was speaking English. Very convenient for us. It's the international party language. There we were with Danes, Belgians, Frenchies, Chileans, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, and Chinese and they were all speaking our language. Sitting around drinking beer and listening to music seems to be an international past time as well. This is the second party we have been to and it seems like all the ex-pats need to get together once a week and just speak English and share frustrating Chinese experiences. Now we are ready to tackle another Chinese week, battling the unfamiliar. For instance, what's on TV right now...

Typhoon Wipha (Part 2 of 2)

Well, China was right, there really wasn't any news about the typhoon. At least not in Shanghai. It missed us by a long shot and it didn't rain as much yesterday as it did the day before when the storm was out over Taiwan. All is well. Our coffee was delivered. We found coffee filters and we spent the afternoon indoors drinking inky cups of espresso watching the rain. We might as well have been in Seattle.

Here's a picture of Peter riding home from school in the storm. We have these awesome Chinese ponchos that clip onto our bikes, so everything in our baskets stays dry. Very convenient. Too bad people in Seattle are too cool to wear something like this. They would have come in so handy. Maybe if Mountain Hardware started making them out of a breathable, waterproof microfiber and charged $250 for them, they would catch on.

Typhoon Wipha (Part 1 of ?)

So, yesterday Peter and I were on an aggressive hunt for coffee filters all over town. Coffee has been a constant struggle and we sometimes chew coffee flavored gum or go to Walmart where they are sampling instant Nescafe just to get a fix. We were spending twice as much money at Starbucks as we were on food each day, so we knew we had to change our ways. We spent some of our "home improvement" budget on a coffee pot and ordered a shipment of Yunan (not Yuban)--local Chinese arabica coffee with free delivery and 50% off new orders--so all we needed were coffee filters. All the coffee in the grocery store here is instant, so of course no one understands the need for coffee filters. We went so far to as place a triangle-folded piece of paper into the coffee pot at the store to indicate that we wanted to find such useful origami elsewhere in the store, but the message did not translate.

This was a two hour mission. Meanwhile it was raining. Hard. And as we rode our bikes across town from one store to another, the wind was blowing us off the road and the streets were filling with water. I knew it could rain here, but this was sensational. We were laughing, enjoying the shower and the silliness of us braving this sort of weather for coffee filters. I said, "I haven't seen rain like this since Hurricane Ivan came through Tuscaloosa." It was quite the downpour.

When we got home, I had an e-mail from the dean of international students at my school. It went like this: "A typhoon is attacking Shanghai. Please stay inside and close all windows and doors." "Oh," Peter and I said to each other, "that makes sense." But we still hadn't found our coffee filters, so we went to Walmart and found them boarding up the windows and sandbagging the neighborhoods nearby. But inside, everyone was calm and we searched the store over for coffee filters, picking up some water and beer and other staples just in case we were "attacked" by a typhoon. We even sampled some milky Nescafe to hold us over.

Wipha was all over the American news, but there was nothing about it here. The local weather report said it was raining. Yes, it was. About 10 inches worth. Today, it is dry. The air is thick like a blanket and the wind is picking up. We have no idea what to expect from this storm if it really is coming toward Shanghai. But so far, all is well. We have lots of Reeb and 9 seasons of Seinfeld and we're on the fourth floor. (Come to think of it the turtles do seem a bit agitated today...perhaps they can predict the weather).

Apartment 401: Home Sweet Home

Some images of our new apartment including the turtles that the neighbors keep in the stairwell (whether they are pets or food remains to be seen...) and the dead bonzai in the guestroom windowsill.

Finding an apartment

I will quickly walk through the standard procedure of finding an apartment to rent in one of the world's largest cities:

1. Decide which part of this massive city you want to live in. We wanted to be within a ten-minute bike ride of both of our schools and close to Grant and Gina, so that narrowed it down.

2. Decide on a neighborhood. A "neighborhood" in Shanghai is what we would call an apartment complex in the States. Of course everything here is an apartment; there aren't really any single-occupant dwellings. Neighborhoods range in size and quality. Almost all are gated with full-time guards. Some have small convenience stores or fruit stands or street food vendors inside. We wanted to live in a "more Chinese" neighborhood--one where our neighbors would be sitting around in their jammies playing mahjong all day and weird Chinese underwear would be hanging to dry from every balcony like welcome signs.

3. Decide on your desired lay-out. This is primarily a question of how many bedrooms you want. We were shooting for two, so that we could have guests. The one-bedroom apartment is rare here. They go from studios to two-bedroom, with usually a big step-up in square footage.

4. Find the nearest realtor. There's one on almost every block in a small, dirty office with a landline, a cell phone, and a water dispensor.

5. Tell the realtor what you're looking for. This is where we needed Grant. He explained what we were looking for in what neighborhood and the realtor started making phone calls. Each apartment is owned by a different landlord, so the realtor goes through his list to make an appointment for a viewing. If he finds a landlord at home (or sometimes the current tenants are home and you just barge in on them eating dinner or whatever), you head on over to take a look.

6. Follow the realtor through the streets of Shanghai on your bike. The realtor will either be on a scooter or a bike himself, and off you go, running red lights and ringing your bell to keep up.

7. Be either delighted or mortified by the apartment you are viewing. We looked at about six apartments ranging from concrete cells with running water and one free-standing gas burner to stainless steel Ikea-makeovers. Prices have gone up steeply in the past six months, but everything we looked at was between 250 and 400 US dollars per month.

8. Decide on one you like and start bargaining. Rent is somewhat negotiable. The first offer is usually about 50 USD lower than the asking price. The more rent you pay upfront, the lower the monthly installments. So 6 months gets you a 5% discount, while paying a year can sometimes get 10 - 15% off.

9. Pay your deposit and plan to meet with the landlord in the apartment to ask for concessions. Sometimes the landlord will buy new furniture or remove the ugly furniture that's already in the apartment. Ours was not so generous, but he did agree to fix the leaky faucet, the air conditioners that didn't work, and replace the half of the bathroom door that was missing.

10. Pay the realtor for his trouble. The realtor gets 35% of your first month's rent. The realtor who ended up finding us our apartment was an eighteen-year-old kid, who was admittedly hung over and who I think probably went directly to a club with the 120 USD we paid him.

11. Move in. Our place came furnished with lots of built in storage, two beds, a desk, two TVs, a table with six chairs, and a small futon. Also we aquired four and a half pairs of shoes, some dirty government-issued bedding, a bottle of listerine, a panda-shaped bug zapper, and a rain poncho left behind by the previous tenant. We paid some cleaners to come spend a day scrubbing the place spotless, bought a couch and some pots and pans off craigslist, hauled an extra desk and mattress pad from Grant's on the back of our bikes, and here we are.