To be a Pioneer

Sorry for the delay in blogging. I feel like there is simultaneously too much and too little to write about. I mean, I could talk about how everything is different--food, smells, customs, traffic (the insanity that is Chinese driving habits could be a post on its own, starting with the spectacular nonchalance of the jaywalking Chinese grandmothers). But, as I tell people here when they ask, “What do you do all day?” it’s really not too different from what I did before. I do my best to keep the house tidy and the laundry caught up. I spend hours grumbling over menu planning, with the added bonus of trying to find recipes that don’t involve cheese (literally everything I know how to make involves cheese. *Sob*). I go to the grocery store once I finally have a grocery list and spend lots of time wandering in circles because I can’t find green onions, only to discover I’ve passed them three times already. I crave Mexican food. I spend a lot of time cooking and cleaning up after cooking, and I work on my new embroidery project. When Mike is home we chill and play video games and I still spend a lot of time cooking. We are homebodies, and that’s ok. People keep telling us to go see stuff and travel! And we will, but I think it will only be after we’ve fully adjusted to the adventure of daily living here. Going to the store is still enough adventure for me, thanks.

I feel like I have an “adventure” meter. I’m pretty good with the new and adventurous up to a point, and then I need to go home and recharge with familiar things. That set point varies from day to day. Sometimes I can go to new restaurants and try new foods and meet new people, all in the same day, and sometimes one trip outside the apartment is enough for me. And sometimes even being in the apartment is enough. Cooking is an adventure all on its own. Learning how to use a new oven is always unnecessarily exciting, especially when it stops working for a few days for no apparent reason. I haven’t memorized a conversion formula so quickly since high school chemistry, but now knowing how to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius is a must. Plus, the oven is a tiny thing--my largest cookie sheet won’t fit but fortunately my smaller ones do--and has about 12 settings that are only labeled with pictograms and no words, so I honestly have no idea what any of them really do. I just make my best guess and hope.

And some ingredients are just hard to find. I wouldn’t be able to do 80% of what I’ve done so far if it hadn’t been for the kindness of friends who showed up with bags of spices about 30 seconds after I bemoaned my lack of things to cook with (Note to self: pack a spice kit next time you move. Do you know how much you can cook with just salt and pepper? Nothing. You can cook nothing.). China doesn’t really do yeast breads much, and the stuff you can get in the store tastes like cardboard. Tomato sauce is virtually non-existent, except at some specialty imported food stores. Cheese is likewise hard to find, although milk and butter are easier. And even when you can find stuff like that, there’s no guarantee that it will taste like the same things in the States. I didn’t notice how much the difference in taste affected me until every thing I ate tasted just a little off. It wears on you. Which is why I’m increasingly grateful for the ability to make things at home. I can make bread. I can make tomato sauce. I can make yogurt and mayonnaise and salsa and tortillas and egg noodles and all kinds of stuff you would usually buy in a store in the States but are really hard to find here. It makes me feel pretty awesome, both because it’s something familiar and comforting and because I really enjoy being self sufficient in that way. I’m so grateful that I have that kind of heritage, both from my upbringing (thanks Mom!) and from the Church. I think about my pioneer ancestors a lot these days. I wonder if they felt the same sense of dislocation and the desire for something familiar when they moved to the West. I wonder if they found the same satisfaction in making things work. I wonder if the community around them was as kind and as giving as the one around me. I hope so. I really hope so.

I’ve been coping with this move exponentially better than I expected I would, and I think it’s due to the people here. Everyone we’ve met has been unfailingly kind and welcoming. I get asked at least once a day how I’m doing and if there’s anything people can do to help. We’ve been taken to dinner and lunch and the park and more grocery stores than I thought possible. The people here are great. When we arrived I started a mental list of “people who need fresh bread as a thank you gift”, but I gave that up within three days and just decided on “everyone”. There are still some harder moments, but they are few and far between for now. This is definitely not the life I would have chosen for myself (my plan was more along the lines of “settle somewhere and never move ever again because moving sucks”), but I think it’s a good one.

P.S.--I promise I will start adding pictures soon. I haven’t taken many because I wanted to get more comfortable with my surroundings first. And I didn’t want to look like a complete yokel. I stand out enough as it is. But watching people watch Mike on the street is hilarious. One poor 6 foot tall guy gave him the most terrified side-eye I’ve ever seen in my life.

Day 1 and Day 2: A Case Study

Thursday 9/15/16

Well, we made it to China (hooray…?). And let me just get this out there right now: the next person that tells me “don’t worry, it will be great and you’ll have so much fun!” is gonna get smacked. I’m sure I will get to that point--someday. But today it’s mostly terrifying. It feels like EVERYTHING is different. The customs, the language, the food, the smells, the way a supermarket is laid out. The light switches. It’s overwhelming. I’m trying to be positive, but it’s hard. And it’s not even that I think anything is bad--it’s just...too much all at once.

The air in our new apartment is drier than I’m used to now. I woke up with my throat feeling like sandpaper this morning. It smells like new paint and that weird indefinable Asian grocery store aroma. But the floor is warm tan wood and the windows let in lots of light, and it’s bigger than any space we’ve had before. We can’t drink the tap water; there’s a filtration unit on the counter where we fill our bottles. I’m wondering about the proper method of doing dishes. If we can’t drink the water, is it safe to rinse our dishes in? Or should I fill up a basin with the filtered water each time I wash?

There’s a clock on top of a building across the way which chimes the hour loudly enough I can hear it with the windows closed. It came in handy when I tried to reset the time on the microwave, which I could only change in hour increments. I don’t know what the buildings are that I can see out my window. The cityscape is foggy, or smoggy, I’m not sure which, and it fades out into the distance. The guy who picked us up from the airport last night said that there were a lot of buildings built in the economic boom after the recession that are now standing empty, because no one bothered to check if there were enough people to fill them. It makes me wonder if the buildings I can see are tenanted. From up here on the 27th floor the haze washes out colors and makes a city that bustles at street level feel a little like a ghost town. The city at street level is smelly and dingy and noisy and kind of grossly humid today. Jonathan, our social sponsor (he got assigned to collect us from the airport and show us around until we get our bearings--he lives in our building and his Chinese is very good and he’s going to his next tour in Mumbai in two months) walked us to a nearby supermarket this afternoon, where he left us amid a bewildering welter of brightly colored products stamped with unintelligible Chinese to make our purchases and find our way home. We managed to do both, but my stomach was knotted so hard with anxiety I was afraid I might never breathe freely again. Fortunately the cashier was as uninterested in small talk as your average Walmart teller, so we escaped with no more interaction than a nervous “hello” and “thank you.” I feel a very little less anxious with one successful purchase under my belt, but the thought of doing that again still fills me with dread.

Our master bedroom has a king-sized bed, which feels enormous after sleeping on a queen for a year. I no longer get elbowed in the ribs when Mike rolls over. But none of the beds came with top sheets, just a fitted sheet and a comforter. Is this a cultural thing? I have no idea. I also have no idea where to buy sheets to tide us over until our own linens arrive in a few months. When we were doing the last bits of packing on Monday before we left I discovered a dryer full of dishtowels and a blanket that had been missed in the packing frenzy on Friday. I was afraid that we wouldn’t be able to find a place for it in our luggage, or that it would put us over the weight limit, but we managed, and it turned out to be a blessing. That blanket is much more comforting to sleep under than a comforter that who knows how many people have used.

The internet is patchy and fickle. Sometimes it loads right up, sometimes it craps out and you have to coax it back. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to when it works. Posting a picture to Instagram requires several tries and a lot of patience. Posting pictures elsewhere, including here, may be a lost cause. We'll see.

*********

Friday 9/16/16

Things look better with less jetlag and more sleep and even just a day's familiarity with my surroundings. Also, there was real bacon at breakfast this morning so even if the rest of the day is crappy this morning is awesome (we live in a hotel. They serve breakfast every morning, with choices ranging from cocoa puffs to made to order omelettes to tiny octopi you can add to your breakfast ramen.)

*********

Conclusion: bacon makes everything better.

A small update and a stupid brain.

T minus 11 days.

At the very end of my college experience I decided that I was definitely ready to graduate, since--for the first time in my life--I had finally gotten the hang of staying on top of my work. I even used my time so well during the semester that I turned in a huge project ahead of time, and when all my work was done and BYU classes were over I had so much time on my hands during student teaching that I startled my supervising teacher by demanding things to do during prep periods. It was a novel experience.

Moving this time around kind of feels the same way. Our move to Washington last year came up so suddenly that I felt like I couldn’t get a handle on it and so I just shut down and didn’t really prepare well. This time around I’ve known about it for nearly a year and I was determined that it would go way more smoothly. So far I think I’ve been reasonably successful in that. The movers come in a week and my to-do list has been winnowed down so far that today there’s nothing on it for me except put sticky notes on things in the apartment to mark what shipment they go in. This is both good and bad, because in the last month I’ve learned the usefulness of suppressing panic through productivity, and a lack of work tends to lead to a meltdown. Also, this sort of sorting is the absolute worst part of packing. I have to say “This box will go in this pile!” but then I can’t actually put it in a pile. I mean, I probably could, but there’s only about three square feet of open space in my apartment to begin with, and it would quickly become unlivable. So I just have to tag it with a sticky note, which is great and all, but doesn’t keep my brain from mentally categorizing things every time I look at them. That picture will go in HHE. The spatulas will come by air freight, and the knife block needs to stay in the apartment! Shut up brain, I already know.

Honestly I’m just ready for the movers to come and be done with it. If they were coming tomorrow, I could make my piles of things and shut up my stupid brain. But alas, that will have to wait until next week.

In other news, I don’t really have any other news. I’ve probably bought more clothes and shoes in the last two weeks than in the entirety of my marriage, there are new suitcases lurking in odd corners, and I actually finished all my unfinished sewing projects (Mike has three pairs of newly hemmed pants and I learned how to put in a zipper). I get great satisfaction in crossing things off my to-do lists and I’m planning on buying 800 pounds of food and supplies from Costco next week so the government can ship it to China, where it will probably inhabit one of the spare bedrooms like my very own convenience store. I’m terrified by the thought of going grocery shopping for the first time in China but I’m excited to see what the bathroom in my apartment will be like.

I’m not sure what I expected my life to be like, but it most certainly wasn’t this.

Cheers (?)

Mrs. Hawsmo

Beginning again (for good this time!)

T minus 20 days.

Hello again. I figured I would reboot the blog with a sort of pre-moving FAQ for those people who I don’t talk to on a regular basis (so basically everyone but Mom and Grandma). The goal after this is to update regularly, since I think I might actually have things to write about now that our lives are changing rather spectacularly. Here’s the things people generally want to know:

Where are you going again?
Shenyang, China. It’s a major city in the northeastern part of China, about 100 miles northwest of the North Korean border. Fun, right? There’s around 5 million people in the city, and it’s a major industrial hub. It’s also closer than I ever wanted to be to Siberia. I’m told the winters are cold and long. I plan on hibernating.

How many Americans are there in Shenyang?
There’s around 40 Americans who work in the consulate, plus their families. I don’t know if there are any other expats in the city, but I imagine there are a few.

Do you know anyone there?
We’ve met about a dozen people who will be working there with us. Most of them arrived in Shenyang at the beginning of August, so by the time we get there they’ll be able to show us around. Everyone has been really friendly, and I’m glad to see there’s already a great sense of community. One of the ladies and I have already decided we’ll have to start a ping pong club when we get there.

Will you live on an army base?
Nope. I don’t even know if the US has an army base there. But we will be living in the same building as most of the Marine guards. The US government is basically leasing a couple floors in a couple of hotels in downtown Shenyang and remodeled the rooms into American-style apartments. That’s where Mike and I will be living. It’s right in the middle of downtown, close to the shopping district, and Mike can either take a shuttle to work or walk. Also, the apartment is a furnished 3-bed 3-bath, so we will have plenty of room for visitors. And my loom.

Are you taking your loom to China?
Duh. It is the best toy ever. Unfortunately, it has to go on the slow boat with the bulk of our stuff so it probably won’t get there until January or something. I intend to have a long list of projects planned so I can have things to make as soon as I can start weaving again. Get your requests in soon, people.

People are coming to move you, right?
Yes, and I love them for it. I just have to make sure that all the stuff gets in the right piles. We will have four piles: going with us on the plane in our suitcases (two 50 pound bags each), going by air freight (450 pounds max, and hopefully arriving in China a few weeks after we do), going by sea (the rest of our stuff), and consumables (peanut butter and chocolate chips and brownie mix, oh my!). There may be a lot of brightly colored sticky notes in my near future.

What about church?
We’ve been told that since Shenyang doesn’t have enough expat members to make a branch, we will be part of an international call-in branch. Basically all the people out in the boonies like us do a massive conference call on Sunday and have our meetings via phone. There’s a branch president in charge, and for the sacrament he will apparently authorize the priesthood holders to administer the sacrament where they are and the call gets muted for about 10 minutes. I don’t really know much more than that.

Will you have internet?
To my knowledge, yes. Probably slow and crappy sometimes, but we won’t be completely cut off from the outside world.

Can we send you stuff?
Always. I will post the DPO address as soon as we get a real one assigned to us, but in the meantime, here’s the pouch address:
Michael Haws
4110 Shenyang Place
Dulles, VA 20189-4100
There seems to be a morass of rules and regulations about what can and cannot be sent, but I don’t know how to decipher them, so this is the best I can give you: http://pe.usps.com/text/imm/ce_009.htm

How long will you be in Shenyang?
Two years, after which we will be sent off to a different part of the world. And no, not to somewhere in the US. We’re in the FOREIGN Service, and as much as the deep South feels like a foreign country, it has not yet seceded from the Union.

How long is your flight there?
Way longer than I ever want to be on a plane. Like 14 hours or something? All I really know is that we leave on Tuesday the 13th, switch planes in Seoul, and arrive in Shenyang Wednesday night. Pray that I’m not homicidal and Mike still has kneecaps by the time we get there.

Do you know any Chinese?
我会说一点儿中文，可是我常常乱说话，因为我觉得说中文很难。
I know just enough to be sure that I am slaughtering the grammar with extreme prejudice. People tell me that immersion will be good for my skills. I just hope to be functional. My Chinese/English picture dictionary will be my closest companion for a long time.

Are you excited?
I think there’s a very thin line between excitement and terror, and I use it as a metaphorical jump rope multiple times a day. I’m trying to stay focused on the exciting parts and not be nervous about the things I have no control over. I do know that this is what we’re supposed to be doing, and there is a solid support system out there for us, so we won’t be doing this alone. I have to remind myself of that often.  I think it will be an adventure, and some parts will be really amazing and some parts will be really hard, and sometimes those things will happen at the same time.

Let me know if there are any other questions you want answered, and I’ll do my best.

再见！

This blogging thing is hard.

***This post was supposed to go up two weeks ago, but Blogger was being stupid and wouldn't let me post. And then I was busy doing other things.***


Sorry. The blog went the way of no motivation and inability to think of things to write about. And also I would occasionally forget it existed and I should be writing about stuff. So. There's that.

So. Here's some of the things that have been going on:

• language training
• bands, all sorts
• springtime (cold hot cold hot cold but mostly windy)
• language training
• team teaching youth sunday school
• visitors
• language training
• meeting friends and influencing people (with food)
• weaving!
• did I mention language training?

First things first, I took a weaving class at the beginning of the year and I LOVED IT. If a passion is measured by your enjoyment of the drugery involved in a task then I was born to be a weaver. The only thing I disliked about the class was it was only one night a week and I couldn't go every day and work on stuff. I'm now seriously planning on getting a loom of my own and making ALL THE THINGS. Donations to my loom fund are appreciated. :)

I also joined a community band in January. It's fun, the people are nice, and we play a lot fewer marches than the last community band I was in, for which I am eternally grateful. We've played two concerts so far, one at a retirement home in Arlington (they had a woodshop in the basement and a disco ball in the big meeting room! Hippest assisted living place I've ever been) and one just yesterday at the airport for two Honor Flights. The Honor Flight Network is a nonprofit group that brings WWII, Korean War, and Vietnam vets to DC to visit the memorials and honor them for their service. We in the band got to serenade them as they got off the plane at the airport. It was pretty awesome to see all the cheering crowds and help let the veterans know that we are grateful. 

I'm also back in the DC Temple Orchestra. Our spring concert is next Sunday, and we're playing lots of cool arrangements of Restoration Hymns. And one arrangement that is probably supposed to be cool but at the moment is just giving everyone fits. Hopefully we can pull it together by Sunday.

Back in March the Sisters Haws came to visit. It was fun to see everyone, though the weather didn't quite cooperate. They went sightseeing, I got to cook fun food, and a good time was had by all. Even if my GPS decided that Mount Vernon didn't exist and tried to direct us to a gas station instead. My GPS is a little possessed.

But the thing that's really taken over our lives is language training. We get to spend 8 hours a day trying to pack our brains full of Mandarin. It's less like drinking from a fire hose and more like drinking from a fire hydrant. Don't get me wrong, I'm really really grateful that I have the chance to learn the language before we get to China, but that doesn't keep it from obliterating my brain on a regular basis. 

The training class we're in has about 30 people, divided into groups of 3 or 4 plus a teacher. Mike and I are not in the same class, as that apparently leads to marital strife. The teachers are all native Chinese speakers, which exposes us to lots of different accents and funny regional stuff. So far I've had teachers from Beijing, Shanghai, Taiwan, Qinghai, Xinjiang, and one from Shenyang (when I told her that I was going to Shenyang she said, "Oh, I just got back from there! The sky was the same color as the road.")

Tomorrow starts the eighth week of the class, which is just crazy. It's hard to believe that two months ago we were just starting to learn how to say hello (你好）and now we can (theoretically) carry on a conversation about what we did on the weekend and how we feel about our schooling. On the days when I feel like I'm forgetting everything I've ever known about Chinese and most of what I know about English, it's nice to look back and recognize the progress I've made (I know how to say "siblings" now, even though I thought getting it to stick in my head was going to kill me AND my teachers). Now I know enough to respond in Mandarin to my sisters' texts and actually say something pertinent to the conversation. Just not anything intelligible to anyone else. :)

So, here's to hoping that I can actually keep this blog thing going this time. Wish me luck.

再见！

We're not dead, I promise...

I'm just really, really behind on blogging. I'm going to try and play catch-up over the next few days. Here's the news from just after Thanksgiving:

The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas were mostly a mad dash to get presents ordered and bought and sent off. Christmas as an adult is not as much fun as it is as a child, but I think it might be more satisfying. It's certainly more challenging. I think I made five different lists to try and keep track of what went where and when it needed to be sent off. But I think I got everything straightened out and all the things in the mail that need to be there. Every day I blessed the fact that the nearest post office is on the first floor of our apartment building--and the UPS store is just the next building over. Shipping things doesn't get any easier than this.

In my hunt for presents I went to Eastern Market in DC. It's one of the oldest market buildings in the country, built specifically for that purpose in 1873, and has been in continuous operation for 137 years. It's got all kinds of produce and flowers and meats to choose from, and the day I went they were selling Christmas trees outside, which smelled divine. The variety of meat products there was kind of bewildering (as was the veritable army of mothers and nannies armed with strollers and small children that were milling around outside the entrance). I think I saw a dozen different kinds of fish and everything from pigs feet to tripe (eww!). I didn't end up buying anything, but I want to go back on a weekend when the arts and crafts vendors are there. I did, however, find my way down to the Eastern Market Pottery, which is in the basement of the building. They sell pieces made by the instructors and offer classes most weeknights and I think it would be super cool to take a class there. Alas, it's expensive and there's a waiting list, and if I get into the Mandarin class I want to take in the spring I won't have time. But it still looked super cool.

I also found a used bookstore across the street from the market and wandered around in there for a while. It's in this tiny old row house and books are stacked up to the ceiling and packed into every available space, including the windows. The filing system is archaic and snarky and there were all sorts of odd nooks and corners. I loved it. If my living space looked like that it would drive me crazy in minutes, but it's sure fun to visit.

I think they used books both as commodities and architectural supplies

Hahahahahaha

This was in the stairwell down to the basement. The sign on the
 right reads: "WARNING: Theft from the Troll's Hole may
 result in, among other things: crooked wall hangings,
 lost keys, bad cell phone reception, impotence,
broken underwire, passive aggressive email forwards
 from Republican family members, vegans, baby theft,
 and ill-fitting shoes."