Xita!

Way back when in DC I took language classes with Mike. It was 8 hours a day, 5 days a week of learning (attempting, cough cough) Mandarin. Once we got to China, Mike and I had a tutor two afternoons a week. But then it got to be winter, and I was tired of spending two hours in transit to and from the consulate for a one hour lesson two days a week, so I left Mike to his own devices and teamed up with Donal to have joint lessons closer to home. And that sort of devolved from actual lessons with actual learning of words to adventures around the city with teacher in tow (Amy is very patient with us). I may not be expanding my vocabulary much but I've seen a lot more of Shenyang than before and I know some useful things now, like where to buy a train ticket and the history of Zhongshan Park. And this week we went to Xita!

Xita (pronounced shee-tah) is Shenyang's Koreatown. Or street. It's basically a couple of streets, but it's packed full of Korean markets and barbeque restaurants and Korean people, and it's very interesting. And I actually took pictures, so we will narrate this adventure with photos.

This is the gigantic drum/tower/sign marking the beginning of Xita Street. 

So the first night we were in Shenyang two of Mike's coworkers took us out to dinner in Xita. We took a cab to Xita, but there was some confusion over where the restaurant was, so we took another cab while Luke and Jonathan tried to figure it out, and after 15 minutes of driving in circles around Xita, got dropped off EXACTLY WHERE WE WERE PICKED UP. I'm pretty sure we made that cab driver's night. This is the restaurant we were aiming for--literally 30 feet from where we were dropped off the first (and second!) time. It was very good. I want to go back, but without the scenic tour.

This is the Korean food street market where you can get every Korean ingredient under the sun. Kimchee for daaaaaayyyyyss.

Dried fishes and peppers and, uh, I honestly have no idea. There were all kinds of dried and packaged goods. I saw fish of all shapes and sizes, cut and dried veggies, fresh greens, medicinal roots, some really terrifying sausage, SO much kimchee, and bags and bags of chili powders.

There were stands like this all over the place, with pots of endless varieties of pepper pastes. Even the air was spicy.

In one of those weird quirks of language, the word "xita" actually has nothing to do with Korea or Koreans. The Korean district takes it's name from a nearby temple-- Xita literally means "west tower". Shenyang has four towers (or possibly temples, I'm a little fuzzy on the details)--east, west, north, and south--but the west tower is the most famous and well-kept. Amy said that many older cities have four towers like that. The towers were supposed to help keep the city stable and grounded. The Xita tower is a small collection of Buddhist temples and open to the public. I loved it. It's the prettiest thing I've seen in Shenyang, and so peaceful and serene.

The actual tower. At the base there is a trough of earth where you can plant your taper of incense and pray.

Part of the temple complex.

Detail of the temple decoration. It's so gloriously bright!

There were stones like this in front of each building. I'm not sure what they are for, but I do love the lotus blossom.

Temple complex. This is behind the big white tower.

Shrine? I don't know. I wish I did.

This is a sign on the main temple building. I wish I could read. 

Inside the main building they had three statues like this along with lots of saffron cushions to kneel on.

Bougainvillea! A little taste of home. Except less...large and viciously spiky.

Amy said that in the olden days all the large temples had bells like this one on their eaves, which must have been something to hear when the wind blew.

The tower again.

This was over the entrance to the complex. Beautiful artwork EVERYWHERE. 

A++, would recommend another visit. Especially if you can get there on the first try.

A Picture Is Worth 1000 Words

Which is good, because I don't feel like spouting out that much nonsense. So have lots of pictures!

(I finally figured out how to get lots of pictures off my phone at once. Go me! Figuring out your phone is a lot harder when half of it is in Chinese.)

A January selfie in front of the Mao statue near the hotel. Apparently it's one of the biggest in China.

Sidewalk snowman!

There's a street that is kind of Shenyang's gentrified Japanese neighborhood that has all kinds of these
statues along it, which are very startling when you walk past them at night and
catch them out of the corner of your eye.

My very favorite sidewalk snowman

Tire art? Saw this while walking to IKEA. 

Where do you even keep a donkey in Shenyang? I saw this fellow on a downtown street corner on the way
to the consulate. I think he and his person were selling sweet potatoes.

These ladies were performing in a mall, playing (so Google informs me) the guzheng, or Chinese zither.
It was really cool and I thought I took a video but apparently I only took a picture. Boo. 

The random public art installations never cease to amuse. Attack of the mutant giraffes?
This was outside the mall with the zither players.

P.S.- I do appreciate any and all comments, and I want to respond to them, but I don't know how. :( Does anyone know how to do such a thing?

In which grocery shopping is an Adventure

Since moving to China I'm fairly convinced that I spend most of my time going grocery shopping. This is a far cry from living in DC, where I spent little time grocery shopping and all of it was across the street at Costco. Technically I think I actually live closer to the grocery store now, since there's basically a supermarket on the ground floor of the building--I don't even have to go outside!--but alas, it is not Costco (even if I sometimes find products from Costco hugely marked up at the import store there). The thing is, what would be one trip to the store in the States is usually four or five trips here. And all these trips are constrained by how much you can carry home in your bags before your spine telescopes. So instead of going to the supermarket and loading all my various purchases into the car, shopping is much like a choose your own adventure novel:

If you want produce, take the staff elevators down to Happy Family (yes that is the name of the store). That will let you out in the elevator lobby, which leads into a back entrance to the jewelry department that takes up the front third of the ground floor. I always think that door should be marked "Employees only" but no one has yet stopped the crazy white girl from wandering through, so I continue to use it. The produce area is set up kind of like it would be in an American store, but instead of having a checkout area at the front of the store, there are registers all over. So you bag the veggies of your choice (as one helpful old lady pantomimed to me the first time I went shopping there--I couldn't find the little baggies and so was just wandering around with an armful of loose cucumbers and broccoli) and take them to the register to be weighed and paid for. Then you repeat with your fruit. And your other fruit. There's some sort of arcane system of which registers you have to go to to pay for which kind of fruit, but I haven't figured it out yet. Usually there's lots of pointing and kind but unintelligible directions. This adventure applies to all produce except for potatoes, which are inexplicably the least happy part of Happy Family. For potatoes, go to Walmart.

Happy Family veggie stand.

If you want eggs, go deeper into Happy Family. At the egg counter you can get several varieties, including (I think) quail and goose. Chicken eggs come in various numbers and levels of expensiveness, but I stick to the cheap flats of loose eggs where you pick them out one by one and place them very carefully in a little plastic baggie. I do this because A) cheap, B) I can get uniformly large eggs for baking, and C) I like to live dangerously. Once you have your bag of eggs, you get to try and find the proper register, which is even more confusing than the fruit one. Sometimes you pay by the eggs. Sometimes you pay in the seafood area. Sometimes you pay in the beef area. Most confusingly, sometimes the register attendant will weigh your bag of eggs and send you off with a printed barcode sticker stuck to your finger to a different register so you can pay there and then go back to the original spot and collect your bag of eggs that you then have to carry gingerly back home.

If you want some basic staples like flour, rice, oil, and instant ramen, you can go to a few places, but I generally choose the little convenience store-like place inside Happy Family, where you can get all of the above, plus boxed milk, Kinder Eggs, thirty million types of indecipherable snack foods, and an entire shelf of things like prepackaged lotus root, chicken feet, and MSG.

If you want meat, I guess you could go to Happy Family or the like and get it, but I've never been brave enough. Meat is generally just set out in chunks in open cases--no nice portions, no plastic wrapped trays. Just lumps of meat that everyone (and probably their dogs) pokes through with bare hands. Yech. Instead, I opt for the halal market, which I think has much better meat, but involves careful planning, a buddy, a bus ride, actually having to communicate in Mandarin, and generally clearing out the entire stock of chicken breasts from one specific lady's stall. Meat buying days are always an Adventure, and generally only happen once a month.

If you want things like tortilla chips or butter, generally you have to go to fancy import stores like Metro or Ole. These both involve public transport or mooching a ride off a friend. They also involve trying really hard not to think about how much you're spending on a bag of tortilla chips. Six dollars a bag. Gah. The things I do for nachos.

If you want a mildly out-of-body experience (or potatoes), go to Walmart. A Chinese Walmart is a weird amalgamation of a standard Chinese store and an American Walmart. They smell the same, is the strangest thing. The first time I walked in to the Walmart here I was expecting the crappy florescent lighting and the long lines at the three open registers, but I was not expecting to inhale and have my scent memory go "Yep, Walmart." It's deeply weird. But hey, at Walmart I can get basic cheddar cheese and frozen corn and sometimes those are very important necessities.

Checking out at Walmart. The little shelves by the registers have things like gum, chocolate, and oddly, condoms.

Happy [Lunar] New Year

Hello again. I feel like I should just have a running header of "Sorry it's been so long, I suck at blogging, blah blah blah" and have done with it once and for all.
So.
Sorry. Again. I'm just going to pretend that I'm doing the whole new-year-fresh-start thing and disregard the fact that January is over. The lunar new year is just starting, ok? And that is a way way bigger deal in China than the turn of the calendar year (it's like a solid week of celebrating and lighting off exorbitant amounts of fireworks at all hours of the day or night. The Chinese invented gunpowder and are really going to work that for the rest of eternity). When in Rome--er, Shenyang--right?

My reason/excuse for not blogging is that I didn't know what to write about. Part of it was trying to find that balance between being informative about my life and navel gazing. Part of it was that I couldn't think about ways to accurately describe my life here without being too aware of how different it was and then being freaked out about it. I had to let time and familiarity give me enough comfort so that I could both describe the differentness of my life and still function within it. I think I can do that now.

In the time since I last wrote, life has more or less settled into a rhythm. The rest of our belongings were delivered in December, along with the shipment of consumables like toothpaste and canned tomatoes. That made life easier--I don't have to spend so much time finding and implementing work-arounds anymore. I'm grateful that I am able to find work-arounds, don't get me wrong, but boy do they take a lot of energy. I'm still getting things unpacked and organized (and discovering things I haven't seen since we lived in Alabama--each box is a litany of "oh hey I remember that" and "where the heck did this come from?"), but progress is being made. My loom made it in perfect condition and Mike patiently let me stock up on yarns. Thus far I've made a new year's themed table runner and I'm working on a scarf for Mike, which has given me more problems than all my other projects combined and it's only 18 inches long right now. This is a labor of love, I tell you.

I've also found better and cheaper places to buy milk and cheese, learned how to make bipimbap, gotten lost on my way to Wuai Market and accidentally found a cathedral, baked a cheesecake on commission, learned the Mandarin word for plaid (thanks Donal), started ironing Mike's dress shirts on a regular basis, had a demonic migrating head cold, been called as second counselor in the Relief Society, and adopted 11 houseplants and all the marines. We have them over for dinner a few times a month (the marines, not the houseplants). They get fed, I get to feed people and have my ego stroked, it's a good trade.

Life is...life, really. Sometimes it's wonderful, sometimes it sucks, and it's challenging and dull and lovely and odd all at once. I am going to try to document some of that this year on the blog, even if it's just the dailiness of life. That's all I've got, honestly. I'm a daily kind of person, and I am content with that. So hopefully people out there like a slice-of-life approach--otherwise we've moved into serious navel gazing territory and really, no one needs that.

Happy New Year!

It's the Year of the Rooster, so before the holiday the hotel staff came and gave us a...rooster.
 A round, fat, hilariously Chinese rooster. I love it.

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.

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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."

Let the holidays commence!

Apparently it's been a busy two weeks. Funny how the day to day things add up into a life. Here's what's been going on:

Thanksgiving! I hope you all had a lovely holiday. Ours was pretty great. We slept in (hooray!) and then made traditional Haws scones for brunch via the Homely method, because I am impatient and believe in immediate scone gratification. They were very good and no one was harmed in my first attempt at deep frying, so we'll label that a success. We spent the rest of the morning playing a new game and then went to Aunt Traci's friend Shelly's house for dinner. We didn't know anyone but Traci, but that didn't matter because everyone was super friendly and nice and we had a grand time. I embarrassed myself at corn hole, we ate lots of good food, Mike won the "dollar game", and my pumpkin cheesecake was universally admired (it's my mission in life to replace pumpkin pie with pumpkin cheesecake because it is astronomically better). I'm really grateful for awesome people. They make life worth it.

The most surprising thing that happened last week was that I was asked to help fill out the instrumentation for the Washington Temple Orchestra for their Christmas concert. I don't really know how they got my contact information, but I'm glad they did, because it was super fun. The DC Temple has an annual Festival of Lights with nightly performances in the Visitor's Center auditorium (which I did not know existed), and the Temple Orchestra was performing on Saturday. So I got the music and showed up and played with them and it was awesome. Everyone was really nice and very excited that I was there--apparently they only have one horn on a regular basis--and hopefully I'll be able to continue playing with them next year. I also made friends with the other horn players and learned about some other community bands in the area, so hopefully I will be able to keep playing with another group too.

We hit a milestone yesterday when we had our very first houseguest! Somehow in over three and a half years of marriage no one has ever come to stay with Mike and me until yesterday. This is a little sad. But Rachel came to visit, so all is well, and it was super fun. We ate lots of food (because feeding people is how I show my love--seriously, I don't know another way to do it), played games, and worked on Christmas decorations during the First Presidency Christmas Devotional. Mike hung lights in the windows and I made Rachel cut out snowflakes with me to hang on the walls and we played "Spot Uncle Glen" during the choir numbers. We finished off the night with the fruit and cheese box Mike's parents sent (because I have the best in-laws ever and nothing you say will convince me otherwise) which was so so tasty. Those are the best pears I've ever had in my life. It was a delightful evening and I'm sad that Rachel had to leave so soon. Visitors are fun! Come visit, people!

Cheers,

Mrs. Hawsmo

Black Magic and Arsonist Pandas

So basically I sit down to blog and can't remember a single thing that happened in the last two weeks. Does this happen to everyone? Is it some sort of weird Pavlovian response to computer screens or writing in general? I don't understand. Here's the few things I do remember:

• Going to the temple. On Veteran's day Mike had the day off so we got to go to the DC temple. We got there right as a session started, so we decided to do sealings instead. It was nice. We got to help a couple with a big pile of family names. I think it really says something about the Church that our most sacred form of worship is made up of service. I thought about that the whole way home. 
• Later that week I went to an orchestra rehearsal for a Christmas orchestra that a friend's stake is putting together. She'd texted me and said they needed more horns, so I was curious and decided to check it out. It was absurd. I laughed the whole way home. If I had been expecting anything other than an enthusiastic but unskilled group of volunteers I might have been disappointed, but that was exactly what they had. We were all crammed in the choir loft of the church, trying to share makeshift stands and sightread songs that weren't always a good choice. Two versions of "What Child Is This" had been passed out--in different keys. We tried to play "Sleigh Ride" (to my undying horror. Ugh, that song) and since we were lacking a percussion section, the conductor's five year old daughter was in charge of manning the clapper to make the whipcrack (and she was actually really good at it). My stand partner was a tiny junior high school boy with glasses and a bowl cut who told me about how playing with three other horns was the most he'd ever played with, and I had to refrain from commenting that I'd been playing horn since before he was born. Oh gosh. It was hilarious. I would have gone back the next week just for the entertainment value, but we have a friend coming into town on the night of the performance and I couldn't make that commitment. Alas.
• We went to another Wizards game. Mike watched the game, I watched the people in front of us slowly lose their verbal filters as they became more inebriated. I think the highlight was when one of them--a dude in a beanie with a scruffy beard--yelled, "Kris Humphries you are a beautiful piece of man!" during some free throws.
• I started learning Mandarin! I found an app that takes you through it step by step (complete with a cute panda who gives you a thumbs up when you get something right and looks like he's gonna set your house on fire when you don't) and I'm liking it a surprising amount. It's like learning a secret code. I can't do much more than say "I am eating a yellow peach" yet, and I'm 600% sure that I won't understand anything spoken to me by anyone who isn't the little arsonist panda, but so far it's really cool and it makes me feel like I might actually be able to learn a new language. 
• I also organized our closet. This doesn't sound like a big deal but I'm excited about it anyway. I had to haul almost everything out and then rearrange all the bits and pieces, but the end result is so much nicer. I think it doubled the available storage space. Mike accused me of working black magic when he saw it all pretty. Now we just have to keep it that way...

This week we're looking forward to Thanksgiving (who isn't!?!) and celebrating with lots of food and pumpkin cheesecake. It kind of snuck up on me this year. Suddenly it's almost December and I haven't even thought about a Christmas list. What do I want this year? (The entire cheese aisle from Costco. What? Don't you?)

Cheers,

Mrs. Hawsmo

Autumn, wherefore art thou?

And by autumn I mean cold weather. Leaves are changing, the days are getting shorter, there's Christmas ornaments bigger than I am in the aisles of Costco, and it's still in the mid-60's. Is this normal? This time of year in college was marked by sleep deprivation and midterms and spending marching band rehearsals squinting suspiciously at the fall colors creeping down the mountainsides because they were the forerunners of the snow and I knew it was just a matter of time before my horn would freeze solid. This year I put on pants and a jacket to go shopping because I assume it will be a bit nippy and then I nearly sweat to death walking out of the lobby doors. I was out looking for new boots on Thursday (under the assumption that someday I will want good cold weather footwear because it will actually be cold) and came across a crew putting up an outdoor ice rink--complete with a zamboni laying down some ice. It was nearly 70 that morning. It hasn't even approached freezing at night. So I have to wonder how they expect to keep the ice there as ice instead of the world's shallowest swimming pool. Liquid nitrogen? Giant cold packs? Frost giants? At least warm weather allows lots of activities. I've discovered a rooftop balcony that faces south where I can go read in the sunshine when I feel like getting outside. I may just live there until it gets too cold.

In other news, Mike's been happy to live in a place that has a professional basketball team and has picked out games he wants to go see. We went to a Wizards/Spurs game on Wednesday and it was a lot of fun. Mike enjoyed watching the game (even though we were in the nosebleeds of the nosebleed section) and I enjoyed the people watching. Also the cheese fries we had at dinner. Mmmmm.

Friday we went to an ice cream social for the LDS people in Mike's training class. One of the class supervisors is LDS, so he and his wife make it a point to gather the LDS trainees together once training is over to mingle and ask and answer questions specific to being LDS in the Foreign Service. In those situations I always feel like I'm in the center of a venn diagram: Here's the circle containing all the FS people, here's the one with the LDS people, and here you are at the intersection. It seems to be a fairly small world out there. But it's also filled with nice people, from what I can see, so that's ok. Everyone at the party was fun to talk to and very complimentary of the maple cinnamon sunburst I brought to share (because I am a vain, vain person and I choose my desserts based solely on how impressive they are--and also because that one is super awesome). It looks like my evil plan of buying peoples' love with carbs is working. Mwa ha ha.

Cheers,

Mrs. Hawsmo

Aaaand we're back!

Sorry for the delay. I was waiting for A) the opportunity to completely take over and redecorate the blog (mwahahaha...I mean, thanks Jenny!) and B) moving to the new apartment. Both have duly been accomplished, so now I have no more reasons to procrastinate. Except procrastination in general. But I'm working on that. So, without further ado, here's some of our recent adventures!

The anticipation was killing me!

• Flag Day: Mike took it all in stride. I was torn between feeling nauseous and getting the shakes all morning. All the family members of the new hires were invited to come be nervous together as they announced our fates. I think the people in charge must enjoy watching people have heart palpitations because they announced all the posts by saying the location, the specialty (like facilities or IT or security) and THEN the person's name. But it did bring into sharp relief whether or not I really wanted to go somewhere. There were a few places I was surprised to find I really didn't want to get posted. But when our turn finally came...
• We found out we're going to China! Of all the guesses I collected, Bentley, Ruby, and Kylie were the closest, so yay for you, little people!  I was surprisingly relieved and excited to find out that

  

  The flag took over
  our IKEA plant

  we're being posted to Shenyang. Mike's excited because he gets language training and therefore gets paid to learn Mandarin. Because of that we're going to be hanging around DC for a while longer than we would have originally, which is fine by me. DC is pretty great (and it's more time for people to come visit, HINT HINT).
• We moved to our permanent place, FINALLY. Originally we were going to be spending a week in a temporary apartment but it kept stretching longer and longer and we ended up being there a month. A month is a very long time to be in limbo and I am so so so glad it's over. And I really like the new place (possibly because a quarter of it is the kitchen, which is totally awesome). Now we're all moved in and unpacked and I can finally feel like we're living here instead of in some really weird vacation dream. 

  

  A Hyatt family, erm, portrait

• We took a spontaneous trip over Columbus Day weekend (because it's a federal holiday for no reason I can fathom, but hey, three day weekend!) and drove up to Connecticut to visit friends from Alabama who moved away from us in June, those heathens. Because they are super awesome they were excited when we called and asked if we could come invade with only a few hours notice and let us stay with them for three days. It was all sorts of fun to see them again. We ate LOTS of good food, played lots of games, and a good time was had by all. Thanks again, Hyatts.

The rest of life has been spent settling into life here. We're getting to know more people, finding out more about the neighborhood, and spending lots of money at Costco (we now live literally across the street and it's both a blessing and a curse). It's still surprisingly warm here, so walking to the store is an easy chore, and the leaves are starting to turn colors. I may never get over how gorgeous autumn is in a place with real seasons. 

Cheers,

Mrs. Hawsmo