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.)

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Conclusion: bacon makes everything better.