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.