People talk really fast

It’s only been just over  a month since I’ve been home yet so many things have changed already. I am very thankful that I managed to find a decent and reasonably priced apartment as well as a very nice and hopefully stable and fun job. It was pretty stressful, but I am happy it all worked out for me. First off, I want to back track and touch upon how my first week went. I was picked up at the airport by two of my closest friends and immediately driven to go enjoy some sushi.

This is me being ultra lame (hem... awesome!) and running towards Andi. :)

One of the things I remember thinking during that first day back, was omg, everyone around me talks so fast! At that moment, I knew that the transition into normal life was going to take a while. And let me just confirm that it did in fact that a while. It took pretty much until I started my job. Why is that you ask, well it’s because for me to feel normal, I had to get back to not only the same state that I was at before I left for China (i.e. working at CME) but I also had to get on the same schedule as my friends. Now that that is all aligned, I feel not only happier but also more normal. It’s funny how the Chinese don’t value their jobs and don’t use it to define themselves, while here I am being back home using my job as a reference point of how to feel normal again. It doesn’t define me, but it is definitely a big part of my life.

I'm finally normal and I'm ready to start exploring and relearning to love Chicago. This past Sunday was a great start.

Go Cubs Go!

Happy Thanksgiving!

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want to share some thing that I am thankful for (and will get to see and touch and love in about three months!) outside of my family and friends, of course. You guys are number one!  I have a feeling that if I had never lived in China, I wouldn’t have noticed or appreciated these things.

1. FDA – I am sick of eating mystery meat. I mean, seriously, it’s not healthy and I think more than half of it is full of filler.
2. Western toilets – the eastern ones aren’t that bad but with lack of flushing and cleaning supplies, the western ones win hands down any day.
3. Cuisines of the world –The Chinese have yet to discover the joys of Mexican food, and their renditions of Italian food (and every other type of Western food) can really use some work.
4. Cheese- Why does this country not like it! It’s like a little piece of heaven and goes wonderfully with wine.
5. Wine –more specifically good cheap wine. The wine here is either cheap or good. Finding a wine that is both is pretty much impossible.
6. Microwave –I don’t use mine at home that often, but man, there are days where I would kill to have one here.
7. A separate shower in my bathroom – Who wants to shower standing next to the toilet? Enough said.
8. Good construction – I can’t put anything on the walls here because they are all cement. Did you know that at one point the world ran out of cement because China took it all?
9. A dryer –you would never know this, but the drier is just as equally important in maintaining your clothes as a washer is.
10. A good meal – According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the most basic human need is to fulfill hunger and thirst. I have never in my life (thank you Mom!) felt what it was like to be deprived of that need until I moved to China. Obviously, there is food here and I eat it, but the food doesn’t fully fill that need. It is very weird how depressed and unmotivated you get when you can’t get a satisfying meal. I hope to never experience this again, and I don’t wish this feeling upon anyone.
11. Unrestricted internet –I think many of us take this one for granted thanks to the US Constitution. J USA! USA!
12. A grocery store –You want butter? It’s there. You want some cereal? You have a whole aisle with every kind you could possibly imagine. Meat? Yes, just tell me how much, what kind and in what form you want it. Fruit? Yup that too, from every corners of the world, even when it’s not in season. I can go on…
13. A good school system –I now know what it’s like when the inmates run prison and I don’t like it one bit! It’s not good for the students, and its ultra degrading and frustrating for the teachers. Thank you and I heart you teachers!
14. Christmas spirit –It’s really weird to be surrounded by a bajillion people, but to have no one share your Christmasyness. No Santa songs, minimal Christmas trees, no decorations and no smiles and cheer between strangers. I never want to miss another Christmas again!

And many more…

Yes I realize that those are all a bit “preachy”, but it’s all true. We live in an amazing country and I think we take a lot of it for granted sometimes. And as the saying goes “you never know what you have until you lose it”. I may have had to go all the way to China to realize these things, but in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want to share with you so you can learn from my experience too. Maybe the next time you walk into a grocery store (or do any of the other things I’ve mentioned), you will stop and think for a second, how freaking amazing that act alone truly is. There are shelves full of products full of stuff from Mexico, and Poland and China and India and the Philippines. And for those who really want it, I’m sure they can even find some Veggie Mite (why they would want to, I have no idea! Heheh). Either way, the huge assortment of available food is astonishing and it’s definitely a rarity around the world. 

And that is what I am thankful for today. Happy Thanksgiving! Gobble Gobble!

Blue Box Blues

As exciting as the offer to go out to your favorite little hole in the wall restaurant is back home in good old Chicago, the offer here in China does not evoke the same excitement. Rather, it usually involves a sigh followed by a question of “where do you want to go today?” The answer to that question is usually a list made up of names for random restaurants around our school: Big Red, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the Kosher place, dumpling place, or Something VS Something place. As we discover more hole in the walls, I’m sure the list of ultra awesome and creative names will increase. Anyways, along with the short list of immaterially different hole in the wall restaurants, our entre choices usually consist of rice or noodles topped with some sort of meat in a sauce and are usually limited to the scarce number of pictures on a restaurant’s menu.

A little outside eating area we go to often. It's quite cute at night.

Some days we get enough courage to go attempt a new place but doing so requires a true desire and patience. Usually, these new places do not have picture menus at all since we had already discovered those locations earlier on. If we are lucky, when we walk into a potential new regular dining establishment, there will be someone eating something delicious looking that we can point to and say “one of this one please”. Otherwise, we can try and orders an item from my list of 8ish items that I’ve had waitresses write down after voting them as an “I want to eat this again” meal. If we are feeling even more adventurous, we make up combinations of words such as “chicken” and “vegetables” and “rice” as if they were refrigerator magnets and see what happens.

Either way, when you hungry and you just want to go and eat, sometimes this eating arrangement leads to frustrations. There have been many days where I’ve eaten cucumbers and fried rice, or simply nothing at all because ordering didn’t work out: either the food that arrived was awful or I simply couldn’t order in the first place because I got too frustrated with them saying “mayo (don’t have)” or babbling on in Chinese and pointing to other things that I just walk away and deal with the hunger.

Our go to fried rice with ham.

We’ve found a few western restaurants along with an authentic Indian restaurant here, but they are all the way downtown. We try to head down there twice a week or so to get a dose of “normal” food as we call it and kind of recharge our batteries. It’s these little trips to eat western food that keeps us going, well at least me anyways. I was told there are a couple of pizza places within a 10/15 minute bus ride from our school, so I think we will start visiting those too, once we get one of the teachers to show us where they are.

In the worst case scenario, on days when we can’t handle it anymore or are not in the mood to order food like refrigerator magnets, we know we can always cave and go eat Blue Box. We have not yet reached that point, but it’s really comforting knowing that in a few short minutes, we could have a hot steamy bowl of fake covered cheese noodles and they are guaranteed to taste just like home! :)

Lack of information

Going through this process of applying for this teaching position and getting things sorted out (classes, books, location of the school, etc) has been interesting to say the least. Lesson learned so far is that the people I am dealing with like to be very vague. I ask: "when do we start/fly in?" and my response is "in August. I guess I should have been more specific with my question, so my response would have come out a bit more ... informative. So, thank you for your answer, as it was A) very beneficial and B) it was totally new information! (insert a hearty dose of sarcasm)

Is this something I'm going to have to get used to?