Merry Christmas!

Christmas here is lacking a bit in the Christmas spirit. There are plenty of decorations, but none of the love. However, we did find little ways to celebrate. On Christmas eve, one of our students offered us tickets to a Georgian Folk Dance show, Samaia, and she had her chauffeur drive us there! It was a great show and definitely a classy way to spend Christmas eve.

In the theater where more than 2/3rds of the seats were empty

The theater from the outside. Pretty nifty huh?

Merry Christmas!

Christmas day was spent eating pancakes and drinking Starbucks downtown. We bought some dvds and had Japanese Hibachi for dinner. It was very Jewish of us but those are they types of Christmases that I love!

Overall Christmas was a good week! We got three packages in one week! Thank you so much to all who sent one!! We truly enjoyed each and every one. :)

Package from the motherland from my Dad.

Huge package from the glorious USA from my Mom!

Full of delicious goodies!

Package from the Goodpastures!

And we even had a tiny Christmas Tree!

Merry Christmas everyone and a Happy New Year!

Ooo China - Pizza hut

So we went to Pizza hut the other day. In China, Pizza huts are kind of a date place. The inside looks rather nice. In fact, they even have escargot on the menu. Fancy right? 

The Pizza Hut Extraordinaire 

Pasta with sausage that tastes like dog food

Well, in the good ol’ US of A, fancy restaurants are usually known for their impeccable service. Not that I want to compare the Pizza Hut in China to a Michelin grade restaurant in Chicago, but I still want to stress service or in my case, the lack there of. At the Pizza Hut, one of us ordered pizza and the other ordered pasta. The pizza came and was fully consumed before the pasta even showed up at the table. The concept of timing food so it arrives together so the party that came together can eat together is totally lost on the Chinese. This is not the first time where one of us has completely finished our meal before the other one even started.

Oooo China! Get your stuff together!

Bags and Frogs

The Chinese love their bags. Didn’t finish your meal and want a doggie bag? Well, your dripping noodles and your rice leftovers will all be put in a bag. Also, the bag will be so thin, that you will carry your leftovers home as if they were a basket of eggs that could crack at any minute. They also serve beer in bags. Brandon and I missed out enjoying this beer in a bag in Qingdao but we’ve seen it done! I’ve also mentioned this, but they have milk in bags here. Little bags. Brandon and I got sick of having to keep buying bags, so we went and bought a gallon equivalent. Surprisingly, it came in a box.

Box o' milk

Stack o' bag o' milk. :)

O and as a side note, they eat frogs here, obviously. You actually can go pick out your own delicious looking frog from a aquarium before they cook it for you. Gotta say that the live frog smell while eating is ultra appetizing. Yum :x

I like that fat one on the left. "shudder"

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! :)

Subway- eat fresh

Our lovely town, ZZ, of 8 million people does not have a subway. However, Xi'an which is a huge tourist destination does! Having heard that the food near the warriors was bad, we decided to pick up some sandwiches to go. Walking up to the Subway, I wanted to capture this joyous moment on film so I proceeded to ask three separate people to take a picture of us. All three of these people completely ignored us and continued walking. In fact, none of them even remotely slowed down to acknowledge us. Now I know what it feels like to be invisible.

But we didn't let that ruin our fun. Brandon happily took our photo but he is dearly missed from the documentation of the awesomeness that is Subway.

Shuyuan Hostel- Best I-miss-the-US-so-I-need-a-taste-of-Home hostel

To think, a hostel with better mattresses than we have at home. Now that is a rarity.

This is getting back into the groove of being a backpacker. I kinda missed these bunks! They were ultra comfy. The hostel also had a pizza oven! I haven't had pizza that I could call delicious since I left Chicago until I found this place. Needless to say, it was a good weekend for my stomach and taste buds. They also had silly straws and free coffee. The lounge was cozy with different flags. I found North Dakota and three Lithuania flags! Downstairs was a Buddha bar with live music. I call this pretty sweet!

Lesson learned: it is possible to find home away from home. You just have to look.

Ode to Peanut Butter

I was sitting on my five hours high speed train listening to some Elton John, when a lovely thought floated into my head: peanut butter.  I don’t know where it came from or who (what country) can take credit for inventing it, but I know that the US has it and that we’re not particularly secretive about it. So as I sat on my train that was flying at about 197km/hr, I came to wonder how such a large portion of the world, including China, has not yet discovered its amazingness. If you think about it, our dear good old peanutbutter is good on veggies and fruits; it’s good on bread and on fingers (don’t deny it, you’ve done it); it’s good off a spoon; it’s good for breakfast and lunch (who didn’t eat a pb&j sandwich 4/5 days a week in junior high?) and of course dinner: who doesn’t spoil themselves with a peanut butter brownie sundae or peanut butter m&ms every once in a while?

Now I’m not calling the US superior to any country out there, but seriously?! How is everyone else on the planet so not into peanut butter? I honestly don’t think I’ll ever grasp that concept.

Anyways, for all of you in the US: enjoy your peanut butter lest it be taken away from you some day. And as for us in the land of no peanut butter, aka China; I hope we have friends who love us enough to perhaps share a bit via snail mail :D

Note: as of writing this post, I have since discovered peanut butter at Walmart! Talk about a twofer!

Prepare for some ramblings

We've been in China for about 4 days now and it's just been go go go the whole time. After arriving in Zhengzhou (to be referred to as ZZ from now on) late night and getting made fun of for having so much luggage, we were showed to our new home for the next year. It is an apartment complex across the street from our school. Between jet lag, tireness, shock of a new place, and a bunch of other things working against me, the apartment wasn't exactly what I was expecting. First impression was not good, but I think that we will make it work and make it much homier later. It just needs a few basics. I will go into more detail and provide pics about the apartment later.

The next day we had three Chinese ladies drives us around town kind of unsuccessfully. Long story short, I think we drove around for a total of three hours and got one thing accomplished: going to the police station to register. Since that was something that had to be done within 24 hours of arrival, I guess it's a good thing we got that done at least. We'll have tons more administrative things to do when we get back.

In the am on the 4th we took the high speed 5 hour train to Beijing. It was actually a very good experience. We had leg room galor and it was a relatively painless ride. Next time we'll know to bring food. Also, the train is on time to the T. I think we even left a minute early. I know I'll be taking that train again many times in the future so I'm glad is a painless experience.

After getting off of the train we were finally in Beijing! I honestly cannot explain to you the sheer size of the buildings around you. If you think you've ever felt small, well try imagining feeling even smaller than that. The train station itself was massive. Even using the word massive doesn't seem to do it justice. I was simply HUGE!

Since my mom was already in Bejing, we went straight to the tea shop with all of our stuff. We show up in the middle of a puppet show and mid lunch. It was like hit the ground running here in Beijing. My traveling group for the next few days are going to be : Me (behind the camera), Brandon, Jim, Mom (Julie), JinLan, and Mr. Chen. Mr. Chen has been the best host ever! He orders every meal for us and hires cars for us and has planned our entire time in Beijing to the T!

So far I have eaten: dumplings, peking pork wrapped in a sort of pancake, peking duck, all sorts of duck parts (heart, liver, feet, soup), jelly fish salad and much more. I passed on the duck brain. It's all relatively good, but doesn't always hit the spot. At least I won't go hungry.

duck heart

The closest plate is duck liver, then the one to the left is a jelly fish salad, then the far back one is duck feet. The tall green one is a spinach christmass tree.

Right after lunch, we went to the Temple of Heaven. For after dinner drinks we went to this lake (Back Sea -  the emperor apparently named all bodies of water a sea) that was surrounded by bars. It was a total tourist trap like in Mexico where bars try to lure you in. But it was really pretty since there were boats on the lake with lit up lanterns. And since all the bars were covered in neon lights and stuff, it was very colorful and very pleasing to the eyes.

Today was the Great wall, and tomorrow we go shopping in the am and off to Shanghai we go! O yea we also saw the Bird's nest from the 2008 Olympics!

I have so much more to say, but I only have two hours to nap and shower before the Bejing Opera tonight, that my post is quick, snappy and lacking details. But we're alive and having fun!

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