#12 Home Sweet Home. ish.

I went for a retail-therapy shopping experience with Susan this aft.  I just received $100 dollars of organic foods from Fields in Shanghai and I needed/wanted a container for my brown rice (found it!). Susan is quite a nest builder as this IS her home and so she is fun to shop with as she always sees things that are great for this or that, while I try to keep everything down to a minimum.  However, her "pitches" are sometimes irresistible - as is her savvy regarding life in China (she's on her 4th year).  "The Nest" is shaping up to be nice-ish to come "home" to - someone taught me how to work the heater so it is warm now (the weather has changed radically).  Here are a few snaps of what I am calling home these days:

 Bedroom (with a comfortable double bed) and a bathroom with shower and tiny washing machine are upstairs.  There is a decent-sized wardrobe and a tiny balcony (for air-drying laundry).

 

 

View from the stairs of my living room  :>)    I unpicked a duvet cover to make a cover for my (disgusting) sofa, and will make covers for those 2 big pillows when I get to my sewing machine in Germany at Christmas. I am loving finally having a reading lamp - and I have that same lamp in Canada and in Germany, which is somewhat comforting.

Here is a delicacy I saw on sale today: corn milk.
And some words and phrases from a recent menu:
- a list of starch-y type side dishes to accompany your meal, titled:  characteristics of starch
- a list of fruit juice items that are available, titled:  friend-is-pressing-the-juice-series

 

I'll end with a shot of one of my classes.  They are so shy - the camera stunned them into serious mode.  Really, really great kids, though, and the teaching is fun and interesting and rewarding.  I have 3 classes of 18 for English- easy peasy, and great, reliable technology (they are required to have their own laptop/tablet)  - I am in heaven, teaching-wise.

Cheers for now - KAREN

I zip over to a fancy hotel for a breakfast buffet every Sat and Sun (because it is China, there is a lot of lunch/dinner food choices, too).  Lots of good food and all for only 28 yuan ($4.75).  Bacon and eggs, noodles, fruit, chicken skewers...Chinese dishes, a few of which  I eat, and breakfast intestinals, if you desire (yes, they would be sausages).
I did my hard walk with Jan before breakfast, and will do again tomorrow.  She recently purchased a pedometer to ensure she does 10,000 steps a day and when we returned to the "resort' aka tenement housing) we had done 10,022.  Now that is exact! We did my first walk a couple of weeks ago and there were lots of cats and dogs, but today there were no dogs - are they now being served up to the students?

                                      We live in the Yangze River delta, province of Jiangsu.


The loud horking up and spitting is EXTREMELY off-putting and it happens constantly.  The Chinese believe that this is a way to rid their bodies of germs.... Here is what the stairwell often looks like in my "resort" hotel.  Nice, eh?

                     I'll end on a positive note, with some wild flowers....Marigolds, zinnias, etc.

                                                                           KAREN





 

More Buddha, IKEA...and Mah Jong

 

Either some naughty person secretly snapped this pic, or it is an officially sanctioned one from the temple.  On an earlier post I put my picture of a reclining Buddha that is in the temple in Shanghai that I visited.  A-OK to take that picture, but this is the protected Buddha, with the quiet music, the incense in a special (admission fee) room. 

This picture does not quite capture the ethereal sweetness of the face. I guess the dim light and the soft music really added to the whole effect...

 

The pilgrimage to IKEA was fine.  It was so comforting to enter, feeling like I was home because of the familiarity of the layout.  That store could have been anywhere in the world, once you are inside!  I just had the usual awkwardness of schlepping stuff home on public transit (and I guess the Shanghai subway at rush hour is nothing to be sneezed at).  I got the reading lamp I desperately needed (you know, the 2 light one - one bowl pointing upwards and a small arm bulb that can be moved around downwards).  The cheapest of the IKEA standing lamps (there wasn't a one in the 2 towns near the school).  I now have that same lamp in 3 countries in the world: China, Canada and Germany.  Thanks, good old IKEA.

 

Off to do a big hard walk around the area of the school, with a real no-nonsense walker, Jan.  She had an initial night of Mah Jong last week, and those of you who know me will not be surprised that even though I was really looking forward to learning the game, and socializing with a couple of women colleagues, I forgot about it and missed it. Then I had to give the lame excuse of  "a form of dyslexia, actually dyscalulia, regarding time....blah blah blah"  Will they forgive me?  Will I ever learn to play Mah Jong?   

 Karen

More food, sanitary issues, IKEA

I carry napkins, tissues and toilet paper all the time. Half of the toilets I have encountered are the squat-holes, including the student toilets at school.  The school floors are washed daily: with a mop that has been rinsed in the filthy canal water that wends its way around the grounds.  If I accidentally put a piece of cutlery down on a table or counter my friend Susan, a vet, yanks it out of my hand and says, "Never touch that again!" 

Yesterday I went to the school cafeteria (one of several eating outlets) and had little rib things and rice for under $1 and then for dinner went with some people to a Japanese restaurant - all you can eat and drink for  the shocking price of  $25. (The restaurant food was beautiful, as you can see.)

Below are Jeremy and Benson, both from Vancouver, eating at a Japanese café where the food rolls by on a conveyor belt - to pay, the waitress just adds up your stack of little pink dishes. See the small black faucets -  tea on demand!

I have avoided eating any seafood, as the water contamination is outrageous, but as a colleague said - nothing is safe.  Even the veggies have been irrigated with the same water. There is an upmarket (expensive) delivery service from Shanghai that trades in organic foods; hat is where I will be able to get my whole wheat bread.  I am still hunting for brown rice.  Oh, it seems I am on about food again...

Tomorrow is Friday and I will be taking the 1pm student school bus in to Shanghai (multiple actually, as we have 1000 students who will be heading home) and then I'll take the Metro to IKEA to get a much needed stand-up lamp.  It is supposedly the busiest IKEA in the world. I will regular-bus it back "home" in the evening.

My initial IKEA trip in Germany is etched indelibly on my memory.  I picked up a rolled-up twin mattress that, because it was rolled up, I thought would be manageable, but the weight and awkwardness of the thing!  I schlepped  it back in the absolute pitch dark and the rain through an unlit graveyard (crying with the frustration/difficulty/misery of it all) only to reach the (far-off) bus stop to find I had missed the last bus.  So not fun.  We will see if tomorrow's China IKEA adventure can match the German IKEA one for grueling-ness (new word).  I shall gird my loins.

KAREN

                                                   Cute old trucks, and not in a museum.
 

Post #7 FOOD

The first of what I think might become quite a collection of Chinglish signs...

            Food is always very important to get right and a big issue for me as I carve out a life here. 
                 
                       One is warned off the street food (or what is called in Mexico "hole in the walls"). 

                Here is a picture of a kitchen in the back alley of an inside medium quality restaurant:

 

 

The Chinese are funny:  so much of their food is "plastic food" heavily processed and preserved crap, but they also love the polar opposite.  They adore fresh seafood (often it is brought live to your table if you have a little hotpot to cook it in).  Here is the seafood corner of quite an upmarket restaurant where you literally choose your meal:

 

Benson and I had a fun meal in Shanghai at a hotpot restaurant.  Our bowls included an egg and some really interesting veg (see also the fat-streaked meat in front):

 

We have a feral dog and cat population in several of the abandoned buildings on the school site.

Dog is on the menu at one of the student restaurants.

 

I am signing off with some more street food:

                                                              Cheers for now, Karen

 

 

 

 

Post # 6

I find this blogging business quite fun.  I had a huge bubble tea today and of course the caffeine in the tea is now keeping me up.  The girls at my favorite bubble tea place are sweet.  The get really excited when the see me because they know which is my flavour and "no sugar" and they learn a new English word a visit from me.  I have to laugh about the no sugar bit though - no, there is no granulated sugar in it, but glucose and fructose syrups up the yingyang....sigh....I try.  Delish tho - grapefruit (and of course the natural sugars alone would be, well, for get it)

There are 2 towns near the school - one is the building-frenzy-that-is-China Luxu and the other is Shenta, quite a rustic village, which I must prefer. I'm attaching a snap of the main shopping area.  At some point  I will show you the pools of live fish and other sea creatures that are for sale all along the road.

And yes, you do drive through that, it is a through street. 

Just honk your horn a lot!!

"That's all for now,"  she wrote. 

Karen

Post #6 Fish and Rain

I absolutely adored these guys when I saw them at a temple in Shanghai.  I took about 100 pictures of them, and finally had to be pulled away by my companions.

I know these picture gives you no perspective to get how big they are, but they are BIG. The biggest ones (not shown) are about 50 years old and the size of my cat Talli.

 

So, the other day there was a typhoon.  Now, 70 km inland, we just got a little tickle, but let me tell you the rains and winds were biblical in proportions.  I did not dare ride my scooter the laughably short distance to school as I knew I would be blown away. When I arrived in school I took off my shoes and socks and pants to dry them - much to the mock horror of Paul the amusing Englishman.  I defied him to tell me what the difference between bathing suit bottoms and underwear is and blithely left them hanging off the air conditioner/heater.  I have since taken a spare pair of pants (not the English meaning: 'underwear' but rather 'trousers') and shoved them in a desk drawer for the next typhoon. 

Here is the gang again (what else am I going to do with 100 pics of gaping-mouthed koi?)  And one more for perspective.  K