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Published: September 2nd 2013
Our Room
So cozy!Weather:
• Humid
• Generally hot
• One rainy day so far (we did not have an umbrella yet…)
• Blue skies!
What we’ve eaten:
• Lots of noodles
• Baozi – steamed bread filled with meat and other things
• Dumplings
• Duck
• Eggplant
The most important lesson learned this week:
• Never take the small things for granted.
What a week! Xi’an is an incredible city. The seams are bursting with culture (and people, of course)! We are so blessed to live in such a great city. Our campus is neighbors with the city wall which houses beautiful parks, restaurants, shopping centers and Walmart! (Or “Warmar” as we’ve heard it called.) Every night we walk to the wall parks and watch people. Families gather to dance, play sports, exercise on outdoor contraptions – no need for a 24 Hour Fitness here. Our favorite thing to watch is called Taiji rou yi qiu. Old ladies gather at 7:00 every night to participate in this fun activity. They carry a racquet with a ball placed on the racquet. Then they proceed to dance taichi moves without letting the ball fall to the ground. It is mesmerizing!
Taiji rou yi qiu!
Our favorite old Chinese ladies dancing taiji rou yiqiu. Pink and black is really 'in' here. They are so full of grace and poise. There is one really old man who participates, as well, but he does his own thing to the side of them. Picture it: Ten old Chinese women dressed in pink and black jumpsuits with matching shoes carrying small racquets dancing in unison to blaring Chinese music while an ancient man with a long white beard dressed in a wife beater and black flowing pants and small shoes perfectly executes spinning moves and focused taiji steps without dropping the ball off of his racquet. It’s amazing! We plan on buying these special racquets and learning the dances. China(Zumba + taiji) = taiji rou yi qiu!
Right now we are living in a kind of hotel/dorm room. It is where they put all the international students. There are two twin beds that we have pushed together to create one big bed! As long as we aren’t sleeping on the crack in the middle it is fine! The beds are extremely hard, as all Chinese beds are, but these are exceptionally firm. I can feel every spring. Earlier this morning, I scraped my elbow on one of the springs! That shouldn’t happen
Window
The view of the city we have from our room. when you are lying in bed… alas. Oh, and we have a western toilet! That is a relief! No squatting for us! 😊 We love having our own place, no matter how small. It is nice to have a place in this crazy bustling city that we call our own. We are very blessed.
One of the things we have learned never to take for granted is a small thing called wifi. We thought it should just be part of a college campus to have wifi for students to access. Not here! So we went and bought an Ethernet cord to use in our room. We went to a little place where a lady was selling tons of housewares and other random things. She hesitantly sold us an Ethernet cord, so I knew there was something wrong with it. When we plugged it in nothing happened. Turns out, we have to pay monthly to use the internet that we use a cord to connect to! So we went and paid and nothing happened. They made some calls for us and we waited. And waited. Finally a guy came and tried it and learned something was wrong with
Twin beds...
1 + 1 = 1 big bed! our cord. Surprise. He took us to a little shop on campus and the man there took it apart and fixed the cord for 1 kuai (like 20¢). He was also very kind. We came back and tried it again. Now there was something wrong with the outlet. After about 30 minutes, the guy fixed the outlet. The cord worked on his computer, but not on Jarek’s. He spent another hour trying to fix Jarek’s computer, but Jarek did not know the password to make changes to the settings! We made little progress that day, but at least we got the cord and outlet fixed! The next day we also spent waiting. And waiting. And waiting. A guy who said he was going to come help us went and had a rest instead. Haha. It just cracked me up. Jarek walked into the building with him and told him where we lived, but the guy went to a different floor and never came to help us. We waited for about an hour and a half until we were too hungry then we left a note and got some lunch. We came back and called the guy from the day before
Our Bathroom
Ignoring the mold and grime (which came with the room), I want you to notice two things: The western toilet next to the counter (you can see the top of it)! The shower that actually has a curtain, and a tub for that matter. (Jarek remembered the password!) so he came over to try again. He was so kind and so helpful. After all day of waiting, he got the internet to work! Huzzah! Something that we thought should be so simple took three days to figure out. Now we know.
Another thing we learned not to take for granted is a dreaded physical. And privacy. And doors. Nobody told us when we were in the USA that we needed a special physical to get our resident visas here. Communication is difficult, as can be expected. So Friday morning we went down to the international health center, I can’t explain how happy I was that it was international! That was before I got the work done, of course. There were five steps that needed to be completed and signed in order for us to get through the physical.
Step One: Blood test. Why? I have no idea. But they took our blood right away in the middle of everything. No doors or separate rooms. I hope we didn’t get a blood disease from the lack of sanitization! Normally, nurses wipe your arm with alcohol for a good 30 seconds before
The bridge at night
This is where we take our walks every night. It's very nice! piercing with the needle. Here, they slapped on some yellow goo and called it clean….! Then they put the needle in. When taking blood, it is customary to tape the needle down so it does not move around. Customary. Ha, what a word. That did not happen. Hello, Loose Needle! Yeah. It hurt.
Step Two: X-Ray. An X-ray of what? I have no idea. Maybe my brain. Or my back. Or shoulders? I will never know. She put me up against the wall of this huge grey machine, told me to put my hands on my hips and hold my breath. “Don’t move!” She said as she exited the room. Don’t move? Don’t breathe? Wait! Come back! When can I breath?! Isn’t there supposed to be protection over crucial areas for this kind of thing? “Okay, done.” She said through a microphone. I have no idea what happened.
Step Three: Ultrasound. I thought the first time I got an ultrasound would be for something exciting like oh, maybe… pregnancy. Nope. It was to see my insides. Maybe if I put on that form that I already had a colonoscopy I would have been able to skip out on
The bridge in the day
This is where we take our walks during the day, too! the unsanitized ultrasound. Not likely. I expect to get another ultrasound at the end of this trip so they can tell me how messed up my stomach became from this food. I demand a before and after picture!
Step Four: I don’t even know. As we entered a new room, we were told the girls and boys had to be separated. I said to myself, “Self, immediately jump to the worst case scenario.” Eesh. Bad bad bad. I did not go to the girl side immediately as there was a little line for that area. I peeked over the boy side to see Jarek lying on a bed with cords stuck to his chest. Whew! It’s just from the belt up. I more confidently proceeded to the girl side. Did I ever mention there are no personal bubbles in China? Or privacy. Did I mention the lack of privacy? I went to the girl side to see a topless Chinese girl lying on the blue examination table. Oh! Sorry! There was no door and… I…uh…it was just a wall…and… “Please, sit!” The nurse insisted interrupting my apologetic thoughts. I much less confidently sat on the stool in the corner
The Park
My favorite trees. of the room with a perfect view of everything that was going on in the room. The girl got dressed which meant it was my turn! Yay. Luckily there was nobody behind me! But it’s not the first time a Chinese person has seen me in the buff in one way or another. Did I mention there is no privacy here? What a way to check a heart beat! At least I think that’s what they were doing…
Step Five: Weight and eyesight. Don’t worry, nothing too crazy here. Just that I really dislike eye tests. Bad eyesight combined with bifocal contacts makes for tricky results. My reading eye, my left eye, could not see anything. She just kept making the numbers bigger and bigger. She liked my right eye much better. And in terms of weight, Jarek and I have both lost at least five pounds since being here. It’s hard to say though because their scale said I lost 12 pounds and I know that can’t be right! I guess if you are concerned with numbers, come to China and weigh yourself here…you’ll feel a lot better.
Aaaand we were done! That took a huge load
From the Bridge
This is the mote around the city wall - taken from atop the bridge seen in the other pictures. off! I was actually really happy with how the check up went… but mostly just because I got to keep my pants on.
On a completely different note, we got to have lunch with the Deputy Director-General of the Foreign Affairs Office of Xi’an. Also in attendance were members of the Protocol Division and the dean of the international department of Northwest University. I was so nervous! My Chinese is not good right now so I was really worried I would just embarrass myself, but they were all so kind. Three of them, including the deputy director, attended Brigham Young University-Hawaii at some point so they already knew that we don’t smoke or drink coffee, tea, or alcohol. In a country where it is polite to accept a drink or a smoke, I can’t express how great it is to meet people who already know why we don’t accept that offer. They took us to the best restaurant in Xi’an, so they said, and it definitely lived up to those standards! We haven’t eaten that well since being here, and I don’t know when we will ever eat that well again! Hopefully one more time before we
go 😊 The director did not know we are married, and once he found out he was so surprised! Everyone here thinks we look the same… ha! The same way we think they all look the same. But people often tell us we look like brother and little sister. I think that is what the director thought. He is so kind so once he found out, he said is going to get us a better room with a kitchen and more space. I sure hope that happens! (Mostly just for a new bed and a kitchen.) They will keep us updated. All of them were so nice and helpful; they want to make sure our time here is wonderful and that we learn a lot. The dean said that they have had up to 800 international students on this campus at one time, but this year there are only 200; she hopes we will have plenty of one-on-one time with our teachers. That will be great to have small classes like we are used to at BYUH, but it is so weird being a minority! We have been here for five days and haven’t seen a single white person outside
China Town?
You mean, this isn't it? of the doctor’s office! Most of the international students here are Asian – Japanese, Korean, and many from the Middle East. Oh wait, I take it back. We did see one white girl, Jarek guesses Argentinian, who was in the international office complaining about something really dramatically. But other than that, nobody. It will take a lot of getting used to and hopefully we don’t return to the US really stuck up… “Why isn’t everyone staring at my blonde hair and big eyes? Hello?! Don’t you want to take pictures with us??” *said in a really squeaky girly voice* Haha, no that won’t happen, no worries there!
What I do know is that we are going to learn a TON. We either choose to be hermits because nobody out there is like us or we go out and meet people and learn and learn and learn. I think our personality types fit the latter. A funny thing we recently learned has to do with the food. Actually, because we don’t have a kitchen and have to eat out for every meal, most of what we have learned is about food. For instance, the other day we were
Another funny sign
Watch out... you might get caught in a "chothes sandwich!" out at a noodle restaurant. The menu showed the dish, then what we thought was the price for a small size and a large size. The waitress asked us if we wanted big or small. I ordered small and Jarek ordered big. The meal began when they brought out a little bowl of this tomato-ey egg soup. We had no idea what to do with it. We kind of pretended to eat it… but it was soup and all we had were chopsticks. We probably looked like such fools! Of course, because we are white, everyone stares at us. Unless we are in our room, there is someone looking at us at ALL times. So there we were half eating this soup stuff. The girl then brought out this massive bowl of…wait for it…ONE LONG NOODLE. It was really just one really really really long noodle! It might have been easy to eat if it weren’t three inches wide. Then she brought out another bowl, much smaller than the bowl with one noodle in it. The noodles were the same width across, but they were small chunks. So we think, we still aren’t completely sure, the size on the menu was the size of the noodle, not the bowl! Oh, and that tomato stuff? Finally someone came and told us you are supposed to put the long noodle in the tiny bowl and eat it that way. What a trick that was. Boy, was it delicious, though! Lesson learned: sometimes the things that are the most difficult to eat are the most delicious! Yum!
Everything here is an adventure. From eating to crossing the street to getting a physical. An adventure we are so happy to be a part of! Maybe next time we write we will have a new place with a new way of accessing the internet…who knows what tomorrow will bring! Remember all you have and don’t take it for granted. Internet is not a right. A cell phone can be taken away. Clothes on our backs are a blessing. Outside our little bubble there are people with nothing who are lucky to get a meal and a box to sit on. The least we can do is learn they exist and use what we are given to serve them.
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Becky and Brenton
non-member comment
We love reading your blog. I(Brenton) read it to my sweet wife on Sunday mornings. It is so fun reading about your adventures. We are four weeks away from having your youngest cousin. We will send pics asap.