Trip To China: The Full Account- Part 3

        Well it isn’t quite 221B Baker Street, in fact it is better. It is home. To be honest, we still don’t have our address memorized and I would need someone to translate the lease agreement if I was going to tell you where it is. The truth about our apartment, however, is that it is quite an amazing first place of our own. It has not come into our hands without some bugs (surprisingly not literal bugs, but figurative ones… though I think I have seen a fly or two, and maybe a few arachnids). When we went house hunting, we went to a few agencies looking at apartments. Some were ok, and others were not so ok. But that first day we heard about an apartment that we would have to come back the next day to see. It was a first floor apartment with four bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, and sunroom. It also had a small square fenced in area with room around it to plant a small garden. This my dear friends, this is what we now call home. 

It was an unfurnished apartment. Aside from the couple of bed frames which had questionably smelling material on the headboards, there was not a piece of furniture to be found. Brother Dom, and those here were very kind, however, and donated enough furniture for us not just to get started but to be comfortable living in our new apartment. As I wrote in the last blog, getting the furniture here was not without difficulty. We hired a moving truck, which is not to be compared with renting a U-haul. No, instead two small men showed up with an intent to bang, dent, and scrape every piece of furniture we desired to move. This, of course, is an over exaggeration. But it was bad enough that I had to ride in the back of the moving truck for one of the trips to protect the precious refrigerator doors, and the round glass table top. The distance from the school to our apartment may be a little over a mile, but really a great distance for us to enjoy our scooter!

The Workers realize the fridge won't fit out the gate.

Once we had signed the lease for the house, we realized a couple of things. One was that there was not a spicket in the wash room to hook up a washing machine (which was generously donated). Instead there was a spot in the wall that may or may not have contained a water pipe that may or may not have been connected to water. Well sometimes you just overlook that kind of… (cue power going out in the entire apartment) Hmm… We all looked around at each other with a puzzled sort of expression. Had we turned on too many lights? Was this apartment built to have only two lights on at a time? Was there a little gremlin in our breaker box that would continue to flip the switch off? Turns out there was just a short in one of the switches and when it was turned on it kept us safe by shutting the power off. (Which I think we are all grateful for.) These problems were fixed pretty quickly by the land lord’s friend, and a worker he brought with him. 

The next adventure we had was with the internet. When we went to China Telecom, we got one phone and one internet plan. This was great except there was no one at our house setting up the internet. Freya, the secretary for the school, is a native mandarin speaker from northeast China. She has been so helpful in translating things for us, and speaking to people about what is going on. This may be the hardest part of being in China is not being able to contact anyone. The first time the worker came, he spent a lot of time in the box on the wall, then outside, then back inside, then gone for a few minutes. Eventually he let us know that he would have to come back another day because he didn’t have what he needed for the job (p.s. this is pretty typical for workers like this here, though not a blanket sweep trait). 

When he did return, he had the wire that he needed and was raring to go! I soon found he was too raring, and not enough thinking. I had been letting him do his thing when I realized that he was throwing the wire through our window down from the second story stair case. This was not going to work. I showed him how this affected the ability of our window to close. He replied, “Oh…” he then got out a screw driver to see if he could work his way around our window frame. Now, there is not centralized heating so if he could have done this it would not have been the end of the world. The problem that I was having was that the room that the window was in was not the room that the internet was going to be in. I asked him in handmotionenglish how he was going to get the wire to the modem. He replied with a smile, shrug, and head wag in an “I don’t know, and I don’t know how to say I don’t know in english.” type way. So I walked him into the living room, opened the box, and showed him a pvc pipe that led up into the wall. He said, “No… no…” So I said, “I come up with you.” Now, I can’t tell you why I change the grammar in my sentences when I try to speak english to non-english speakers. Perhaps it just comes naturally? But I did find myself speaking in broken english with my new internet friend as we got to the second floor. The box up there had many wires, and many pvc pipes. I told him, “One of these goes to apartment.” He put his hands on his head and did that inhaling hiss that means, “Yes, but I don’t want to pick the wrong one and end up messing up someone else’s wires.” So I replied, “I go down and wiggle wire.” (Hand motions for wiggling wire.) “Oh, ya ya ya.” was the reply I received. So after wiggling the wire, I then went back up and helped him to push the wire down by unfolding it as we pushed it down. Eventually the internet was hooked up and the worker had given me his number for if I had anymore problems that he could help me with. He really was a nice guy, and I may ask for his help in the future even just to get to know him more. 

When we got the router for wi-fi, everything was in Mandarin. I tried to set it up, but could not figure it out. It so happens, however, that a man here that that is near to my age was one whom I slept across the hall from in the dorms at college. We didn’t really have any other connection, and he is a native to China. He and his wife have been a huge help to Jewel and I. He came over and set up my wi-fi in a jiffy, and gave us a program that we can use to learn mandarin. They also bought an oven for us, which we just recently have opened and started to use. (Ovens are not as common here as most things are made in a wok or other pans.)

In conclusion, our apartment is a HUGE blessing. It is only about 400 US dollars a month for our beautiful new home. Here are some random pictures, and Jewel will also soon be posting apartment pictures on her facebook (she’s been waiting a while for me to write a blog about the apartment so she can. Shalom!

Trip To China - The Full Account: The Adventure Continues

You try to take it all in but it’s like trying to drink in the ocean. (Not because it’s salty, but because of the amount of things to ingest.) The clouds rising halfway up the mountains that surround our city shine yellow as the sun sets on a busy day. The trees that live in abundance and line every street sway in the breeze as a small shower of rain wets their deep green leaves. A small kitten purrs as it cuddles up in my lap to rest after it’s weary day of toil. We’re in China, and we’re loving it. 

When we arrived in China, we were met by brother Ian, and brother Dom. We dropped our stuff off at the school, and took some of our possessions to the Crump’s apartment where we would stay the next couple of days. Thinking back now it’s a bit blurry, but, because Jewel and I thought to write things down as they happened, I can recall them. JET LAG, not the most fun thing. It was not until today (the day that I am writing this… which may not be the day I post this… so you’ll have to try to guess the day…) that I really felt like I was able to understand where we were driving in the vehicle. The rest was like that feeling when someone wakes you up from a short nap, and you hardly have the mental capacity to respond. Anyway, Ian and Candace have a very nice apartment, and we greatly enjoyed being able to stay there. Their little dog Jackie met us upon our arrival, and made us feel very much a part of the family. Candace was still in the states, and it was nice of Ian to host us there! THERE WAS COFFEE! For some of you this might not would have been such a big deal, but if you know Jewel and I you can be sure we greatly appreciated this necessity of human life. The only thing that gave us any trouble was the squatty, but we don’t need to dwell on that.

When Candace did return, we were allowed to stay with Brother Dom. His wife had to make a trip back to the states because of her father’s health. We are still hoping that things will turn for the better for their family. Brother Dom is a great man, and we have enjoyed getting to meet him, and are looking forward to a continuing relationship! It was not many weeks previous that they had some trouble with flooding. One of the drains on a balcony got backed up during a large storm, and water got into the second story of their beautiful villa home. They have been fighting getting the water out of the wood and walls since. They also have a two person scooter. This may be the death of Jewel and I, not because we almost hit a light pole our first time on the scooter together, but because the way people drive here in China, we will be their last consideration until we are made a permanent part of the pavement. Just kidding… mostly (duhn duhn duhhhhhhhhhhh)

Since we have arrived, we have experienced many different kinds of food. The local people are the Naxi (or Nashi), and I would describe their food as being so-so. I do like rice, and some of the meat and vegetables were good, but not the best we have had. At a little guest house by Tiger Leaping Gorge* (*see next paragraph for more details) we ate some Tibetan style food. The “garlic bread” was rather delicious and the rest of the food was quite great. I’m sorry that I am not being very descriptive, but you have to remember that we are trying to recall what happened in a dream state of mind, and it gets rather mixed up after a while. There IS a restaurant called the MAYA that we have eaten at twice now. It is run by an Indian couple whose daughter I will be teaching this next year. The food there is very good. They have great curry, mango juice, mango smoothies, the “best burger in town (and possibly China)” and a cool little salad with sliced carrot, diced peppers, uncooked ramen noodles, sesame oil, and love. (It tastes a lot like the asian salad that my wife makes… though I know only like Matt and Amanda have had that.) There is also one other restaurant owned and operated by an American who also runs an English teaching school. Their food (Pizza, Fried Rice, Fries, awesome coffee to name a few) is very delicious, and they also are the home to Snoop Lion, my new little kitten friend. We have been twice to his restaurant as well and both times the little guy has found his way to my lap to play together. The majority of the time we have had a lot of different Chinese foods, and have not disliked too much of it. Perhaps the bitter vegetable, and the chicken feet were the only things we were not so fond of. The bitter vegetable (actual name) is just that, and the chicken feet (at least the way it was prepared this time) looked too much like eating the last two fingers of a human hand for me to enjoy. 

*Tiger Leaping Gorge is a beautiful, and awesome place. Ian took us here in our first couple of days. The drive out there was absolutely beautiful. You drive along the Yangtze (Yellow) river for a while past villages, and Chinese homes. The actual driving however is not so hot. Dotted lines are on basically every road. Also, the Chinese sometimes have serious depth perception problems when it comes to oncoming traffic. Just about every minute you are cringing as a small car zips back into it’s lane within inches of a head on collision with a cement truck. At the actual gorge is a beautiful section where the water flows and tumbles with great power. It is rumored that a hunter was chasing a tiger, and the tiger (out of fear, and with the help of it’s magical powers) jumped the gorge. The hunter gave up the hunt out of respect for this magical tiger. Ian and I have surmised that a bad hunter told this story to his wife one day after another unsuccessful day out. The guest house was beautiful to say the least, and Jewel and I hope to stay there for a couple of days some time. It is rainy season here, but the weather has been absolutely gorgeous most of the time. 

Canvas above me, glass table top in one hand, refrigerator door in another. I was bouncing on my knees down the school’s road in the back of a Chinese moving truck. These guys are no joke! They get your stuff from A to B, but would just about roll your stuff there if it was the easiest was to do it. So I ((was)) volunteered to ride in the back of the truck and hold onto the things. See, we were on our way to Jewel and my new apartment, but all that information will have to wait for the next blog!

Trip To China - The Full Account: An Epic Adventure

Today was the day. The sky was a light shade of gray as the rain suggested that it may bring a sobering atmosphere to an already intense circumstance. We pulled up to the airport and started pulling our suitcases from red lightning. (This is the name of what has been my vehicle for the last six years of my life. The red Jeep Cherokee Classic has been through a lot, and held many friends and acquaintances. It will be missed.) One, two, three, four, five, six …. Two carry-ons, and two laptop bags. It worked out well that the majority of my family was able to make it out for the send off or we may still be sitting in the parking lot juggling those bags. We wheeled them all in, got our temporary boarding passes, and came to the front counter. After the first three bags were put on the scale, the assistant went ahead and let a reality check fly. “You know, this is going to be nine hundred and sixty-five dollars for these alone.” Doh! When Jewel and I had checked online I had mistaken the overweight size for the standard size, and so had packed them mostly between 50-71 pounds (save for one that weighed close to 100!) 

So we reach the first moment of decision. Do we pay probably close to three thousand dollars to get our bags sent from Norfolk? We decided not to. My father and I made an organized bee-line for the vehicle and drove to the closest K-mart to acquire two more suitcases. In the mean time, Jewel and the others were busy unpacking all of the suitcases, evening them out to be fifty pounds or below, and leaving the remainder in a pile to be packed into the new suitcases. Were we not sure that the Lord had called us to go, this alone would have been a difficult obstacle to overcome. But truly, “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee, because he trusteth in thee.” We packed the rest of our bags and got back in line. When we got to the front register again, our initial helper had moved on and a new man was to help us to get on the plane. We weighed the bags and received our new price that was a considerable amount less than the amount for just the first three weighed bags. Then we received some more news. “Now, you realize that because you have a lay-over of seventeen hours, you are going to have to pick up your bags in the JFK airport?” Doh Again! 

You may be wondering why we brought so much baggage. The answer to that question is somewhat simple while also a bit complex, depending on how you look at it. So we will try to look at it from the simple kind-of-way. I received counsel that if we moved somewhere, like to China, I was to make sure that my wife was going to be able to live comfortably. So we both went through our stuff, and filtered it until we felt that to get rid of anything else would be to lose the ability to feel at home in our new country. The only things we left behind that would not fit into the suitcases after we had repacked them were some books that will have to wait to be read. 

The plane was not uncomfortable. Jewel and I were on a side with only two seats and so we were able to sit next to each other and talk about what we might do when we got to JFK. We had already said that because it would be difficult to get all of our luggage organized and moving with just the two of us that we may not stay at the hotel we had booked, but instead just stay in the airport for the full seventeen hours until we could check our baggage into the new airplane. Upon our arrival in New-York, however, we found that with two rented carts we could get our luggage out the door to where yellow-taxi could call us a van to fit it all in.

Now, you must take a second to picture this with me. Jewel and I are now pushing a cart each piled up with four medium/large suitcases while wheeling our carry-ons, carrying our backpacks, and lugging my guitar along with me. The looks we got, and comments given were often quite humorous. The scenery would change when we got to Guangzhou the next day, but only because we would be going through an airport at double time. (This story is for later though)

So, our illustrious taxi driver finally arrived at the Garden Inn Suites in Jamaica, New-York. This was somewhat of a difficult task because he had trouble saying the word “Baisley”, the street name that the hotel was on. We unloaded our stuff onto a luggage cart (these I have gained a great deal of respect and appreciation for.) and went inside to check in. This process was smooth enough, and we left for our room after explaining the reason for the plethora, nay even the abyss of luggage to our kind guest service assistant.  Once we had settled into our room, contacted folks to let them know that we were safely in our hotel, ordered some Domino’s sandwiches for dinner, and re-arranged our bags in our less than extremely large room, I decided that it was time for my nose to be powdered. But I soon realized that this would have to wait as I stepped into the bathroom to hear a “splish-splash” of feet. It took me less time than it is taking me to type this sentence to realize that the splish-splash was being created by my own feet in the pool of water that I was standing in. So, after laying a towel across the entrance to the bathroom, and, out of possible muscle memory, leaning down to check on the sink and toilet to find where this leak may be coming from, (it was a broken seal on the toilet) I told my beautiful wife that I would return soon after talking with the front desk about our dilemma. 

I was met in the lobby by a tall man with a kind attitude who asked if there was anything wrong. When I told him what was happening up in room 407, he told me that he would be up directly to help and that we would have to be moved. His gesture when he said moved made me nervous because he seemed to be saying that we would be bringing our luggage down to the lobby. I told him that we had a lot of luggage, and he assured me that we would not have to move too far. So, Jewel and I began moving our suitcases out to the hallway. Soon a man came walking in with a plunger. I began to help him to realize that the toilet did not need plunging, and showed him where the leak was just before the original man from the lobby came in with a new key. So a few members of Garden inn began to help us to move our stuff down the hallway to a new room which was at least twice the size of our old one. The man explained that he wanted to help us to have room for our luggage. We thanked him, and called Domino’s to tell them of our room change. 

The next morning found us early standing outside of the hotel waiting for a shuttle to bring us to the airport. The first shuttle had already left without us because it was too full (and again, our luggage was of the ridiculous sort of amount) We struck up a conversation with a couple of guys about where we were going, and what we were doing. When we mentioned what Jewel’s major in college was, one of the two guys spoke up, “Oh, so you’ll be going to a very rural area right? Don’t you have to go really deep to be one of those?” We explained this to him, and laughed about not having a specific set of guidelines that after acquired would get you mission status on Facebook. 

We arrived back at JFK at 7:30 am and rolled our baggage up to the counter as we were the first two in line for our specific flight. Our flight did not leave till 11:15, but we wanted to be sure that we had enough time to get comfortably on the plane. About two hours later, we were very glad we had come early since we were still waiting at the counter. See, this was China Southern Airlines first flight out of JFK, and their card reading machine was simply not working. There was going to be an additional fee for our extra baggage, and after giving some cash that I had, the rest was not going to be easy. After about a half-hour of waiting, we were told that they would try one more thing and if it did not work we would have the rest of our fee waved. About an hour and a half later, I reminded them that they had told me this, and we were finally allowed to go through to wait at our gate. 

That was seven-hundred dollars saved because the card machine did not work. We got to the gate in time to sit down and order a cup of coffee. Soon, over the pager I heard my name being called up to the gate desk. A couple of thoughts went through my mind. Maybe I had packed something in one of the suitcases that was not supposed to be in there, maybe we were going to receive another apology about our delay earlier. But, on the contrary, the desk agent wished to inform me that I owed seven hundred dollars to the airline, and that the card reader had been fixed. To this I replied, that I had received a receipt that said that I would not have to pay for the rest of the baggage because I had been waiting so long. She replied, “Yes, I do remember seeing you at the front…” She called the manager and told me that he would be coming soon. Upon his arrival, I learned that he was not going to be kind about the whole incident (though he had been with us since we arrived, and knew how long we had been waiting.) He informed me that it was their first day and because the machine was working now I needed to pay for the baggage. We went back and forth for a while as the gate opened up for boarding. This being a flight to china, the line got REALLY long REALLY fast. I talked him into giving us a discount on our baggage and still ended up saving three hundred. The flight was mostly eventless though it did last for fifteen hours. Little did we know, this would be the calm before the storm. 

Guangzhou sits near Hong-Kong and is a semi-popular airport. Not quite as big as Beijing, but still rather large as we soon learned. We were told in New York that we would not have to go through customs. This proved to not be true as we arrived. This, however was the most painless part of the Guangzhou airport. We had to fill out arrival cards, and had our visas stamped within ten minutes. Then we went to pick up our luggage. Because we were the first to get our luggage on the airplane, we were also the last to get our luggage off. The good news was that we did not have to pay for the two carts that we would use to cart our luggage around. So with the same setup as we had in the New York airport we set off to find where we were supposed to go to get to our airplane. The problem? No one spoke English… So we were trying to find out how to get our bags to wherever we were to get them, and this was not without great difficulty. Our plane had arrived close to 4:00, and our airplane was to leave at 5:40. So off we go through the airport. This was the highest moment of stress during our voyage. We knew no one, did not speak the right language, and were being given different instructions from each person we talked with. As we got to the third level through the elevator, I realized that I did not know what we were going to do. I did not know where to go, nor what to do if we did get there. But around the bend came a Chinese man who said, “Do you need help? They said someone needed help.”

The next hour and a half was full of running, and sweating. Chasing a man who was trying to help. Getting ahead of long lines to find that we were in the wrong line. Finally getting our bags on a belt to find we had to go to another airplane line to pay for our extra baggage. Dry-heaving seemed to come on as a result of the loss of time. Finally, with boarding pass in hand, and passport in the other. We ran to the TSA as we checked our watches and found the time to be 5:25. It did not take too long to get through TSA and we started running, backpack bouncing, guitar swaying, and carry-ons rolling through the Guangzhou airport. Our gate was 226, and so we were flying past the gates at lightning speed. It was a long corridor. I mean, a LONG corridor. 216, 218, 220, 222, 224, FINALLY! I look up at the gate sign to read, “Flight to Lijiang moved to gate 218” … RETREAT! Off go the crazy two americans back the way they came from and running now at warp speed. 218 was down an escalator. As we approached the gate, we saw the sign flashing in red “FINAL CALL LIJIANG” What a relief! We got on the bus that would shuttle us to the airplane and traded face sweat as we kissed each other. 

An hour and a half later we were still sitting on the runway. Not sitting next to each other, but sharing the unity of a nap after our exhausting run. I did feel bad for the two guys sitting next to me because who knows how I smelled! But we were on our way to Lijiang, and we knew that our mission was accomplished. We went through no security or customs at the Lijiang airport, and soon were walking towards brother Dom and brother Ian. What a relief! We had been brought faithfully to China, and this was just the beginning of our adventures.