Jet Lagged

“Biju, I’m going to show you some place hardcore. Some place really Chinese.”

We had already spent a late night at our local hangout and I am more than ready to go to bed. It’s late, but my friend cannot be denied. Grabbing my hand and shoving me into a taxi, I assume that we are going to find a local place to eat nearby, a comforting meal of late night barbecue cooked up to order at virtually any street corner in China.

But as the taxi meter counts steadily upward, I realize my friend is serious. A long time resident of China and a fluent Chinese speaker, his exploratory powers far outshine my own.  As we pull into a chop shop to ask for directions, he tells me how ridiculous it is when people say that our city is small.

Xiamen is home to over 3 million people and covers an area of 1500 square kilometers. By Chinese standards Xiamen is a small town. But the tendency amongst foreigners (myself included) is to stick the easy-to-reach comfortable areas where foreigners tend to congregate. Bars, cafes, and the university are places that are safe and familiar, where foreign faces are expected if not common.

An intense conversation in Chinese with the chop shop workers results in the bewildered taxi driver dropping us off in what seems like the middle of nowhere. The cab fair reads 50 RMB. 50 RMB! I didn’t even know you COULD pay 50 RMB and stay on the island!

As rain dribbles through my clothes I lurch into motion after my friend in the dark as he barks at a series of sleeping shop owners at 3 in the morning in Chinese.

“What’s open?! Where’s the restaurant!?”

The shopkeepers start, muttering and motioning to keep going down the road, promptly falling back asleep as we pass.

It’s so easy to lean back and rest on your laurels as an expat. After all, we’ve moved, we’ve settled, we’ve found the places of interest in the guidebook or the expat forums online. We’ve plumbed the depths.

But sitting at that restaurant, eating the dog and pan fried silk worm larvae as my friend chats with the grinning restaurant owners, I realize again that I’m in a new country. There’s no end to the exploration and when you find yourself in a new culture, there are always hidden depths to explore.

Last week we had friends over for dinner, a nice mix of fellow expats and local Chinese friends.  As usual for a dinner event, everyone brought dessert.  No complaints from me; I love dessert.  We had homemade cookies, green tea and strawberry ice cream, brownies and doughnuts (doughnuts being a dessert food in Asia as opposed to breakfast).

The box of doughnuts, brought by Kate, our landlord’s daughter, contained a mix of different flavors, including some classic favorites like chocolate, coffee, strawberry, etc.  As Kate was helpfully identifying each for us, she pointed to one and said it was a meat flavored doughnut.  Hmm.  We all selected other types, leaving a few odd stragglers behind.

Later that evening, once most of the guest had left, we were hanging out with a few close friends and decided someone needed to try this meat doughnut.  Leave it to Biju to the the first.  After carefully observing his face as he took the first bite, the rest of us decided we simply had to experience a meat donut for ourselves.

The first few seconds after you take a bite are sweet and doughnutty, and you immediately think, this isn’t so bad.  Wait 5 seconds.  It hits you, a strange fishy, salty meat flavor.  If you’re lucky enough to get a bite with a dark brown flake on it, you get taste a strong flavor of beef bullion as you take in the doughnut texture.  You keep chewing.  It’s quickly getting gross.  Doughnuts really shouldn’t taste like this.  Nothing should taste like this.

So, if you’re ever in China, be careful what you bite into.

I keep forgetting I’m in China.

It’s the other side of the world, there are very few people that look anything like me, and they all speak Chinese, which I don’t understand at all.

Yet, I keep forgetting that it’s actually China.

I think that’s the thing that really shocks me about this whole moving overseas thing. People really can get used to absolutely anything. Different writing, different customs, not knowing what’s going on half the time.  I remember when I first encountered it all in Korea, it was shocking.  I really felt completely inept and lost for the first couple of months. But you get used to that feeling.

And that’s the other thing that’s weird – moving abroad and diving into something you’re completely unfamiliar with is also a process you get used to.  There is a learning curve to even that, and it’s getting easier.

After 7 months in Korea  what struck me was how normal it all was.  Taking the elevator down a dozen floors, dodging adjummas, catching a bus, noting the stops in another language – it became so commonplace.  Here in China it’s even more striking, because it’s only been a few weeks and I’m getting that feeling of daily living, of things being…mundane.

Because when you get down to it, my day-to-day life really isn’t too different from living in Texas.  I wake up, I shower, I work.  I get groceries, I  make some food, I watch some TV.  I go to the movies, I go shopping, I get a bite to eat.  And, like evolution, though  these things might be punctuated by an intense trip or an adventure, my background state maintains a steady equilibrium.   The only big road bump is attempting to communicate to some people, but even that isn’t too bad, usually circumvented by hand gestures and pointing. In understanding that we’re all basically the same, most situations make sense, because we have a basic underlying human intent behind them.

Normality isn’t usually my cup of tea.  That’s kind of why I moved in the first place.  I would have thought this would fill me with a sense of ennui, but oddly it hasn’t.  Rather, it fills me with a perverse sense of joy.  Because if I can get used to this lifestyle, then, really, I can get used to anything.  I can be whoever I want, I can try whatever I want, secure in the knowledge that even the most challenging of ventures can, at some point, become everyday. It has, in many ways, made me more secure in the idea of living further and further afield in any area of my life, which is exactly the type of total soul re-calibration I wanted when I first decided to live abroad.

I just still keep forgetting I’m in China….

A very auspicious elevator indeed!

Everyone knows that 13 is an unlucky number.  How about the number 4?  In the Mandarin language, the word “four” sounds very similar to the word “death”, and in a culture where numbers are taken quite seriously, 4 is a very unlucky number.  The number 14 is even worse as “ten” and “four” combined mean “accident” and each read separately sounds like “will die”.  The picture above is from the elevator in our building.  Not only did the contractors leave out the 4th and 14th floors, they threw out 13 for the rest of the world, and, just to be safe, 24 and 34 as well.  So what we have is a 35-story building with only 30 floors.  Apparently we’re living in the luckiest building around!

1. The quiet- There’s a sense of peace and serenity surrounding the city that I would never expect of China. During the day we hear a bit of traffic noise, but by 10pm, silence seems to envelop the city.

2. The crowds- or rather, the lack of crowds. In the most populous country on earth I would expect to constantly be surrounded by  people.  Not so. Whether walking in a park or shopping at Wal-Mart, there really are not that many people out and about.

3. The cleanliness- The streets in Xiamen are immaculate! I don’t think I have seen a piece of trash yet. I also haven’t seen anyone picking up trash which tells me that people here take care of their city.

4. The food- I had always heard that Chinese food is very different from American Chinese food.  I guess I assumed this meant that food here in China is less greasy. It turns out, everything here from seafood to veggies is cooked in oil. Our first meal was a huge pot of seafood in what looked like a soup.  Nope!  It was oil.

5. The food- In addition to #4, we have already found in our first week both a Tex-Mex and a Texas BBQ restaurant run by native Texans. In China. In Xiamen. We gave the Tex-Mex joint a try and it was great, and we hear the BBQ place actually imported a meat smoker from Texas, so it’s bound to be good.

Every spring Xiamen’s Bailuzhou Park is lit up by hundreds of lanterns depicting Chinese and Xiamenese myth and folklore. Just our luck that we arrived here with a week of festivities remaining.

Year of the Tiger

Chinese lantern festivals typically correspond with the spring festival. The lantern festival, always on the 15th day of the 1st lunar month, is a celebration of the first full moon. Households around the country hang lanterns from their porches and balconies, children parade the streets with miniature toy lanterns, and many cities (Xiamen included) hold festivities including beautiful lantern displays, music, and, of course, street food.

We found out about this years’ festivities through the in-flight magazine (I knew it was useful for something!) We figured we’d go check it out on our own some night, as we hadn’t really met too many friends yet. Turns out, a shop worker in a local wine store we were browsing invited us to sit down for tea.  Before we knew it, we had a date to the festival. Chu Mei Fang, our first friend in Xiamen, was born and raised on the island.  Between her bit of English, our nearly non-existent Chinese, and loads of hand gestures, we were able to enjoy the festival and learn a bit about some of the displays.

Barbequed Chicken Skewers

The lantern festival also happened to be our first foray into the wonderful world of Chinese street food, and it didn’t disappoint! For fifty cents, Ms. Chu purchased a handful of barbecued chicken skewers literally dripping with wonderfulness. For some unknown reason, every skewer stand was worked by a couple of young men dressed in either cowboy or caveman getup, dancing around wildly in the smoke of their grills; the dumpling and fruit vendors didn’t seem to feel that such flare was necessary.  Who knows, maybe that was the secret ingredient.

A few days before heading to Wuhan for our teaching job we found out that our recruiter was basically scum and had lied to us, and that the city kind’ve sucked.  Doh!  Things came together, and we found an awesome city in China to go to instead of Wuhan – Xiaman.  It’s a beautiful island city off the coast of south east China, where the temperature is tropical, the people are friendly, and the skies are clean…..mostly.  We came here, and luckily we found two amazing websites (What’s on Xiamen and Amoy Magic) dedicated to the city that detailed everything form how to use the bus routes to where the best places to eat in town are.  Also, it included an amazing resource – how to find an apartment.

Night view from our balcony overlooking Gulangyu Island and the ocean.

We found a realtor, Paul Ye from Xiamenapartment.com, who showed us around 10 apartments in two days.  Paul is a great guy who speaks excellent English, and as a native of Xiaman, knows the town like the back of his hand.  He also has an intimate knowledge of what expats expect and want out of apartments and is very familiar with the real estate in the area.  He was great at his job and friendly, taking us around the apartments and pointing out where to shop, where to eat, and overall went way above and beyond the call of duty in making a couple of laowai (foreigners) feel at ease in his hometown.

We found an amazing 3 bedroom 2 bath apartment with a killer view of the ocean

Daytime view

and the nearby islet.  Paul showed us where to get groceries, marked out places of interest on our map of the city, helped us get internet, and negotiated a better deal with the landlord.  Needless to say we are utterly in his debt.  We discovered that he likes big, fat, juicy steaks, and we intend to have him over to cook him one. We also intend on introducing him to a Texas favorite, chicken fried steak, which he hasn’t heard of.  Anyone have a good recipe!??!

Guest Bedroom #1

Master bedroom

Living room

A kitchen at last!