4--The Second Week of August

Thunder woke me up in the middle of the night -- hadn't heard that before around here. I got up to see if there was rainfall and to close the windows. I wanted to watch the storm, it was mostly sheet lightning, but I was too sleepy and couldn't keep my eyes open. It turns out there wasn't much rain accompanying the storm.

The next morning we were met with a myriad of emails from home. Everyone had responded to the phone calls and desperate emails we had sent in order to get some news from home. My e-cards also seemed popular. Around 4:00 in the afternoon we called Alisa to come with us to buy some items downtown. She always likes it when we call her because she gets away from her work at the school. She had been told that we are her primary responsibility, so when we call, she jumps. What makes that even better is that we have really developed a friendship with her. She is about 26ish and lives in the girls' dormitory where she shares a room with 2 or 3 other teachers. She is away from her family and her boyfriend works in Jinan, so she has adopted us as her family away from home.

We went downtown to get a tea kettle. We thought that if we were to boil water to rinse the dishes, we could eliminate some of our recurring digestive problems. We are our own worst enemy there, because we break all the rules of the travel guides. We eat at street vendors and small restaurants, and we know the cleanliness is not exactly what we are accustomed to. The local people try hard to clean, but they don't have all the resources we do. We haven't really narrowed our problems down to one source, so who knows?
It's not killing us, so it will make us stronger, right? Well would you say...uh... wiser? How about "We are improving our immune systems?" Would you accept "...an involuntary cleansing of the digestive tract?" Actually Dick's theory is simple: When eating food from a street vendor always leave a layer of food on the plate, always order food that will be cooked immediately before you eat it, and never let the eating utensils touch the plate.

We bought the tea kettle at the department store and then Alisa led us to a store where we could get pillowcases. I had been looking for some plain ordinary pillowcases because the ones we were using were the fancy ones that came with the bedspread. I didn't want to ruin them, so had asked for pillowcases. Well, that's not as easy as it might be at home. First we looked at a store that specializes in bamboo products, like mats, etc. that you put on top of your mattress and pillows. It was intriguing, but not quite what we thought we needed.

So we headed down the market street to a store that sold drapery and bedding fabrics. I picked out a cotton sheeting material of pretty good quality. It was white with large purple flowers on it. Alisa spoke with the woman who was obviously a seamstress (I could tell by the sewing machine near the back of the shop) and we were having a sheet set made. This consists of one flat sheet and two pillowcases with the opening in the centre of the back and with ruffles around the edges. It would be ready the next day, and the school was paying for it. Alisa also ordered a set for herself, but of much lesser quality of course.

After that we rode around on the market and came back to the area of the Sun Wu museum (since the name is in the third tone, it sounds sort of like swoon woo). We asked Alisa if we could go in, and she bought the tickets and we toured the rather large set of buildings. It is built in the style of the old Chinese mansions with many courtyards and gardens. The different rooms all had different artifacts in them, the first one being a series of books. They were all the different editions of "The Art of War" and it was impressive to see how many different versions there were, including many other languages.

We toured the rest of the museum and took a lot of pictures. It is so neat to see something that actually dates back a couple of thousand years. I personally haven't read the book, but it is quite well known around the world and many of the artifacts are pictures and gifts from world leaders. Dick says that the book is still required reading for a lot of military academies around the world. The book not only teaches strategy, but also philosophies that can help in daily life. A truly inspired work that has literally outlasted the centuries.

Afterwards Alisa took us out for dinner, complete with dumplings, and we ended up taking some of these home in a plastic bag. (That's how you do take out here).

The next morning Alisa rang the doorbell and said she needed some help with the translation of a news release that Dick had written. In the second week of teaching they had asked him to do so, and apparently this would be printed in the school newspaper. Alisa had been given the task of translation and had done a lot of hard work looking up all the difficult words. But there were some phrases she had trouble with. We explained them to her and she caught on pretty quickly.

She then called the cook to come over and cook lunch for us. He cooked a couple of dishes and then heated up the dumplings and the pineapple pork that we had taken home previously. But heating up is not done in the microwave, no sir. You end up with practically a newly cooked dish. We invited Alisa to eat with us because, as usual, there was way too much food. She did, and then washed the dishes for us. The cook decided that he would only bring small amounts of vegies on a daily basis from now on.

Around 4:00 the doorbell rang. Two little girls, about 7 or 8 years old, peeked their heads in and started talking in Chinese. At first I just spoke to them at the door and then waved bye bye. But a short while later they came back with flowers for me. So of course we took their picture and then they wanted a printout. I knew what they wanted, even though they spoke all Chinese and we all English. It took a while to figure out how to do it, but I got two copies printed and they were happy. Then they wanted a picture of the two of us, so we mounted the camera to the tripod and had the more precocious one push the button. She is going to be a teacher, I'm sure, because she has a very persuasive nature about her and I have to repeat the Chinese she is teaching me. Kind of cute. We weren't sure if we could convince these two to leave, but eventually they did.

Later in the evening Alisa showed up with the pillowcases and also just to check on us. We told her about the two little girls and we all had a laugh about it. They have become regular visitors and are quite amusing. They are in the Grade 3 in a Junior School and have not taken any English classes.

Being on days off, there really isn't a great deal to do. Riding bikes in the heat is not always recommended and at home you can always do housework and watch TV. There is only one computer and we have to take our turns to do all the things we can do on that. So I expressed my boredom and we decided I needed to do something in line of a hobby. I now knew about the fabric store, so we recruited Alisa to come with us and told her I wanted to get some fabric and some thread and needles so I could get a little creative.

We went back to the same store where we had gotten the pillowcases and I picked out some off white cotton. Then the lady pointed to a vendor in the market, just across from her door actually, who could sell me thread and needles. I picked out some colours and a box of needles of varying sizes and I was a happy camper. I now could do something with my hands while watching TV in Chinese.

We came home to a group of neighbours sitting outside the apartment on their little stools playing cards. They invited us to join, so, after a short protest that fell on deaf ears, I sat down and took over the cards from Mrs. Liu. One of the students from our second week class helped me and tried to explain the rules. Every card seemed to be "bigger" than the others and it was like I was holding three hands in one. I picked up a little bit of the game, but it was extremely confusing and Dick and I decided that they were making up the rules as they went along.

The next day I decided I had to know a little more about this card game before subjecting myself to the neighbours again. So onto the good old internet (what did we do before computers?). I researched Chinese card games and after a short while zeroed in on a game called Da Bai Fen. It was similar to what we had witnessed downstairs, except that our neighbours used two decks.

So, being smug or stupid or something, we mentioned it to the man who sells us the delicious ice cream bars in the little shop at the corner of our apartment building. He has a little bit of English, but of course he didn't really comprehend that I was trying to tell him we had researched the rules of the game and should be able to play now. We ended up in our apartment with about 5 or 6 people and they had sent one of the kids to retrieve someone who knew more English.

By the end of the hour, we were all sitting in our living room with their 2 decks of cards learning how to play this extremely difficult game, which consists of a trump rank determined by points earned in the previous hand and a trump suit determined at some point in dealing, and 5's, 10's and kings being counting cards. I threatened that I would teach them cribbage some day, but Dick said that if they could play this game, crib would be nothing for them. I think he might be right.

Alisa had mentioned a day or so ago that Mr. Liu had ordered the workmen to come and do something with our TV so we could see English programs. At about 8:00 in the morning they showed up, after Alisa of course, and started to run wires, climbing on the roof and then going away for a long period of time because they didn't have the right tools. After a long day of watching these guys drill through brick and so on, we realized we were getting a satellite dish. What a surprise! I guess Alisa must have told them that I was bored and we didn't understand the Chinese programs, so they wanted to make sure we had some entertainment.

We now have a choice of about a dozen English channels, including National Geographic, Discovery, Hallmark (we get Star Trek Voyageur on that as well as a bunch of mushy stuff) and a few others. The Chinese channels seem to be repeated 4 or 5 times in the remainder of the total 77 channels. In the evening Mr. Liu and Mr. Geng came over to make sure everything was done right and to have a discussion with the installer (who isn't really an installer but the manager of the business, no wonder it took him so long).

While they were sitting on the couch, they looked at the attemps of embroidery I had started. You can't leave anything laying around, or they look at it. Then they wanted to play a CD to see if that was working proplerly, and they picked my meditation music. Not very interesting when you are trying to visit.

We also had some discussions about the giant bag of grapes we had received from Mr. Liu (grown at his home) and the gift packages of tea he had given us. This was apparently grown on the mountainsides and has medicinal qualities to it. If you drink it for a year when you are 20, by the end of the year you will be 18, we were told. So I told Dick he has to drink twice as much as me. They like our sense of humour, well, they laugh at it anyway.

Then we were offered dinner out again and we accepted. Mr. Liu couldn't come due to a meeting, so we walked, this time to a small restaurant at the corner where the school's road comes out on the main road. Alisa and Mr. Geng ordered and we had beer (a little too much, I'm afraid) as well as some tasty, really spicy, dishes.

We walked back home and the neighbours again invited us to play cards. We stayed for about 3 or 4 hands and I was actually beginning to get some of the strategy now.

Once upstairs I decided I was going to watch some English TV, but Dick went to bed. They were showing Philadelphia with Tom Hanks, so I stayed up late to watch it. The only problem we have with this setup is that the music is always so loud and we don't want to disturb the neighbours, so I'm always adjusting the volume control. Oh well, small price to pay, I suppose.

How disappointing that the next morning I couldn't figure out how to get the satellite back on. I knew that I had turned all the machines off in the right order, but now couldn't get the thing to work again. Of course the manuals were no help because the only English that appears on them is numbers. Frustrated we decided to ask Alisa later and just go on with our day.

In the morning we had phoned Flora and managed to talk to Trinity, Tony and Karas as well. It was Flora's 80'th birthday (morning for us but yesterday evening for her) and we wanted to wish her our best. She was impressed because she had received a phone call from Germany earlier and now was speaking to China.

A quiet day until Alisa and Dennis appeared after supper. They brought us peaches and the diskettes that Dennis had bought for us in Jinan, as well as the music we had asked for. We paid for the diskettes (which were quite a bit less expensive than the ones we had bought in town here) but they wouldn't let us pay for the CD. That was a gift which we gladly accepted.

This was traditional music made on the oriental harp (about 25 or 30 strings) that we had heard in the Golden Horse restaurant. The restaurant had loaned us their CD, but it was in my purse when you-know-what happened. We had wanted to replace that CD as well, but we were told that Mr. Zhang would talk to the restaurant owners on our behalf. Knowing his PR skills, we were quite OK with that. The CD turns out to be a DVD that has scenery of China, Hong Kong and even London on it. The music is very soothing and definitely a special souvenir of China.

We mentioned to Alisa that we couldn't get the Digital Box to work and that maybe the installers had to come back and fix it, but then Dennis played with the wires and managed
to get it back up. I figured out later that if you play the DVD before using the digital box, you may have to un- and re-plug it for some strange reason. I don't ask, I just do what works.

By this time our hosts had decided that it was not good for us to always carry our bikes up and down the stairs, so they had cleared out a storage room accross from our staircase. Alisa was to have a key cut, but she had forgotten to, so she said she would do it the next morning. She and I decided to put the bikes downstairs and then she could bring us the key as soon as it was ready. When we put the lock on she said it was too old and she would just buy a new one.

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