I am drinking some delicious, hot, formula tea. I wanted milk tea, of course, but I’m stuck with this for a while.
"Natural Relish" just means plain. I was hoping for dill pickle.
I bought this at an airport. The sticker says that I am not allowed to take it on the plane, but I didnt know that until we landed.
After purchasing a few versions of milk tea (both with and without the tapioca pearls), I decided I wanted to drink it far more often than I wanted to pay for a disposable cup of it. I searched the local mini-marts for powdered milk, but all I found was baby formula of varying levels. Given 6 choices (1-3 months, 3-12 months, 1-3 years, with or without DHA+ARA), I opted for Level 3, with the DHA+ARA. I figure my body is somewhat closer to a 3-year-old’s than a newborn, and isn’t DHA a mood elevator for adults? As it turns out, it’s pretty tasty stuff and I haven’t been poisoned by melamine yet.
Of course, 3 days later I wandered into a huge store called My HoMart, which is more like Wal-Mart than the name implies. They had two full aisles dedicated to baby formula and powdered milk. So when I run out of this stuff, I can either switch to powdered whole milk or go for the more enticing Milk for Families, Milk for Young Women, and someday Milk for Pregnant Women and Milk for Seniors.
Though wikipedia says I’m doing it wrong, my version of milk tea is just brewed black tea with a scoop of brown sugar and a scoop and a half of formula. Once I venture down to the honey store, things could get far more exciting.
As predicted, I’ve been reading nearly constantly. If my crochet hook is not in my hand, my Kindle is. This is partially due to my continued inability to connect my computer to the internet in the apartment (resolved fully as of this morning), but it certainly helps that I have no job and 17 books currently on my Kindle. While we were on the bus back from Jiangxi, I finished reading Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which I will get to in a minute. Instead of sighing and looking out the window for the remaining 20 hours of the ride, I went back to reading Atomic Lobster by Tim Dorsey (which I finished a couple of days later and moved on to Up in the Air by Walter Kirn…which I finished the morning I began writing this review). When I did something similar in the Philippines back in 2000, it resulted in a large pile of books that I didn’t have room to bring home with me. I’m diggin’ this Kindle thing. A lot.
Half the Sky Review
If you’re not familiar with Nick Kristof’s column in the NY Times, you should be. He writes about issues that are important but often not well-known, and I’m grateful for being introduced to these. Kristof is careful to not merely complain about things; he often highlights the work of a person or an organization which has been working on the highlighted issue with good results. His appeals also often lead to a flood of donations for whatever charity he mentions.
The book is no exception, for it contains a large appendix which lists all the charities he mentions in his narrative as well as others he knows of. They are sorted into the same categories as the sections of the book: sex trafficking, gender-based violence (including neglect), and maternal mortality. The narrative itself approaches each general topic from several angles, each telling the story of one or a few women and Nick or Sheryl’s experience with them. For someone brought up with plenty of opportunities, the stories are shocking. Each situation is impossible to imagine, starting with the opening story of a Cambodian girl who was sold into sex slavery and escaped, only to be jailed and have a crooked cop sell her again. There is no way for me to wonder what I would do in such a situation, because it’s so far beyond my experience.
Half the Sky will move you, hopefully to action. Because I’m lucky enough to be spending the majority of this calendar year volunteering, I intend to find a way to put a special focus on the girls and women. I won’t know specifically how I can do this until I get there, but I will try to highlight it here. Once I’m back in the US and earning money, you can bet that I’ll be contributing far more than I have in the past. Kristof mentions a few “price points” in the book:
- Tithing, which is traditionally giving 10% of one’s income to the church, need not be limited in such a way. The idea is to work a certain percentage into your budget and making giving a priority.
- The world spends $40 billion annually on pet food, but an increase of only $9 billion per year in aid money would “provide all effective interventions for maternal and newborn health to 95% of the world’s population”. What if we all donated, each month, to a charity focused on this problem, an amount equal to whatever we’ve spent on pet food?
Please, read this book, and start reading Kristof’s column in the New York Times.
Dealing with this gluten-intolerance thing has made me a less adventurous eater while traveling. Without the language skills needed to make sure food is safe, I get scared when I’m fending for myself.
This was the situation I found myself in yesterday — the hubs was off making vital connections, and I was hoping some people would meet me at one of the cafes for a little yarn play. Lunchtime rolled around (nobody showed) and I decided to walk to one of the foreign megastores to look for a couple of imported necessities. I left the cafe (which offered the safe option of a cheese omelette) with the full intention of stopping at a noodle joint or something along the way. The further I got from the area where foreigners tend to congregate, the less sure I was of finding safe food. Eventually, I recognized where I was, looked to the right, and saw Wal-mart. I cringed, since this was not the foreign megastore I was intending to visit, but where there is Wal-mart, there is surely KFC. Where there is KFC, there are…french fries.
So my very first meal without my lovely husband’s help was a large order of fries and a strawberry sundae. It was also 3x the cost of a far more filling meal at any of the restaurants I passed on my way there.
I continued my walk toward the central square where I was told a Carrefour loomed large. It’s a beautiful area with lots of landscaping and some welcome shade, mostly provided by the triangular New Era hotel. I got my shoes shined for 5 kuai, but passed up the blind masseurs since I can never remember how to ask “how much?” and my usual gesturing wouldn’t have worked. I don’t know why, but I never found the Carrefour. While speaking to the hubs on the phone, I told him where I was and he told me to turn around. Perhaps I should start giving massages in the square…
That night, we ventured to a restaurant near the apartment and ordered a dish called Grandma’s potatoes. It’s been said that there are as many varieties of this dish as there are grandmothers, but we were thrilled with the version we got: fried, half-mashed potatoes with ample spice. Add steamed eggs and a cold rice noodle dish (yes, I know…pictures. Sorry) and we were both stuffed. The hubs declared it the best meal he had had so far this trip, and the restaurant delivers!
Note to my mum-in-law: They had a waving cat.
I haven’t begun teaching yet, and haven’t been able to pick up any temporary gigs here in Kunming. I generally spend my time split between reading and crocheting, and while this is nice sometimes, I need something else to mix it up a bit.
Upon our return from Jiangxi, I started putting out feelers for places to learn the dialect of Tibetan I’ll be learning once I get up to Shangri-la. My third feeler turned out to be a hit. I was directed toward a restaurant about 20 minutes from my apartment on foot and told that they aren’t very busy during the day. We ventured out there on Sunday for lunch.
It’s a beautiful restaurant on the 2nd floor of a building that includes (in addition to the main dining room with a stage) 3 banquet rooms. One is decorated in a Tibetan royal style, one more middle class, and one is an actual old-town Shangri-la kitchen that was taken apart and moved there. We spoke (er, the hubs spoke…I smiled and nodded) to a woman named Lamu who grew up near Shangri-la and indicated that she was willing to teach me. After negotiations were made (no pay, but a vague hint that some English in return might be appreciated by some in the restaurant) we had a fabulous and expensive lunch. We noticed her teaching Mandarin to a musician while we ate.
So today was my first day, and I went alone. This surprised and rather exasperated her since she expected to have a translator. After a quick phone call between her and my hubs, we began with some basics.
Lamu still relied on a bit of Mandarin throughout the lesson. I apparently have greater knowledge of that than she has of English, so we managed. I wrote down some greetings and common small talk, family words, numbers, days, months, and some colors. When she looked a bit stuck, I got to practice some of my teaching by miming things like “good morning” and “good night”, drawing a stick-figure family (that got a laugh), etc. It really made me see the value of pictures, and I think I’ll pick up a magazine or two before I return on Thursday.
Occasionally, she had to do some actual work, and the other women there started to get curious and wander over. Two had studied a little English, and one may even be high enough to be called a beginner! Since they didn’t seem to interested in teaching me (or maybe they spoke a different dialect) I started working with them.
Using the calendar I had drawn to label in Tibetan and some hopefully useful gestures, I started using sentences like “Today is Tuesday. Tomorrow is Wednesday.” Later while setting up my next meeting with Lamu, one of the women wandered up and exclaimed “Today is Tuesday!” They all giggled when I praised her a bit.
Brief Reflections
The calendar is something I’d like to use when I have a classroom. It should be familiar to the people I’ll be teaching, and it seems like a good way to begin a day. I recall my mother incorporating weather into her morning calendar lessons, so that’s something I can expand into later as well.
Since the women there (besides my teacher) seemed like they wanted to learn a few things, I’ll come prepared with a little bit next time. I’m still wavering over whether I should try and give them a little homework. Since Chinese students often have greater reading and writing skills, I’d like to fish around to see if that’s the case here.
So now I know a little bit about what it feels like to be an absolute beginner. There’s a lot of initial confusion, but things do start to click little by little. I went quickly from thinking she was asking me if I wanted to order food or have more tea to realizing that she was teaching me the word for eating. As I progress here, I hope to get more ideas for my own classroom.
Watching movies here is weird. We got strange looks in Nanchang when we asked a hotel clerk if there was a movie theater nearby, though the next day we saw a big “Cinema” sign about half a mile from there. Mostly you just buy an unauthorized DVD and plunk down at home to watch. My lovely husband has informed me that it is occasionally possible to see a movie in English here in Kunming.
Most big movies are available – you can buy Avatar, The Time Traveler’s Wife, 2012, etc. as well as Chinese movies. I just picked up a copy of The Lovely Bones, and I’m not sure if it’s even available on DVD in the U.S. yet. It’s obvious that it’s not an authorized release – just look at the proof of purchase:
Wait, what did I buy?
Even the Chinese movies have bizarre packaging. The hubs picked up two movies the other day, one of which stars Gong Li, a Chinese actress famous for melancholy historical fiction flicks where she dies at the end. In this one, Raise the Red Lanterns, she’s the 4th mistress/concubine of a rich man. When I was asked to pick which movie we would watch that night, I picked that one based on the English description that it was about a man who returned to his village for the funeral of his father. What?
But what’s interesting to see are the movies in English that we’ve never even heard of.
Our host has a binder full of movies that we flipped through on one of our first nights here, and we picked out a movie called Redacted. We had never heard of it. A quick search revealed that it was a total flop in the U.S. and critics generally hated it, but you can buy it in China! It turned out to be a graphic and disturbing war movie, and while I don’t think it was badly done, I wished I hadn’t watched it.
A more upbeat example is a movie that the hubs picked up in 2006 when we were last here together. I don’t recall if it was made in Australia or New Zealand, but it’s a cute romantic fable called The Price of Milk. If you can dig it up, I would recommend watching it with someone who will snuggle with you.
I asked my husband before we left Kunming for the holiday if maybe Sam and his wife (Wen Li, which I called her the whole time, forgetting that Wen is her family name) would ask us to give their baby an English name. I’ve been trying to come up with a Chinese name for myself, knowing that if I picked it myself I’d probably end up insulting someone. To me, if they asked for an English name for their baby, it was the perfect opportunity to ask them to give me a Chinese name. I had hopes for my Chinese name — maybe something to do with nature and sounding vaguely like the name my parents gave me. Prior research (thumbing through a dictionary) had me looking at combinations pronounced roughly “Wei Li”, but I didn’t like any of the meanings.
Anyhow, after spending a few days with this well-insulated baby (did I mention it was cold there?) commonly called Niu-niu or “little cow” because she was born in the year of the ox, I had already come up with a name for her. One day, finally, they asked us! We quickly agreed, and I countered by asking them for a Chinese name. Two nights later, the whole family was discussing it.
The first one they came up with sounded nice, but after seeing and trying to write the characters, I sheepishly asked for another that was easier to write. It’s important for me to be able to write my own name. 
After more deliberation, they suggested ?? (Xia Mei) which means “beautiful summer” or “summer beauty”. It’s significantly easier to write, though I do need to practice. Sam and Joyce’s father also pointed out that the xia character has something to with China, and the mei character is the first part of the Chinese word for America (making me the person to unite China and the U.S.?). Unfortunately, when I inevitably mispronounce my name, I could become ??, which means “shrimp mildew”.
Oh, and the name we gave the giggly 8-month-old? Joy! I wanted to give them something easy to say and spell, as well as something with a meaning.
From left: Sam, Li, Joy, XiaMei, and DiMing
In short, it was mostly great. You know that saying about guests and fish starting to stink after 3 days? Sometimes it applies from the perspective of the guest as well! Unfamiliar styles of hospitality can be overwhelming, though at the end of 6 days, I had actually begun to adjust better.
The view from the 2nd floor, on our first morning in the village.
We were staying at the family home of my husband’s friend “Sam” and his sister “Joyce”. It’s in a village about a half an hour outside of Ji’an in Jiangxi province.
We flew out of Kunming a few days ago and landed in Nanchang, the capitol of Jiangxi province. The flight took us over about 15 forest fires that I spotted from my side of the plane. The drought in Yunnan is bad, and some are predicting that we’ll run out of water in about a month if there is no rain. I think the last precipitation was in October.
The wind was crazy in Nanchang as we checked into a cheap hotel (so cheap it had hourly rates, but the sheets were clean) and walked to the train station to try and purchase return tickets. The trees looked as if they were bending nearly in half. The next morning, we took a double-decker bus to Jian, where we were treated to a Chinese-dubbed showing of Airplane. Once there, we were met by our host’s sister and uncle who took us to the family farm. Now, I’m not exactly an urbanite, but I’m a little soft for the Chinese countryside in winter. It’s a fair bit colder than it was in Kunming, and raining (go figure). I can handle the outhouse, but the lack of indoor heating is hard to cope with.
Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, and that’s when the party starts! I have pictures, but they will have to wait until I have a way to upload them.
While chatting with my mom from an internet cafe the other day (I’ll get to that later) I told her that I lived about a block and a half away from 2 very dangerous things. This was intended to play on her fears for 30 seconds or so before I revealed that these 2 things are a yarn shop and a tailor with some beautiful coats on display. I am a mean daughter
I went through the patterns I had scanned before leaving, and wrote down the requirements for 2 of them. After much awkward pointing, nervous laughter, and the shop owner assuming I could read Chinese, I walked out with 8 balls of green fuzzy yarn. All I could tell from the label was that it’s a 50-50 mix of 2 fibers, and weighs 50 grams. My intention was mohair, but I bought angora blended with something synthetic. Apparently the hubs’ vocabulary does not extend to synthetic fibers.
So I’ve begun making an angora coat, and in that respect I’m lucky to have a 30-hour train ride coming up at the end of our Lunar New Year vacation.
The first few rows of the coat.
In other news, I’m having trouble getting my little linux netbook connected to the internet in our apartment. I’m currently limited to John’s computer, stinky net bars with wonky keyboards, or coffee shops with wireless. I can only access blocked sites when I’m using my own computer, so those of you waiting for a response from me on Facebook will have to wait. It’s probably best that I haven’t been able to post anything for a few days, since I probably would have gone into detail about my 2-cipro, 4-pepto illness that is thankfully resolved.
Warning: Do not read this in public if you dislike sobbing like a baby in front of other people.
While I made the mistake of reading a lot of reviews for this book before reading the book itself, it didn’t spoil it for me. Many said the ending was stupid, but I didn’t mind it. Hokey? A bit, but it seemed to fit. I actually have a paperback of this that I got from a garage sale in 2005 or so, but I never read it. I bought the Kindle version before hopping on the plane, and am glad I did.
It was definitely a tearjerker. One particular moment had me looking like I had dipped my head in a vat of tears and snot (on the plane, of course) and I managed to scare the hubs when he looked over at me. I think what worried him most was that he thought I was still reading Midnight in Madrid, which had become a joke between us by then.
While the book opens with a scene of rape and murder, it is not overly graphic. It may be triggering for some. Overall, the book is about life and healing, not death. I found the characters to be well-developed and believable, and I look forward to finding a bootleg copy of the movie soon.
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