I just got back from our short vacation in Weihai.  (I bought my camera, but was afraid to get it sandy, so this post has very few pictures, sorry!)  The school took a lot of the staff and their families there for a two-day, three-night optional holiday.  It was a mixed bag but generally a good time.  Kudos to the people who put it together so quickly, when our earlier plans for the holiday week were nixed.

(The view from just outside the hotel lobby.)

On the way there, we stopped at a gas station about mid-way through the four-hour-plus drive.  (Much to my relief, because I had a cold and was drinking lots and lots of water to keep from coughing.)  My acquaintance with Chinese gas stations is pretty thin, not owning a car myself, but it seemed about standard compared to the one or two I’ve visited – gas pumps under a very high roof so buses and trucks can access them, a small shop with overpriced junk food, and toilets with thigh- to waist-high walls between the stalls.  Actually, like the bus station when I visited a friend my first winter here, it wasn’t technically toilets, just a trench running through all the stalls.  Not my favorite kind of facility, but since the other women were my co-workers rather than curious strangers and the smell was somewhat better than the college bathrooms often emitted, I was pretty comfortable with it.  And a bit amused at the reaction of some of the others who have been here as long as I have or longer but haven’t dealt with these before.  On the bus today, though, I did hear stories of other such places, some less easy to deal with, that some people here have encountered, either in China or other parts of the world.  I’m glad I was forced to get used to squatties in the nicest possible way my second winter here.  (Sorry, no blog entry to point you back to about that, but maybe one day I’ll write it up; it’s one of my “The-Father-has-a-sense-of-humor” stories.)

(some lovely landscaping outside the hotel)

The first morning in Weihai, I went out on the beach to lay on a towel and read with some of the other ladies.  Around noon I went into the water, and had to kneel down to get wet past my waist – it was shallow for quite a long ways out!  Then I headed inside to wash off the sand.  Since the hotel was not near anywhere populated and was very ritzy (ie, pricy), I just ate some snacks I had brought for lunch, and read a second book.  In the evening, I went out with a couple of families for “barbecue chicken” a not-too-long bus ride into the city, then attended a seminar on time management.  After that I didn’t really know what to do with myself; the problem with hotels is that people disappear into their rooms and you don’t know where or what is going on!  I ended up painting my nails with a small group in one of the meeting rooms, then going up to my own place, where my roommate was already asleep.  A lovely lady from the US with the same name as my mom, she and a few others had come over the help out with childcare, and she woke and went to bed before me each day there.

(another view from the hotel.  I didn’t go out on the pier, but it looks nice!)

Tuesday morning I was back out in the sun despite the mild sunburn I’d gotten on Monday.  I’d signed up for some boating activities, but I wasted the first 45 minutes walking to the wrong place, walking back because I didn’t see anyone from our group, and then walking past that place again on my way to the right place, trying to keep my sandals from falling off my feet without constantly curling up my toes.  To spare my toes after the boating I walked back along the slightly shorter sand route, but of course almost-a-mile on sand is just as hard for feet as a mile on asphalt.  Ow!

(The small buildings to the right of the big sail-like buildings are the boat rental place.)

While I was down at the boating area, I was able to take out a small one-person sailboat (yay!) which was fun but would have been more if I had planned to get wet and thus hadn’t been so worried about swamping. So much for my notion that boats are to keep a person dry!  Then I gave in to the wetness and took a two-person kayak/canoe out on the water.  Both rides together were shorter the time it took to walk there, I think, but hey, it’s SO amazing to me that I have actually sailed a boat by myself!  Then I watched other people sail, including: a couple of the guys learning to windsurf, my TA and her friend trying the kayak even though she can’t swim (we all had life vests, of course), and some kids riding on the mesh front deck of a catamaran to look into the clear water as it was sailed around the area.  Three of us walked back together and I went to my room for more sand-removal and reading and snacks for lunch.  I also talked with a couple of people in their room before sitting in the lobby to see who I could join for dinner.

(the hotel lobby as we checked out Wednesday, complete with chandeliers and with plant displays in the revolving door)

Tuesday evening, there was the possibility of my showing a movie for the “youth” (an age which was never satisfactorily defined but at least meant “older than my students”), but the youth themselves were quite happy to be free to do their own thing, so I left them to their pizza-eating, Lord-of-the-Rings-watching, and whatever else they were up to, and played a game of bowling with a couple of families down in the hotel bowling alley, then watched another game while I knitted and cheered people on.  It was not a stellar performance by yours truly, but I had fun getting those 50 or 60 pins down, and I even had one strike (followed by the only score-less frame. figures.)   The best part of the evening was realizing that I need and want to get to know the families here more.  I think that’s part of what I miss from ZZ, part of why I’m lonely even though I’m with so many people every school day and Sunday morning.  There are lots of great single women here – I went to dinner with several Tuesday night, read on the beach with others Monday morning – but I’ve always been a bit “different,” playing with kids of different ages, having a difficult time bonding with girls in my own class, cooking instead of reading star magazines, coming on my own to live in China…. I have tried to define what I’m missing here before, and I think part of it is what made me “fit” in ZZ with the other people who also came there without any kind of organization to show them the ropes or give structure to their lives during the transition and life in foreign culture, a part I may not find right away here as I don’t have a lot of time to get to know other foreigners outside the organization I now work for, but I think the other part of what’s missing was being adopted into the Southey clan, mixing with the Neal children on Sunday in between their homeschooling and Chinese schooling, going places with Sarah on our electric bikes, gleaning wisdom from Pat and John on our cab and bus rides together, talking and working with Kate and Kirsten and Samson and other students from my college, working on school things and surfing the internet and cooking dinner while “Melissa” Wang Fangfang and “Lucy” Ma Peixuen and their friends did homework at my table and ate anything I set before them (as long as it wasn’t pork, for Lucy) and sometimes brought me noodles or junk food they bought on the way home from school but remembered not to buy the smelly spicy meat because I asked them not to bring it in my house and were always willing to help me garden or clean house or just sit and play with my cats.  I miss the people, and also the flavor of the community.  It’s just taking a lot of time to adjust socially, with school eating up most of my waking hours and leaving little emotional or physical energy for introverted-me to reach out.

I guess I’ve veered a long way from my original topic about the mini-vacation.  There isn’t much left to tell.  After bowling I went up to Carolyn’s room* and we read together – just sitting in the same room each finishing a novel made us both feel less reclusive.  And then this morning, breakfast and packing while watching (gasp! shock! wonder of wonders!) CNN Asia on the hotel’s TV.  My thoughts go out to Manila and Samoa, the latter of which dominated the news.  The hotel’s breakfast buffet, by the way, was quite good, with a mix of Western and Chinese options.  Cereal and juice and cheese on toast and bacon, three days in a row, yum.  Then back on the buses to hui jia (return home).  I finished all but the last three rows if my Goforth/QMIS House Unity Hat on the bus ride, then read another book, my third of the trip.  (The last three rows of decreases needed DPNs, which I didn’t bring, but they’re finished now!)  Now I just need to have a movie-watching-and-yarn-skein-winding party to get the yarn I bought for the matching scarf transformed from big hanks into neat balls for knitting up.

(the hat before leaving on vacation)

(the finished hat)

Tomorrow, Thursday the first of October, is National Day and the PRC’s 60th anniversary.  I’m sure it will be quite an event. Our holiday continues through Monday, and my plans are to get next week’s lessons ready, work on my classroom, and get a better feel for where I’m going with the curriculum this year (or at least semester).  That’s what I like to do at the beginning of the year, but there just wasn’t time before school started, so this is my first chance.  I’m also going to take at least half a day to talk with the Father and work through some of the transition stuff I touched on above.  It should be a good “break,” though I don’t know exactly how restful it’ll be.  I think I’ll go call a couple of families and invite them over for that movie-and-yarn party one night this week, now.

*: Carolyn also moved here from another city in China (same company though), likes to cook, and likes Star Wars as well as teaching children.    Maybe I’ll invite her to the party too.

So, here’s the wall in my room that I decided on my first day here had potential.

The other suite in the apartment already had some awesome book-display-shelves and cabinets built in, but thankfully the roommie has turned that space into her own domain and loved the teal wall with birds and branches (I like the pattern, but NOT the color – glad it’s in her room!).  I was sorry not to have the shelves already built in like she has, but I was willing to trade them for the potential of this room.  Her room’s already painted, accessorized, and gorgeous, but that’s a whole other post.  I’m planning to work on mine, sometime… (if you know me, you know what that means).  But I’ve taken the first step, and so my journey of a thousand translations, explanations, searches, ma-fan’s, and kuai has begun.

Back to the space.  I bought the wardrobe in the corner because, well, I needed some storage, like, right now, and it was available and cute and I’d never bought a wardrobe before!  I don’t know what I’ll do with it if I go forward with my plan, ’cause it really isn’t part of it.  Maybe it can fit elsewhere in my room.  But probably it’ll have to go.  Sad pandas.  But I’m not too terribly attached to it yet, as all it does right now is hold my shoes, and my new shelving unit would have a place for that that’s fitted to them a bit better!  Well, and it provides me with a good full-length mirror, which I will dearly miss, even if I did have to stand back by the door to get a look at myself because of all the stuff piled against the wall in front of the mirror!

And this is my grand plan.

(totally-out-of-proportion drawing with measurements that include the molding at the top and bottom of the wall, the door frame, and even the radiator cover and indentation in the wall that covers the pipes in the corner.  Back when I thought I might include that area with some teeny-tiny mini-shelves!)

1:10 scale drawing (well, it is on my paper; I don’t know about your screen!)  (That’s the light switch on the left, by the way.  The door isn’t in the drawing because my paper wasn’t 35.1cm wide.)

My grand plan.  Or mostly.  I’ve already thought of a pair or tweaks to the bookshelves near the top.  Basically, the 4×4 grid would be immobile (though part of it right in the middle would be just a small frame, not a full wall-between-shelves, unless I’m told in no uncertain terms that that’s completely unstable, and the two big storage spaces with doors on the left and right bottom might not have that shelf in the middle of them), and the rest of it would be adjustable, with the possible exception of the yarn cubbies – depends if such things can be built non-permanently!  Here’s a gorgeous picture from HelloYarn (hosted on my own Photobucket account, not hotlinked)

Pretty, eh?  Not that mine would be so pretty; the cubbies would be a little larger and the yarn not so uniformly cute.  But still, a nice way to see what I have and much better than the tacky plastic baskets they’re in right now (because B&Q doesn’t have the pretty, affordable wicker baskets I used to buy from Home Depot but didn’t ship).

So, each of the 16 rectangular sections is 60cm x 50cm, and most are sub-divided, the top will be a place to stick “decor” items and will extend across the top of the door, possibly with lighting above, there will be glass doors on much of the top half (if possible) to keep the humidity here out of my books and yarn, wood doors on the bottom to hide storage, no backing to the top half so the pretty wall color I’ll chose can show through, not attached to the wall any more than necessary (hopefully not necessary at all), and that’s the plan, Stan.

Advice, tips, comments, suggestions, gushing expressions of delight?  Please comment!

…for a Facebook status update.  Definitely too much for a tweet.  So here it is, take your pick, they’re all my status as of sometime today.

I:

was amused at the variety of cultures, accents, and languages at this afternoon’s staff meetings.

am, thanks to my math curriculum’s year-long “Length of Day” project, painfully aware that I now get up every morning before the sun, and will therefore continue to do so for the next seven months, until it starts getting up earlier than me again.

managed to spend less than 2000 yuan on Sch*lastic book orders when I turned them in today.  Plus a hundred dollars or so worth of bonus points books, of course.  (The fact that the majority of my last paycheck is already safe in my US account and there is still half a month till the next paycheck in no way explains why I was able to stick to so reasonable a budget.  Really.)

fervently hope that tomorrow’s fire drill goes smoothly and I don’t forget my attendance book.  Not that I can’t take attendance of ten children without it.  Just that I’d feel un-teacherly.

love rediscovering that I live near the ocean when I walk home from the bus in the afternoon/evening on days I don’t have to do errands along the main road.  It’s right behind my complex, but that’s the only time I see it, so I forget it’s there half the time!

really look forward to when people stop running their AC units (it’s in the 60’s this evening, why are they still on?) so that I’ll be able to hear the ocean again from my bedroom window.

am completely done in, and aim to get to bed ASAP.

When I came to China, I learned a phrase: “This is China.”  I thought it was kinda cute, a way to remind yourself that things are different because you’re in a different place, so don’t waste time being upset over them.  “TIC,” you could say to your foreign friends when something made no sense or seemed “incorrect” compared to the Western way.  I think I even wrote a blog post about it that first year – search my archives if you’d like to see it.

But in the last year, someone – maybe Peter, maybe someone else – pointed out that it wasn’t a very complimentary phrase.  It was generally said to highlight a complaint, as if people here can’t do things right.  Rather judgmental, and not a good way to connect with the culture, adapt to living here, etc.  I can see that point. Side note: Kind of like the warning I was given before I came, to not think or say “we” and “they,” or you’ll never identify with or get close to the people who live here because you’re always generalizing them as different from “us.”  In any case, I never used the “TIC” phrase much anyway, and I try not to use it now lest it offend anyone who feels it’s rude.  I still think it’s good to remember that, hey, it’s a different culture here, yeah, you’re not in America any more, so stop expecting it to be the same, but perhaps it’s a bit like taking the L0rd’s name in vain – if you only say it when you’re annoyed, instead of celebrating the good things, it’s probably not a good thing to be saying at all.

Thus, the title of my post is instead “This is Life.”  Another title could be, “The Saga of the Refrigerator.”

A few weekends ago, we discovered that if you leave the door of the fridge open, it starts going “ding, ding, ding.”  What a neat feature! The thing has a digital display on the front with six buttons – everything in Chinese so of course we just have to guess, but still, what a high-tech machine.  We generally figured the part of the display that said something like 3 was the fridge, and the part that said something like -18 was the freezer, and didn’t worry about what the middle number was (found out later it was something to do with the space between them, which is why it was generally around 0.)  No worries, everything’s cool.  Except that, a couple days later, the freezer display wasn’t a negative number. No bright “bing, bing” to let us know, just a number in the wrong part of the scale.  Uh-oh.  Work hours being what they are and the craziness of teaching being what it is, I didn’t get around to calling maintenance for a couple more days, once the standard push-all-the-buttons-and-see-if-you-can-fix-it method failed.  I tried the unplug-it method too, but it didn’t seem to help, so I put the partly-thawed things in the fridge.  Only, after re-plugging the machine, that stopped staying at a low number, too.  Hoo, boy.  Definitely time to call in maintenance!  I made one last effort, looking for a manual in English online (nope, though I did find a Chinese one on an English-language website, thanks a lot, guys), and asking a friend from Hong Kong to look at the manual that came with it (nope, only general care and use, no trouble-shooting.)  By this point I was finally putting things in a neighbor’s fridge.

That Thursday, workers from Samsung came to check it and said they needed to come back with a truck and take it to their shop.  Great, but we aren’t generally home during business hours, and Tuesday and Thursday are the only mornings our ayi is home.  We’d already given a spare key to another teacher’s wife who is a “stay-at-home mom” (I know, how many moms actually stay at home all day? But at least she had a better chance of being there!)

Come Saturday I’m out at school working and get to be part of a phone chain that runs repair shop -> school housing and maintenance department -> actual resident (me) -> neighbor and back again, setting up a time for them to come get the fridge.  They got it.  That week, we put leftovers of ayi’s cooking in the neighbors’ fridge and generally didn’t eat very well because who wants to bother the neighbors all the time – even very friendly ones – to get the salad dressing or a cup of yogurt?  (I must say, Dale and Jenni were wonderful about it all!)

Saturday again and still no fridge, the same answer as when it first disappeared – “several days” – and our hero of an elementary principal offers to unplug the mini-fridge in the secondary building’s conference room and bring it over for us.  Heaven!  It’s one of those little cube-shaped jobs, just big enough for a few necessities (or, pretty much everything we’d managed to salvage from the old fridge that was still worth eating, and a couple things that weren’t).

Finally on Thursday I took the early bus home so I could meet the workers returning our fridge.  “Don’t plug it in for three hours,” they said, killing my hope of asking them to show me how the buttons worked.  They did assure me that I didn’t need to press any buttons when I plugged it in, and they spoke true.  It cooled right off once it was plugged in, and I transferred things over before bed, wiping out the mini-fridge and leaving it to dry.

So, now we have a working full-sized fridge again (and a cube fridge in the corner, waiting to go back to its place).  Friday after school I went grocery shopping, so we have frozen dumplings and corn, loaves of bread and fresh eggs and other nice things to put in it.  Still some stocking up to (re-)do, but we’ll get back to full operational level soon in our kitchen!

And chalk another one up to the “Well, I survived that.  What’s next?” stories.

I remember my first year away from home.  (And my second, and so on.)  As an intern and then a college student living in dorms, I remember being told, “Your mother doesn’t live here.”  Whether it was piles of laundry on top of the dryer, dirty dishes on the kitchenette counter, or the state of the suite bathrooms, we were to pick up after ourselves, be responsible, and not act as if our moms were coming around to tidy up after us.

The “mom” they were describing wasn’t my mom.  I didn’t work hard at home, but I was expected to do some chores once I was old enough: wash the supper dishes once a week plus any I used between meals, vacuum or clean the bathroom from time to time, help get dinner ready if Mom was pressed for time or had had a full day.  Still, I got the point.

Only, I think that mother that they were talking about – the mythical one that takes care of your every need and mess – I think I have found her.

We hired a wonderful local woman to help us keep house.  She comes two mornings a week while we are at school and basically mothers us.  I had an ayi in my old city (though she told me not to call her ayi because she wasn’t old enough to be my aunt.  I called her by her name instead), but her one job was to clean.  Three hours Friday morning, she’d clean my apartment from top to bottom, stem to stern, and that was that.  There’s plenty more I could say about her, she was wonderful too and I count her as a friend, but the point is, the ayis here in my new city apparently have a broader job description.  This lady cooks us dinner, washes our laundry, tells the school repairmen what to do if they come while she’s here, and cleans the apartment.  She irons.  She does stacks of dishes.  She shops.  For now it’s just for ingredients to make our meals, but if we ever figure out how to write her a list, she can get other stuff too.  She’s amazing.  I think if I live here long enough, I may forget how to wash my own clothes!

So, to anyone in college, your mother doesn’t live in the dorm with you.  She lives here.  Come teach here when you graduate, and I’ll introduce you.

A week of school under my belt, and what memories will I carry with me?  What do I mean to do differently next week?  What do I expect for the rest of the year?

School began with a half-day on Thursday a week and a half ago.  The short beginning week meant to ease students back into the school routine was a good taste for me, too, though it wasn’t anything like normal school yet!  I set my class some lessons over the first day and a half, but because Chinese and Science classes hadn’t started yet, and Friday has an unusual schedule anyway, it was probably the longest I’ll ever spend with my students in one day for the entire school year – I was only without them for about 15 minutes of lunch.  Exhausting, but it made the next week seem much easier by comparison!

Monday was the beginning of the regular school schedule.  Since nine out of the ten students in my class speak English as their second language (or possibly third, if they learned Chinese before English), we’re encouraged to focus as much as possible on Language Arts at the beginning of the day.  I actually have three segments of LA most days – right after morning work, right before lunch, and again near the end of the day.  In the afternoons, after Chinese and (Monday through Thursday) Music or PE, we have Science and Social Studies time.  This may change as the timing of Art is throwing it off a little twice a week, but for now, the plan is that Lisa – the other third grade teacher – covers a unit of Science for about four weeks, and then I’ll cover a unit of Social Studies in a similar amount of time, switching off as the year goes on.  This allows the students to work in bigger groups with people who aren’t in their class all day, and means that we each get a month off every other months from teaching that chunk of time in the afternoon.

I’m slowly learning how to interact with my teaching assistant.  She’s been working here for the last two years, so she’s a great resource when I need an idea about how to handle something, or when I forget – as I did twice in the first week – where exactly to lead the class!  (Our school is divided between three buildings on an even bigger campus belonging to a Chinese school.)  I certainly trained to teach a class on my own in college, but now that I’m working with her I don’t know how I would pull it off alone.

Work days start early and end late – I hear that in the winter you don’t really get to see the sun at home during the school week.  We catch the school’s bus around 6:30, have a morning gathering at 7:10 (it may differ some Tues and Wed), students start to arrive right as that ends, and then school officially begins at 8.  I think I’m going to be catching a taxi in at 6 or 6:15 on Mondays so I can get my head on straight and just savor a moment or two alone in my classroom before the students arrive.  School ends at 3, but we’re required to stay on campus until the first bus home at 3:45 – a bus I only know by reputation, having taken either the Chinese staff bus at 4:30, or the second foreign staff bus at 5, every day so far.  Since there’s more traffic in the afternoon, it’s generally well after 5:30 by the time I get home.

Some of the memories I’ll carry with me:  Having to stop and ask my TA, “Is it on the third floor of this building?” the first Friday when we were already late because I’d forgotten what time the assembly was.  Feeling once again the joy that comes when a student gets that “aha” moment as I explain something.  Realizing on Thursday afternoon that I’m going to be done teaching by 2pm that day each week – possibly even by lunch time, if we do science that day – because they have art the rest of the afternoon and then the TA takes them to the bus.  Printing up a newsletter for my class with Publisher (ah, how I’ve missed thee, Publisher!  The rest of Microsoft I can do without, but Publisher, I love you!)  On that note, discovering that I can function better in the Chinese MS Word that was on my old school’s computers than I can in whatever the really-new version of MS Word is in English on our school computers.  Gah!

And, best non-teaching moment of all: browsing the secondary library after school on Friday.  Browsing a library in China!  I could have floated back to my classroom!!!  (The public library system is one of the things I miss the most about the USA, and this summer I was in VA for such a short time, I didn’t even get to visit the library once.  It hurt.)  I read two Young Adult books this weekend in between working in my classroom and going to felowship.  Not a balanced social life, but a wonderful way for me to unwind.

The best moment of the week (that actually relates to the students!) was realizing on Friday that I know all their names.  OK, so there are only 10 of them, and I’d make myself learn my campers’ names by Wednesday each week when I worked at the Triple R, but with the constant need to think about what’s-next, how-to-explain, classroom-discipline, where’s-my-overhead-pen, etc, etc, while I’m with them teaching, I was surprised and pleased to find that I can tell them all apart already.  Now to work on the other third grade class’ names this week, so I won’t be clueless when Social Studies time rolls around!

Goodnight and best wishes for the new week, from me here in China!

New blog post coming… sometime soon! (Hopefully this week)

With the new job settled, the plethora of other big and small details to settle are coming together. I’m feeling good about it today, so much seems to be working out and getting done. Here’s a quick look at what I’ve been able to cross off my to-do list lately, and what still remains:

Attend summer training in the US: (3.5/8 done)
-Get the OK to leave ZZ before my contract ends
-Move up my last four classes so I’ll be done in time
-Buy plane tickets from China to the US, to training, to VA, and back to China
-Buy tickets to and from my international flight in Shanghai
-Find accommodations in Chicago, preferably with a friend, for the night I’m there on the way
-Fill out all the forms and personality tests required for the training
-Buy some short-term medical insurance for while I’m in the US
-Finish grading everything possible ASAP so I can dive into research-paper grading when all 70 of them are turned in next Thursday

Prepare to move:
-Contact my landlady about when I’m leaving, getting back my deposit and hopefully the August rent I already paid since I’m leaving in July, possibly selling her my two air conditioners, and suggesting a new tenant
-Figure out how to move my things to a new city – I just heard from Sandy that I can send things by train for 2.3 yuan per kilo, as long as it’s all in bags or boxes (ie, no furniture, no electric bike). They provide door-to-door service and even sell empty boxes and bags (what, a packaging supply shop?!? Something I’ve never seen in China.) This is great except it doesn’t answer my question about how much to budget for the move, as I have absolutely no idea how much my books, clothes, kitchen supplies, and other things weigh. 200kg? 1000kg? Probably somewhere between those two numbers! At least I know it’s not going to cost 5000 yuan or anything, as I was thinking it might – that would equal almost 5000 pounds of stuff!
-Sell my bike, apparently, as well as selling the small pieces of furniture I own and my dining table and chairs set
-Figure out what to do with my cats

Prepare for the new job
-Visit the new school and city, to find out all I can about the curriculum, students, school culture, etc before the summer, and to see what kinds of things I’ll want to pick up in the States for both my classroom and my apartment this summer. Hopefully I can do this later this month, or in early June, though pushing my end-of-term schedule forward by a week has made me even more busy in the weeks leading up to my departure.
-Fill out yet more forms that come with employment at the school
-Be in contact with lots of people there – I’ve already been in touch with four or five different people at the school about various things, including one biggie:
-Renew my residence permit before I leave, because it will expire while I’m in the US… or, get the paperwork started to get a new visa, so I can get it while I’m in the US.

Say goodbye to everybody!
-Hopefully I’ll have some sort of goodbye party, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to squeeze one in in June, and then in July lots of foreign friends will be out of town, so… who knows.

And that’s not everything on my to-do list. But I’m cheerful because I’ve finished absolutely everything I wrote on my to-do list for the week last weekend! Admittedly, it was an incomplete list – I didn’t write down to order my dad’s birthday gift, but I thankfully remembered to do so; I also didn’t write down to finish planning tomorrow morning’s lesson, which I still need to do today. But… *runs for pen* Aaaah! It feels wonderful to cross off that last item!

Hoping your week has also been a productive one,
Lily

Spring means many things to me here.  The beautiful weather is at the top of the list!

Something I really enjoy about the spring is the light.  The fact that it is light when I get up at 6:20 goes a long way to waking me up.  And I can’t get enough of the way the light comes into my kitchen in the morning.  It faces north, so it doesn’t get any direct sunlight half the year.  Seeing the beautiful light trickle in where the window wraps around just a bit on the east in the early part of the spring mornings makes me very happy!  So happy that, Sunday morning, I took a quick video tour of my kitchen, to show off the light… and to show off the fact that everything was in its place.  (I do have a place for everything, it’s just rare that everything gets there at the same time.)

My cats also enjoyed the sunlight… or maybe it was the birds they were watching so intently!

My neighbor put his birds out on the porch bars across from my kitchen window today.  The green one seemed to be having a blast socializing a couple of with the local sparrows.

Then they flew away.  “Where’d you go?”

Another aspect of spring that I enjoy is the constant art displays in my classroom building.  Of course, there’s no posted schedule, and displays change from day to day (sometimes even from morning to afternoon), so I don’t usually get photos of the ones I like best – I only remember to bring my camera the next day!  But I try to enjoy seeing them in the moment and not worry too much that I can’t share pictures with everyone else.  (But last year I was pretty bummed that I didn’t get a shot of one dress design, pinned up on a dummy, that I thought would have looked great on yours truly but didn’t trust myself to draw or explain without a photo.)  My favorite so far this year has been a photography display.  The students really had a ball using color, lighting, and some great post-work (most of which looked like it could have been done in the darkroom, whether or not it actually was.  Photoshop’s awesome, but I’m always more impressed by actual physical manipulation of light and exposure!)

And since buying my electric bike last fall, I’ve found another reason to enjoy spring – I can start riding it long distances again!  The weather was so nice Saturday evening that when I went out to put away my fully recharged bike and get a couple items at the store, I did it in that order – I enjoyed the walk! – but on Sunday it’s great to go to meeting on the bike, and on Wednesday I jetted over to Wei San Lu to grab some butter for a spur-of-the-moment batch of Swedish Coffee Bread while it was having its first rise.  (You put in the butter between the first and second rise, don’t you know?)  I’m getting better at surviving low batteries, too – in other words, speeding up more gradually, and looking ahead so as to coast to a stop rather than waste juice going full speed before a fast stop.  Take a wild guess how I’ve learned to do this!

Here are the results of three quick shopping stops on Sunday.  Can you guess which price totals were highest/lowest?

First just inside the Southey’s gate on my way in the morning, at one of the many little tent-and-table shops that pop up to sell polo shirts in the spring, I got three “Large” shirts that fit me quite snuggly.  OK for under other things or days off, but I guess I’d better go for “XL” next time if I want to wear them to work.  Rats, and I know I wear a “Medium” shirt in the US!

Then I got these items at a new Carrefour, which has a very large foreign import section full of things that are ridiculously expensive and most of which I don’t know why they bother importing.  Summary: bottled/canned drinks, breakfast cereal, candy, olive oil, balsalmic vinegar, coffee, tea, and pasta.  That’s about 80% of what they had, in multiple brands and places of origin, filling up four medium-length aisles!  The only thing that tempted me that I didn’t buy was a 55 rmb sack of bread flour.  But I will probably go back for that if I start making tons of bread again now that it’s getting warm enough to rise.  Everything else they sell either seems pointless to me (well, I do drink a lot of water, so I don’t buy many drinks aside from big bottles of juice and milk even in the US) or redundant (you can get popped rice for cereal and plain spiral pasta here for a good deal less than the imported stuff  costs).  The grassy coop, as you might say, was the vanilla powder!  (At least, I think that’s what it is.  I haven’t baked with it yet.)  It’s the first known appearance of vanilla in ZZ, and I’m quite thrilled to find it as I’m on the last drops of a second-hand bottle, my own having run out a couple months ago after I failed to visit the US to replenish it.  Hooray!!!!!!

And, after a quick stop at the ATM to replenish the pocketbook, a visit to the baking shop yielded pretty much everything I asked them for. As nice as the pleasant surprise of new discoveries is the satisfaction of knowing where to get what you want, and having it be there when you go!

Did you guess? I dropped plenty of hints. The most expensive purchase was at the second shop, where the total came to 110.10. The shirts were only 25 each, and the baking shop totaled 91. <- (highlight the text to read it.)

Finally, it’s fun to dress for warmer weather…

(a long story gripe about that second dress can be read in a note on Facebook… let’s just say it didn’t come out as I’d requested from the tailor, but happily I managed to accessorize away all but one of the major flaws.)

So, welcome spring!

Teagen and Emily

Aren’t they cute? And as you can see, I’m not the only one accessorizing with ribbon these days!

He is risen!

The celebration of Easter is truly the high point of the year. Christmas may be “bigger” in terms of traditions and feelings not actually related to the original holiday (it also makes me more homesick), and you couldn’t have Easter if you didn’t have Christmas first, but still, Easter … well, it’s the ultimate expression of the Creator’s love,the pivotal moment in a plan of thousands of years, the truth behind so many human myths and fairy tales, the answer and fulfillment of every search and longing.

And, if it has several orders less music, what it does have rocks the house!

To find out the back-story of Easter, please read one of the four books of “Good News” by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Or ask me or someone at your local ch’rch!

And, in more-easily-post-able-from-China news, here’s the run-down on the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of this particular year’s celebration of Easter for me.

Any occasion can be an excuse for me to bake something. Even non-occasions, like something I don’t feel like doing (yes, I have been known to procrastinate by baking) or time that miraculously doesn’t have anything to procrastinate, may be celebrated by mixing things up in the kitchen. But Christmas and Easter are the two with traditional recipes to pull out. For instance, this was my fourth year – every year since I came to China – making Swedish Coffee Bread, a recipe I kinda hope is really from Sweden since that’s where some of my dad’s side of the family is from, but which I would continue to make even if it turned out to be an American concoction. The recipe has been in the family for decades, in any case! I made two batches this year so I could have more of it to myself, since it usually disappears at fellowship Easter morning. Recipe at the end of this post.

Mmm, the smell of the cardamom and cinnamon and yeast scream out “Easter!” to me. (Baking with yeast for Easter (the real even of which Passover is merely a shadow) is probably as fitting as having ham for Easter dinner, come to think of it. I’ve never been able to decide whether eating pork for Easter – the holiday that makes us part of Abraham’s descendants – celebrates freedom from the Law or is just kind of oddly ironic.)

Together with the sight and smell of these lovely lilies, the air is overwhelmed with “Easter” scents!

And the tang of vinegar in the air ushered in egg-dying time. I just did a couple this year; this is my blown-out-egg collection from my years here (the one the says “Luxy” was dyed by and belongs to young Lucy). My students all got to dyes eggs – hard-boiled for the young ones, while the older students blew out their own egg shells before holding them under the dyes.

I also baked hot cross buns for the third year in a row, from the Cooking For Engineers website (but he got the recipe from elsewhere, I believe). Somehow I didn’t get any photos this year, and can’t find any from previous years, but if any surface I shall endeavor to post them here. I think I may try a new recipe next year. They’re incredibly light and puffy (a good contrast to the dense coffee bread) and nicely sweet and fruity and spice-y, but they dry out like nobody’s business as soon as they’re cool, which makes for not-so-great eating on Easter morning if you made them much ahead of time. Making the glaze out of powdered sugar, cinnamon, and orange juice sure gives it a great topping, though!

And, while I was waiting for other things to rise and because I had some cider concentrate in the fridge waiting to be useful, I made some Apple Cider Doughnuts, from a recipe I clipped from the paper somewhere, sometime. They were kinda good, but because I wasn’t about to use six cups of my precious canola-olive oil to deep fry them in, I baked them instead, which was kinda weird. Almost like too-sweet apple-cinnamon bagels. (I tried boiling a couple too, after thinking of the bagel comparison. Uh-uh. Chewy and ugly.)

The sounds of Easter were arranged by me this time. I volunteered to put together the music for fellowship, and after a long Saturday afternoon of browsing You Tube (my not-so-secret source for songs I don’t have on CD), digging through my papers for the copies of favorite hymns from my mom’s hymnal, making sure the modern lyrics I pulled off the internet matched the recordings, and arranging it all to print/copy, here’s what the playlist looked like:

Lamb of G. (Hillsong)
Lamb of G. (Twila Paris)
Up From the Grave He Arose (hymn)
Chr’st Arose (hymn)
L0rd, I Lift Your Name on High

I ran off ten copies of the “Hallelujah Chorus” from my full “M’ssiah” score, “just in case” – I wanted to sing it but wasn’t sure everyone else would agree. When we got to the end of the songs above, the mood seemed right, so I passed them around, and off we went, with the MP3 turned up loud and voices ringing out best we could. It was glorious even though some of us kept getting lost. (Honestly, after all these years of singing it at the end of the Christmas sing-alongs, I still get lost at a couple of the parts where all four voices go in different directions on different beats). What a perfect sound to end with on Easter!

One last Easter sight:

Hallelujah, He is risen indeed!

Recipe for Swedish Coffee Bread
I got it from my mother; I think she got it from my dad’s mother. Beyond that, I don’t know the source.

Scald 2 cups milk (don’t boil it). Add 1/2 cup sugar, 1 tsp salt. Cool (around 10-15 minutes).
Dissolve 1 pkg yeast in 1/4 cup warm water.
Add yeast to cooled milk in mixing bowl.
Add 4 cups flour. Mix and let rise around 2-4 hours.
Add 1/2 cup melted butter, 8 fine-rolled cardamom seeds (1 1/4 tsp powdered), and flour enough to be able to knead (2 1/2 cups or so). Dough should be softer than regular bread.
Let rise (around 2 hours). Punch down.

Roll out into 9 rolls and 1 loaf twisted bread.

Rolls: Take a chunk and roll it into a medium-length rope. Wind it up into a roll and place it into a square baking dish. Brush with butter and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar. Bake around 15 minutes at 375 degrees.

Loaf: Roll out into a rectangle. Spread with melted butter and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar. Roll it up lengthwise. Place it on a baking sheet, seam side down. Cut the top with slits about 1″ apart. Pull the sections in opposite directions. Bake around 20 minutes, also 375 degrees.