The first 10 days in China - living (hi)story

Dear friends,

Thanks for looking us up on our blog.

Thanks for all your emails. You can’t imagine how nice it is to receive messages from nice familiar people if you live in a culturally alien part of the world. So keep them coming!

After nearly two weeks here we feel almost at home and have made our apartment our little “safe haven”, where we watch western DVD’s (all “originals” for 50 cents), read, laugh at the little people and their ways (the same way they probably laugh at us… at least we’d like to believe that to make us feel less guilty ). Everybody treats us very well; we almost get spoiled by the attention and help! Our apartment is very big by local standards (air-con everywhere) and it even got a new lick of paint! Not to forget the DVD player, our best friend… after the pill, of course!

After returning from a short trip, the green and pleasant field that we originally overlooked has turned into a massive building site. Now we are going to take pictures every day and publish them on flickr in the end, so you can go and see for yourself. When China decides to build, it doesn’t waste any time… day or night!

Lee gets a lot of attention, not only by kids, but also by adults, who just won’t stop staring at him. We don’t think they have the concept of “secretly staring” like we do in Europe. Guess who doesn’t get as much attention as she would like to? Exactly, it’s Johanna! Oh well, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger, little German girl!

After having mainly lived on noodles and rice to start off with, we have now discovered a nice little market where we can find fresh veggies and fruit plus tofu. Yippee!

Being vegetarian around here keeps you entertained! Since the Chinese almost never say “no” the following situation occurred to us: “Is that tofu?” “Yes!” “Great, and how about this?” “Yes!”… so in the end everything was tofu. Yes, you are right in remarking that we should have become suspicious by then, but we were simply pleased that for once we actually had a choice! The end of the story is that Johanna ate liver and Lee had some lovely bits of beef. By the end of our year in China, we will have probably “sampled” most animals!

It is still very warm and humid here, so most of the time we take a little nap around noon, since it is too hot to do anything else.

At the moment we are spending 24/7 with each other, but that will change from next week onwards when we start taking Chinese classes. Actual teaching will in fact only start on Sep 18th, which was a nice surprise. Still, we are looking forward to teaching as much as we are looking forward to learning Chinese. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

We will publish our first pictures during the weekend, so please check out flickr from Monday, 4th September onwards. We’d be glad to have you take a look at them.

Til the next bog!
Lee and Johanna