April miscellany…

Miscellaneous = 其它

This was one of the words on a recent vocabulary list from Cece’s Chinese class. An odd word to teach a beginning Chinese student. I can think of hundreds of words that would be a lot more useful to her right now. Anyway. A good word for me tonight. I have so much stuff flying around the desktop on this computer… and no time to organize it for posting. And so, in no special order and with no particular significance (and in some cases, no significance at all) here’s some recent 其它

Most recently on my kindle have been: Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum (good), The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (super), and The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht (fabulous; I could not put it down. A contender for my best book in 2011, though the year is young.). I keep thinking I should be reading more about China, but I’ve shied away from my China books. Maybe being fully immersed in it all is enough for now? I am, however, clipping through: When a Billion Chinese Jump by Jon Watts. A good read for insight into current China (which is different than the China of 10 or 5 or even 3 years ago), and one that leaves me worried for all of us (the environment) and sad for China… losing so much of itself to things western…
There are many wonderful things about our time in China. One of them is the girls trying to help Art and me in our efforts to figure out (fill in the blank) where we are, how to get to the next place, how to find/buy something, how to fix, etc, etc… We do a lot of problem solving here and mostly they’re a part of that. At home (I realize now) most of life is seamless to them…
The girls went on their first Beijing sleepover on Friday night with two Chinese sisters. Had a blast. Some things are the same everywhere…
The tooth fairy has been to our apartment three times (Elle: 2 and Cece: 1). And we may see her one more time before we get out of here. The Easter Bunny also made it; he left modified baskets with no jelly beans, and no peeps, but lots of sugar and fun girl things. Apparently, the EB outsources to IKEA here….
Homesick? Not really. The girls miss their friends, but neither has been homesick and we’ve not had a single teary “I want to go home” episode. I think we’re just too busy for any homesickness to surface. We also have a reasonable end date. It’s not like we moved here permanently.
Fluorescent lights are BIG in China. In our apartment, for example, we have glaring flourecent tube lighting in the bedrooms, the living room and the office. The kitchen and bath, on the other hand (you know, the places where you might actually want task lighting), have scrawny 40 watt bulbs. Weird.
Of course, our kitchen has no stove so we don’t task ourselves too much in there. We eat out or carry in dinner most nights. Tonight we ate at our favorite restaurant on campus: the Angel. It’s one of the schmancier places at Renmin, and the menu is about 174 pages long… the food is delicious and one of the hostesses gives us “come back and save” coupons. So we do.

Now, the misc/random pics:

Steve Jobs and Facebook are on the covers of best selling books here...

The nicer malls have all kinds of these "Learn English" centers. This one is Disney branded...

Chinese homework...

Elle showing Papa the art show entry her class did. American girl living in China learning about Aboriginal artwork...

A local mall...

We let the girls do indoor climbing at this mall...

When in Rome?

High...

Fearless...

New shoes...

Pink bunny...

For about 80 cents (on campus) you can buy a large wedge of hot street dough: plain or spicy with scallions and peppers... it's quite good!

I will do an entire post on Renmin soon. It's a huge campus with lots of new and lots of old...

Here's Cece (several weeks ago) at the front door of our apartment building. Using these big heavy canvas pads as "doors" (instead of simply using the actual doors) is a very popular thing to do here. On that cold, early morning in February when we first arrived, I assumed this was the loading dock and that we were coming in this way because of our suitcases... Ha.

Here's Elle in front of the same doors two days ago. The big heavy canvas pads are down, and up instead are thick plastic strips. I don't know, exactly, why they're opposed to using the regular doors...

Floors 1 through 16 of our building house female graduate students. In their apartments, they have no shower or bath facilities (and no hair dryers allowed) and no kitchens (and no electric kettles allowed). So every day they get their hot water (for tea, and presumably noodles) in these thermoses. There are always a bunch of them on the stoop...