Watermelon

I bought this a couple of days ago. I'll just post the pictures here and let you all check it out yourselves. I've been trying to find a watermelon knife for several months with no luck until last week.


I'd venture to say this is my greatest purchase in China. My new watermelon knife actually has several functions. Although the
label says it's only for watermelon (right next to the company slogan,
"Resist the Germs!"), I think Sarah and I have found several other
creative uses:

Thanksgiving- No longer will you have to lean over your guests to
carve the turkey at Thanksgiving. You can handle this family tradition
from the comfortable distance of two feet.

When grandma comes over and needs a little help carving her steak you
won't have to get up and walk over, just whip out the watermelon knife
and presto! It's taken care of.

Ribs- For that time when you must barbecue the entire rack at once.
Flames a little high? That's okay with the new watermelon knife. You
can seperate the ribs into portions from your lawn chair.

Besides these functions, it's just great to have a knife that cuts
through a watermelon in one slice. No more sawing action to get all
the way through, this baby makes one clean cut.

Marriage Market

In my Chinese culture class we discussed marriage and dating in China. Our teacher mentioned that at some parks small marriage markets are set up for singles to find potential suitors. Each "market" is set up by the parents. Advertisements stating things such as job, hobbies, and what that person is looking for in a mate are strung up along clothes lines just far enough apart for people to walk through the aisles.

The other day several of my classmates and I decided to take a trip to the People's Park; a large wooded park in the center of city. There just happened to be an activity day being held at the time. Nearly every corner was packed by crowds of people singing karaoke and dancing. Public exercise and dancing is big in China. I know of two places near my house where hundreds of people gather faithfully every night to dance. It's not much on style, mostly arm flapping and shuffling of feet, but it looks like everyone has a good time.

Anyway, the entire park was packed with dancers and singers. One crowd was doing a group sing-a-long. A small band sat on stools in the middle of the pack, while audience members shared song books.

At the marriage market, dozens of parents were milling around looking at future daughter or son-in laws. There were no young people. My classmate Deborah and I decided we would peruse the aisles for future husbands. I stopped and looked at one description just a little too long. An older couple walked over and in proud terms started describing their son to me. He speaks English, has a good job, lives in Singapore. This couple was so intent on telling me about their son that I literally had a hard time walking away. All I could think about was how sad it would be if my parents tried to sell me at the marriage market.

That night I called home just to make sure.

Life as usual...

There's a tower in Chengdu that looks vaguely like this: I don't have a picture of the actual tower, but you get the point.

Since the first time I saw this building I've wanted to go up in it. As I've mentioned before Chengdu is entirely flat, so finding a view is difficult. For months I've been bringing it up to people in hopes that one of us will remember to make the trek on a clear day. Finally I had the opportunity to ask a group of Chinese people whether or not they had been in the tower and how much it cost. Everyone stopped their conversation and just stared at me.

"Why would you want to go up there?"

"I don't think people are allowed up there."

"There's nothing for you to see."

"I don't think you can."

"Why do you want to do that?"

I was really startled! Did these people really mean to say that the television tower, with all the windows and come-to-me tourist appeal is actually off limits? Did they really mean to say the television tower isn't a tourist trap at all? Why in the world would you build it then?!

I have no conclusion to this story except to say that I have yet to go and try my luck at getting up.

Life

Life has been rather slow lately. With my homecoming just over a month away, I'm finding myself increasingly anxious about the amount of stuff I need to finish, and at the same time losing motivation to do it. My weekend has dragged by while I sat on my floor and tried to finish a paper. I'm out of practice and the topic is boring. Inbetween the paper and surfing the internet, I found time to write up a script for a skit I have to perform in my spoken language class.

Other useless stuff is killing my time too. I'm still working my way through a large stack of classic novels I bought at a sale in Shanghai. English books are hard to find in Chengdu, and those that are here are both pricy and old. Why Chengdu bookstores sell only the classics I'll never know. Chinese students of English should be offered a selection of easier to read novels than those that even native speakers struggle with. Anyway, that's a topic for another time.

The most exciting thing of my week was the discovery of a HUGE cockroach in my house. It was nearly two inches long, the kind of thing you only see in movies. I've seen these things roaming the street before, they're a type of free-range roach. I saw it just as I was about to run out of the house for class. I realized I forgot my phone so I ran back in my room to find it. When I did, I saw the beast crawling slowly across the floor. After the initial shock (adrenaline rush turn into flight or fight mode) I grabbed a shoe and squished it.

I was in denial about it all morning. In class I reported to my friends that it was a "huge bug" that caused me to be late. I don't have cockroaches in my house. We're fairly clean and there's no other evidence of infestation. Whenever I do see cockroaches in China-- in hotels, buses, or in apartments, they're always the small kind. Like I said this was a free range roach, not a resident.

When I came back that afternoon I was determined to do a massive cleaning of the entire house. If any evidence turned up I was going to buy roach motels by the dozen and then spray the entire house with roach killer and let it settle while I went shopping. When I went to clean up the original "giant bug" it was still moving. That was the moment my denial changed into acceptance. There was a roach in my house and he was going to die.

Thank goodness nothing else turned up. I've been keeping a tight watch on things all week, and I've concluded that my roach came in through the window when I wasn't looking. Nothing to be worried about. Nothing.

Post office adventures

I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago when it happened, but I've been busy doing everything except blogging. As we leave in just over a month, Sarah and I have been getting things ready to pack and ship home. She bought a basket that she wants to send to a friend, but it's too large for a carry-on, and too awkward to check in. We decided that we would take her pile of stuff and my smaller pile to the post office to send it. We'd heard that if we send it the cheapest way home-via boat, then it would take two months.

The problem with sending stuff from a Chinese post office is that you have to buy the box from them and then have your things hand searched before they are sent off. This means that anything you want to send has to be small enough to fit in the post office boxes, and you must be ready to unpack for the search.

There's a post office about a ten-minute walk from our house. As with everything in China, sending our stuff was bound to take several trips over several days' time. We finally found an afternoon when we were both free to make the hike and buy the boxes. When we got there, we asked for a couple of their largest boxes. When the woman brought them out, we realized they were not large enough to send the basket. We explained that we wanted to send the basket to America and asked what we should do. At first they just stared at us, finally after some negotiations they agreed to mail the basket so long as we found a larger box ourselves. Fine.

The next couple of days were spent searching for a large enough box to fit all of Sarah's stuff. I was successful in packing what I wanted to send home into my smaller box, but still had some left over for another trip later. Several days after acquiring the box, Sarah and I took off carrying our loads down to the gate of the apartment complex. The boxes were so heavy that by the time we got there, we were drenched with sweat. Fortunately the complex guard guys keep a shopping cart at the gate for just such an emergency.

We hauled our stuff down the road, the shopping cart squeaking and people staring the entire trip. We pulled up the post office a while later and shoved the cart up against the side of the building to keep it from rolling away. As soon as we walked in the front door, the same woman from our last visit announced to us that they did not ship internationally. What!?

This is such a good example of China. She could have told us the first time that they don't ship internationally when we were buying boxes and asking about shipping to America! But no, she waited until we followed what she told us to do, took an afternoon off and made the haul. No amount of complaining would do the trick; they we're under no circumstances going to send the boxes. Needless to say, I was not happy.

A couple of days later we brought our boxes down from the apartment (again!), found the shopping cart, received the warning from the guard guys about not loosing it and started walking in the other direction to another post office about a mile away. Again everyone was staring at us. People slowed their cars to gape out the window, and those in the bike lane were nearly the cause of several accidents themselves.

We made it to the post office in one piece. Most importantly though, no one was killed along the way.

Sarah's box is obviously not standard issue and the woman balked when we told her we wanted to send it. She was certain that it was against the rules and could not be done. Rather than take the complaining method to get what we wanted we went on the offensive. We began to argue that because the other post office directed us there, they had to send it for us. She countered that they didn't know what they were doing and were just trying to get rid of us.

"But we believed them!" Sarah countered. We were not going to leave until something got done. We argued in circles for several minutes, she telling us there was no way, and us asking what then we were supposed to do. After some time passed and we still hadn't left, she gave in and agreed to send the boxes for us.

If I went to a post office in the US and was told I couldn't mail a particular item, I would just accept it as law. In China, my feeling is there's an excess of rules and nobody knows them. They'll tell you something is against the rules, but the feeling is clear that they are just making it up or are acting on a vague notion of what the rules might say. What is this?