Loving Life in Xi'an!

Life is GOOD!!!  We are absolutely LOVING this experience we are having!!  We seriously couldn't have chosen a more awesome experience to begin our life as missionaries.  I think the hard part will be comparing everything to this first one!  We are reminded daily how amazing it is to be here doing what we are doing at this time in our lives.  It is such a blessing that we are able to do this while we are fairly young.  I’m not sure how some of the older couples that are closer to 65 keep up sometimes because it is a pretty crazy schedule and has a high demand of physical-ness to go along with it.  

Here are some of the physical aspects of China:

1   

     --Everywhere you go, you get there by walking.  Our closest store is about a 15 min walk.  We walk EVERYWHERE…to the bank, to the store, to the fruit and vegetable markets, to the subway (about 20 min walk), to the bus (about 15 min walk), to explore the city… You get the idea!  We walk, walk, and walk!  And, whatever you buy at the store must be lugged home.  We typically each take a backpack to the store with us and then load it up and heft it home.  I tell ya, we are building muscles in strange ways!

      --Getting to school each day requires running down 2 flights of stairs carrying our heavy briefcases (laptop, projector, cords, speakers, teaching supplies, etc.) and then hauling them up the bus stairs and down the aisle, only to repeat this step backwards to get home.  My arms are getting quite strong I think!  Plus, once we get to school, we go up, up, up to get to our classrooms (someday I will count the number of steps), carrying all our gear.  There are no elevators anywhere in the universities, at school or in the dorms that are 6 and 7 stories high.  Everyone must take the stairs!  We are definitely getting good exercise!

INTERNET

The good news is that WE HAVE CONSISTENT INTERNET!!!!!!  Well, as consistent as it gets in China.  We finally have our own internet that is secure so we aren't sharing with 7000 other people here.  It has changed significantly in that we can access the internet pretty regular.  We still have times where everything shuts down for a while and then it will come back on… we just have to be patient and wait it out.  We are getting pretty good at being patient!!!

COST OF LIVING

The cost of living here is quite cheap.  The other night we went out to dinner and afterward, stopped and got Jordan a haircut (I didn’t have the extra room or luggage weight to bring my hair buzzers) and here was our total:  20 yuan for dinner (we had yummy Muslim noodles) and 10 yuan for the haircut, for a total of 30 yuan ($4.92).  We about broke the bank that night! It is almost cheaper to go out to eat than to try and get ingredients to make meals here.  But, I still try to cook pretty regular because it gets old eating out every night. 

WATER

Water is an issue here.  We must only drink bottled water.  Even the locals refuse to drink the water.  For dish washing we add bleach to the wash and rinse water.  So far so good.  We must wash all fruits and vegetables with either bleach or a special food detergent before eating it.  Again, so far so good.  Brushing teeth requires some fancy bottle swishing and rinsing.  Next time you stoop down and get water from the faucet to rinse your mouth, say a little prayer of thanks for the simpleness you enjoy!!  

TAXIS

We had our first bothersome taxi ride.  We had gone about 20 min across town by taxi to meet some friends for dinner.  It only cost 20 yuan ($3.20) to get there.  When it was time to return home we caught a black taxi (most taxis here are green and yellow) and at first we were surprised at how clean and new it seemed.  Very quickly we realized it wasn't all good.  The meter started cranking up very quickly and the driver was going about 10 miles an hour.  At one point he pulled over and searched around and around inside the front seats to recover his cell phone which he had lost, all the while the meter is cranking up.  I started to get a little worried that he might be “taking us for a ride” so turned on my phone GPS and started tracking our progress toward home.  It was apparent he either had no idea where he was going or he was trying to get everything he could from us.  I started spitting out words I was looking up on Google translate to try and get him to turn where I knew he should turn.  He would act annoyed and ignore me.  We got more vocal and demanding and he started to respond, maybe realizing we were on to his game.  Finally, after 45 min and a 60 yuan fee (3 times what we paid to get there), we got close enough to home that we had him pull over and let us out.  We certainly learned our lesson…. Never take black taxis!!  We now know black taxis are privately owned and they pretty much do whatever they want, especially with dumb foreigners.  Whatever…fool me once….that is it!!  We understand it could have been way worse than what we experienced so we are grateful someone was looking out for us!

TUK-TUKS

Pretty much, our favorite mode of transportation if we can get one is a TUK-TUK.  They are motorcycles with a little cab attached to them (the same thing they have in Thailand).  They are generally falling apart and we wonder if we will ever even make it home.  The top speed for a tuk-tuk is probably 15 mph.  But, they are easier to catch than a taxi here in Xi’an, so many times we either walk or hail a tuk-tuk. They are referred to by the locals as “killer cabs” but that hasn't dissuaded us yet.  Believe it or not, they charge more than the taxis do but they are also more likely to stop and pick up foreigners than taxi drivers.  For some reason, taxis don’t like to stop for us foreigners!  A little frustrating!!  The other night I was out with a group of women and taxis were passing us right and left and stopping just after us for locals.  We tried to remain positive about that little obvious prejudice!  A tuk-tuk finally stopped but after smelling his breath and realizing he had probably had way too much to drink, we went back to trying for a taxi.  After about 30 minutes we finally got one to stop.  Oh the joys of city life! 

Well, time to get to bed.  It is late and morning comes early!!  Life is good.... 

Silk Road Tour - October 1-6, 2013

NW area of China Xinjiang Province is famous for grapes and raisins of every color.

This little girl is so cute!

Ancient Cities

Love the babies!

Ancient cities

Remains of ancient temple

Chinglish for "staff only"

Had to ride the camels with 700 other people!

Chinglish for "slippery when wet"

Terracotta Warriors

Amazing colors painted on every warrior

The Archer - one of my favorite

Travel is sometimes overrated!

10.13.13 - Xi’an, China

Here is what has been happening in this neck of the woods:

TRAVEL

On Tuesday, October 1st, we left on a 5 day trip to NW China.  The tour was organized by a man named Marvin Wu who plans several trips a year for all the BYU Teachers in China.  This particular trip was called the “Silk Road Tour” because the area we visited was part of the long Silk Road.  The Silk Road, or Silk Route, is a series of trade and cultural transmission routes that were central to cultural interaction through regions of the Asian continent connecting the West and East by linking traders, merchants, pilgrims, monks, soldiers, nomads and urban dwellers from China to the Mediterranean Sea during various periods of time.

There were 53 BYU teachers on the trip from all over China.  We all flew from our home cities and met in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang province.  The people living in this region, Uyghurs, are a Turkic ethnic group living in Eastern and Central Asia and look completely different from the people in our city,  mostly Han Chinese.  The Han Chinese are an ethnic group native to East Asia. They constitute approximately 92% of the population of China, 98% of the population of Taiwan, 74% of the population of Singapore, 24.5% of the population of Malaysia, and about 20% of the entire global human population, making them the largest ethnic group in the world.  There are 56 different minority groups in China!  Crazy huh?   

From Urumqi we traveled by bus (an extremely unpleasant experience given it was a 100 degrees outside and the A/C was broken the entire time) to see traditional villages of the Uyghur people, ancient cities and customs, a myriad of grape vineyards and raisins galore, as well as many cave and cliff dwellings.  Very interesting, but with no relief from the heat and bus, it was hard to completely relax and enjoy.  We basically went from hot bus to hot village to hot hotel (no hotels have A/C either and the beds are like a board..seriously) to hot bus to hot village to hot hotel with one night being even worse as we boarded a sleeper train around midnight, crammed 4 adults in a 6x6 room with 4 bunks and no windows or air flow…. Well, you get the idea.  We were pretty much ready to go home after the second day!  Oh well, it was an experience and one we will keep fresh in our memory to prevent us from booking another travel trip in China without very careful consideration.  The best part of the trip was interacting with the great friends we have made through this BYU program and then finally flying back to our personal home city of Xi’an on Saturday and spending two days seeing the sites here.  The city wall, the Muslim market and the Terracotta Warriors.  Many on the trip agreed it was the best part…we should have saved our time, money and patience and just met up with everyone here for the last couple of days.  Live and learn. 

FACILITY UPDATE

Kitchen -- We have purchased several new appliances that have made life so much better.  New toaster oven, rice cooker, crock-pot and vacuum.  Funny how small things make such a difference!  We also found some “liquid nails” glue and secured some warped boards down in the kitchen a couple of weeks ago.  Dad noticed they are coming up again so will have to do some more work.  Our tiny fridge is a little troublesome in that we don’t have enough room to keep much in it.  I have resorted to cranking down the A/C in our bedroom and putting watermelon and over sized veggies on a small desk next to the bed until more room becomes available in the real fridge. I call our bedroom the 2^nd fridge! 

Bathroom -- Our bathroom is better because we found some white caulk and redid all the nasty black moldy caulk that was a hundred years old.  We put duct tape around all the exposed hoses (there is no such thing as a goose neck for plumbing here which prevents the nasty sewer smell from coming back out of the drain), and I have several air fresheners and candles in the bathroom to combat the smell.  We also no longer have a wiggly and leaky toilet thanks to the inch thick and inch high caulk the handy man squoze (not a real word but I like it!) around the bottom of said toilet. 

Bedroom -- Our bed is no better and we are still trying to decide if we want to find and invest in a good bed for while we are here.  I think someone sold China a “bill of goods” when they introduced mattresses to the country because the only part of the mattress they have is the BOX SPRINGS!  They sleep on the BOX SPRINGS!!!  What in the world???  I keep wondering why on earth anyone would think that is even acceptable!  I do admit that after sleeping on several BOX SPRINGS on our trip, in twin beds and no A/C, I was SO happy to get back to our bed and our cushy 2” piece of foam that felt like heaven on earth!  Perspective…it’s all perspective!

SHOPPING

Since we have such a small fridge, we do shopping on a pretty regular basis.  We have little ma & pa fruit and vegetable stands everywhere, a medium sized supermarket within a 15 min walk, a Walmart (don't get too excited..it is still China with mostly Chinese stuff) just a short 30 min quick-paced walk away, and yet one more larger Costco type store that is a pretty good hike for us to get to but we use it as exercise, generally on Saturday mornings.  That is the good thing about shopping here, because we must each carry a backpack and several other totes to and from the store, it gives us a great workout!  Sometimes the backpacks are so heavy we can barely get them home and the tote bags are quite laden as well.  Our arms are a foot longer each, but no big deal. 

TRANSPORTATION

For the first couple of weeks Jordan was pretty intent on getting a scooter.  However, after being here for almost 2 months now, we have decided it is more hassle to have a scooter than not.  There is a high risk of scooters being stolen here so if it isn't completely locked down, and even sometimes when it is, it can disappear in a heartbeat.  Plus the fact that we are loving all the exercise from walking, walking and walking.  Someone wore a pedometer on our Silk Road Trip and reported at the end that we walked over 47 miles during the week.  We put serious miles on our feet and shoes here in Xi’an, as is evidenced by my favorite pair of flip-flops that were new when we left and now look like they are a year old. 

This past week was definitely a harder one but we are still staying focused and remaining positive.  We miss you all and appreciate your support to us as we continue forward on this ever changing journey that will shape us and refine us.  

Pictures to follow....