April

Life is rolling on here in China. April has come and gone in a flash. It seems that at the beginning of the month we were preparing for a visit from Anne, she came, she went, and *poof*. It's May. I'll start with the present and work backwards:

It's officially Spring/moving into Summer.  It's hard to tell the difference really.  But lots of flowers everywhere, the weather is mostly warm, and we've had a bit of rain.  

Andrew and I have recently determined that I have a bona fide addiction to spicy food, somewhat perplexing given my Midwestern background of meat and potatoes (and I mean, like, once in a while we would eat chicken or a pork chop for variety. or spaghetti with meat sauce.) And believe me, it's not that I've lost my love for mashed potatoes.  But I dreamed of Mapo Doufu last night.  (Homemade version below.)
 

It's not MSG that does it I think, since I don't cook with it at home (and we ask to have it left out at restaurants, but who really knows). I think it's Sichuan peppercorns, which are not so much outright spicy as numbing.   and addicting.
       
Continuing back in time - I'm on the mend from a cold I had this week. Despite that fact that I probably chop about 8 cloves of garlic for every meal we make here at home, can't remember the last time I cooked without ginger, drink green and ginger tea like it's water, take a Vitamin C pill just for placebo piece of mind, and wash hands like a crazy woman, I still got sick.  Ug.  I will note that dearest Andrew did not catch aforementioned cold.  

So I missed a few classes this week, but luckily made it on Thursday, which was learn more about the menu day. That means I'm finally starting to decipher a little more on the average chinese menu, beyond 水(water) and 米饭(rice).  I can, at this juncture, successfully catch the attention of a server (no small task in China), ask for a menu and for the bill.  I'm soon hoping to move beyond just pointing at said menu and saying 这个 (this) (picture menus, by the way, are ubiquitous here. and genius.)

Before the cold, Anne was here. Anne as in we've-known-each-other-for-something-like-25-years Anne. We've spent thousands of hours on the phone (most of which a. were probably 4th through 8th grade and b. drove our respective parents crazy), and to this day

I can hum the tune that her home phone number makes when I dial it (well - her parents' number now I guess). With all of those days spent randomly wandering the mall in Fort Wayne, who knew someday we'd do the same at the Forbidden City? Or the Great Wall?

Anne came, we saw, she conquered. I had been saving up the Beijing tourist circuit for when she arrived. Save for the Beijing Tap Water Museum (which is at the very top of my list of must-do soon), we saw it all. I actually had an exam right after she came, so Anne ventured off on her own while I was in class, brave soul.  All in all, I got to practice a bit of Chinese and she got to become the Valparaiso Public Library System Expert on China (Anne is a librarian by trade, and manages one of the branches.)  There were a few adventures involving long subway rides, a curling iron, bargaining for various souvenirs, foot massage, and climbing lots and lots of stairs. Fun was had by all.

Before Anne's visit is really digging deep.  And likely uneventful.  Just a couple pics from the visit:

(maybe you can't see the sign - "Look out Knock head"

Visitor Explained

That unexpected visitor was our landlord. This is the first we've seen of her. She's in town for a few days on a business trip and wanted to check in - she works for one of the big national banks and is based in western China. Mainly she wanted to chat about her son, who will soon graduate from college and wants to go study in America or England. So we chatted all about U.S. colleges and majors and the application process. This is the sort of conversation I have had many, many times because so many Chinese parents are trying to figure out how to get their son or daughter into graduate school overseas or, more generally, to arrange his or her life after college.

Anyway, it looks like our landlord is now eager to be friends with us. We are being taken out to dinner tomorrow night and we have an invitation to visit the beautiful province of Ningxia.

A visitor

We have a visitor tonight. Someone knocked on our door - a couple of times - and since I don't generally answer the door in this country, I left it up to Andrew. He answered, they talked for a minute, and then he invited her in and offered her some water. And they've been talking ever since. I thought my Chinese was coming along pretty well until now, where for the last 45 minutes, I've been listening to a conversation and I have no idea what's going on. And I still don't know who she is, but I trust Andrew on this one.

My version of their conversation goes something like this - she likes something, Andrew says America is something, she says something about China and America in the same sentence, there's talk of school, and they both think things, and then some of those things are not bad and ok - wo xihuan, Mei guo, Zhong guo, xuexiao, wo juede, renhou, bucuo, ke yi - "I like, America, China, school, I think, and then, not bad, ok" - with a few pronouns thrown in for good measure.

Spy photos: