another day in paradise, china style

So I just typed for 20 minutes and it all just got deleted randomly. Blogs suck. This will now be the abbreviated version.

Sunday morning. Woke up early and had some pancakes. Turns out you don’t need as much batter for just me as you do for my whole family. I now know.
9:30 bike ride: On the way out of the apartment there was a huge traffic jam. The folks who live below us were celebrating a wedding. Turns out when you only have one kid, you got to go big. So in this case big turns out to be renting 2 Hummer H1’s and 1 H1 stretch limo. Turns out Changchun city planners did not have Hummers in mind when they laid out the streets. So the stretch H1 is trying to make a right hand turn down a narrow alley. After a gazillion tries, he finally ‘goes American’ and punches runs up the 10” curb, runs over a few shrubs, and goes on his way. This is what it looks like to go from a 3rd world country to being a global superpower.
The bike ride took me to the capital G ghetto. I wasn’t completely lost; I just didn’t know where I was. Turns out china knows how to do ghettos that are way more ghetto than American ghettos. Lots of shacks and lots of trash, but all the people seemed just as happy as could be.
So they’re putting a freeway through the ghetto. The one picture has a mom and her small daughter picking up sticks in the foreground while cranes are working the grounds where I’m assuming there used to be houses. The next picture shows the 2 walking away with their haul of sticks. I’m afraid they won’t get a lot of money for those sticks but they spent a lot of time collecting them
There was also a dude using a pickaxe to tear up a gravel road. He was doing about 1 in2/minute. He was on a road that was 30 feet wide and ½ mile long. He was by himself. I’m thinking if he works 7 days a week, he could be done by about 2035. Maybe. Or he could talk his buddy in the crane 50 yards away to give him a hand and he would be done tomorrow. China is a crazy place.
Went to church again today. Kind of interesting. It’s an hour service and the sermon/homily is like 5 minutes. The Catholic Church loves liturgy. Stand up, sit down, recite, pray, sing, recite, repeat. Takes a little getting used to.
So after the service I met a delightful couple and their 3 young children. They moved to Changchun 3 weeks ago. He works for Siemens-VDO right down the street from jci. They lived in Mexico, then Germany, then Alabama, and now China. It was all great right up until she asked where our kids would be going to school. When I told her she said, ‘oh that will be great. I’m working there starting this fall as their counselor’. I wonder if Dee would have wanted me to punch her for taking the job she had applied for or not. Life is not without its twists and turns.
After church, went to a Chinese restaurant with the priest and the Chinese philosopher with the Greek name that I can understand when he says it. The reason I knew it was a Chinese restaurant was because a) it had all of 4 tables, 3 of which had chairs. B) It had one window in the back looking out on a nice panorama of slum apartments with laundry and trash being the primary visual delights C) There was donkey on the menu.
Now some might have steered clear of the donkey. But since I’ve had boiled cabbage and tofu, I didn’t think donkey could be worse. Turns out it tasted just like roast beef. They shaved it nice and thin and it seemed like you should put it on a sandwich. You can see it in one of the pictures.
Ended the evening watching a movie. It was Chinese with English subtitles. It had Jet Li and one of the dudes from matrix reloaded. Pretty impressive cast. The director’s list of credits was little spottier with ‘Jason meets Freddie’ and ‘Chuckie’s marriage’ being the 2 top-tier movies in his portfolio. I guess you have to start somewhere.
Finally, I found out the word for mouse and rat is the same in Chinese. I got into an argument with the Chinese friend who didn’t understand why Americans always want to split hairs with our words. They were basically the same so they should be called the same thing (he took issue with the English words ‘rabbit’ and ‘hare’ as his primary argument). I ended up winning the argument though because the Chinese had to come up with a new word for your computer mouse because nobody wanted to use the cursor manipulating tool called ‘your rat’.