The Stray Dog

A couple of updates before I get into it.

1. We finally got our residence visas squared away.  This time, we had to stay at a different hotel because the other one wouldn’t allow us to cheat our way into getting a TRRF.  A Temporary Residence Registration Form can only be issued if you have a “residence” in Shanghai for at least one month.  So we book a hotel for a month, get the TRRF, take care of business, and then check out early.  Since the new hotel didn’t allow pets, we had to find a dog sitter for Smudgie.  Luckily, Vivian was happy to do it.  So hopefully he wasn’t too annoying for her and she’ll be willing to do it again for us at Christmastime. 

2. We figured out the hot water situation.  There’s a separate water heater for each bathroom and there isn’t one in the kitchen so we just have to wash our dishes in cold water.  Also, the water heaters are able to be turned on and off by a switch in the bathroom that’s right next to and looks exactly like the light switches. 

So we apparently accidentally switched the water heater off when we were trying to figure out what the switches do and we thought that one just did nothing.  Nobody told us about this feature.  Our old apartment was different too so we had no idea.

Anyways, the story of the day is about the stray dog that lives in our apartment complex.  When we first saw her, it was obvious she had recently had a litter of puppies because her teats were bloated.  So Adam nicknamed her Saggytits.  I don’t like that name, but there really is no better way to describe her.  Anyways, she wears a collar made out of a piece of belt so I don’t know if she used to have an owner and they kicked her out when she had puppies, or if she’s always been stray and somebody made a crappy collar for her.  But she has a friendly demeanor so I think she must have had some human contact.  By the way, someone took the puppies away and sold them.  I only got to see them once before they disappeared.  I was walking home from the grocery store when I heard whimpering in the bushes so I went to investigate.  Someone had put a cardboard box back there and the puppies were clambering around all over each other.  They were about one month old.  I pet them for a little while, and then a lady came over and started counting them.  I think she thought I was going to take one.  How do you say “I don’t want your stupid mutts, I already have a dog.” in Chinese?

Anyways, since she seems like a nice dog, I’ve been taking Smudgie up to her whenever we see her outside.  She seemed pretty aloof the first few times and Smudgie didn’t care either way which is amazing because usually when we see someone else’s pet dog outside, he growls and barks at them.  But to be fair, the other pet dogs are also male.  Well, I guess Saggytits has really warmed up to Smudgie because now whenever she sees us, she comes running up and tries to play with Smudgie.  She zooms around like a greyhound and sometimes she bops Smudgie on the head with her paw.  At first, Smudgie was just like, "Hey, why you do dat?" But now I can tell he wishes I'd take the leash off him so he can go running around with her.  It's great that he has a friend, but it’s very distracting when I’m trying to get him to poop.

So what I’ve been doing now, is taking an extra leash with me when we go out.  If we see her, I put the leash on her and tie her to a tree while Smudgie does his business.  Then we have a little play time.  She’s amazingly patient

 

 

And here are a couple of Smudgie shots.  I’m letting him grow his big boy coat out for the winter: 

 

 

 

Eating Out in China

On the 10th, we had our third wedding anniversary.  Adam asked his translator, Vivian, for her opinion on a good restaurant to go to.  So Mr. Liu drove us there, and then a waitress took us to our table.  After that, we didn’t really know what to do.  We established with the waitress that we didn’t know very much Chinese when she asked us “Ji wei ren?”  And I had totally forgotten that “wei” is the polite counting word for people so I stared at her blankly until it came back to me.  She was just asking how many people there would be.  After I told her two, she served us tea and then never came back.  I think she didn’t know what to do with us.  We wondered why no one was bringing us a menu so we called Vivian and had her talk to the waitress.  It turns out it’s one of those places with a 3-D menu, where they have all the dishes on display in one corner of the restaurant.  We prefer that to a normal menu anyway.  So we picked our dishes and they were all freakin’ fantastic.

Tortilla-like things

Lamb and asparagus

Not sure what to call this but every time we’ve had it, it’s been amazing

Then this week, Kevin (Adam’s boss) came to Rui’an, so Mr. Yu (the general manager) took him, us, and a couple other people out to a seafood restaurant.  Being right by a river and the ocean, seafood is big in Rui’an.  Next to the bathrooms with no stall doors that we encountered in Xi Shuang Ban Na, this restaurant was probably the most “foreign” place we’ve been to yet.  It was out in the ghetto, so that was kind of scary.  But I knew Mr. Yu wasn’t going to take us somewhere sketchy so I wasn’t too worried.  This restaurant also had a 3-D menu, but about half of it was still alive.  The other half was laid out on ice. 

An assortment of fish and snails

No idea what these are

Scary fish heads and stingrays

We could not figure out what the bottom two were or what the stuff in the pink basket was.  The upper right bowl was full of chopped up fish and the upper left tray had eels.

Crabs

A fish head cross section next to some cuttlefish

The chopping block

 

Luckily, Mr. Yu didn’t order anything too weird, and the dinner was pretty good.  I also got to try yangmei jiu, which is wine made from that fruit I was raving about back in July.  It tasted a lot like red wine.

And then of course, there’s Do & Me, my favorite KFC knockoff chain.  Here’s the logo:

We eat there more than we should.

'Merica, I Miss You

About 7 months ago I did a blog about things I miss and things I don’t miss about good old ‘Merica.  Now, there’s not really anything new that I don’t miss.  I’m still happy without religion, snow, and not talking to people.  J  But here are a few more things I thought of that I can’t believe I’ve gone almost a whole year without now:

 

1. Reliable, high speed internet.  First of all, it seems like the only option over here is broadband, which is bad enough.  Top it off with the fact that you need a VPN in order to get to any decent websites.  Even if I didn’t use Facebook, Youtube, or Blogger, the Chinese government blocks the strangest things.  I’d be searching for design inspiration via Google Images and many of the images would be blocked.  WHY?  They’re not porn or anything.  Anyways, you need a VPN and we have two different ones because they are spotty and sometimes they just don’t work.  So yeah, I’m excited for when I don’t need to use one anymore.

 

2. Lean ground turkey.  It used to be a staple in our house!  Now our only option is between fatty ground pork, and even fattier ground pork.  We buy it anyways, though, because it’s one of the few meats that comes without bones in it.

 

3. Being able to blend in.  Ever get that feeling that someone is watching you?  Well you’re being paranoid.  Come to China and then you’ll know what being watched is like.  I can really turn some heads, if you know what I mean *raises eyebrows*.  But seriously, almost every time I pass a group of two or more people, I hear the word “laowai” being softly spoken amongst them.  That means “foreigner”.  And when I go to the grocery store, I feel like everyone is looking at the contents of my cart.  Oooooo what’s the foreigner buying?

 

Side note:  You know what’s crazy?  There’s a little convenience store right outside our apartment complex.  We drink a lot of Coke Zero so when we run out, sometimes we’ll go there instead of going to the grocery store.  The price was 3 RMB per bottle when we first got here but they’ve since raised it to 3.50 because they know we’re buying it!  Sneaky sneaky!!

 

4. Knitting, sewing, and other crafty hobbies.  I’m not sure these things even EXIST here.  Maybe sewing (I mean as a hobby, not a profession).  But knitting?  Scrapbooking?  I guarantee you scrapbooking doesn’t exist.  And if knitting does, I sure would like someone to point me in the direction of a yarn store!  I do miss my little projects.  I have a great idea for a scarf and I can’t do anything about it.

 

5. Dishwashers.  Our housekeeper used to wash our dishes.  Now she’s gone and I am so sick of hand washing everything.  We’ve also been going strong without a microwave. I just make sure to only make enough food for one meal so I don’t have to deal with reheating it.  But having to use a wok or pan (or both) every day does make for more dishes to wash.

 

6. Dill pickles and soft pretzels.  Just two of my favorite foods and they simply don’t exist in China.  Wah….

 

7. Not being woken up by roosters… ever.  Did you know…. roosters don’t crow at the break of dawn.  They start crowing before dawn, and they keep crowing well after the sun has risen.  They are dumb and deserve to be eaten.

 

I wrote that last one because someone in our building got married and the day of the wedding I woke up to a rooster, which is not a common occurrence.  When I took Smudgie outside, there were two decorative cages with six roosters in them sitting right outside the door.  They must have been for the wedding dinner.  Sorry, no interesting pictures.  Here is Smudgie being a cute snugglemuffin.

 

 

Pointless Trip

So we just wasted 2 weeks in Shanghai.  Apparently Guilford’s business license was out-of-date because the Chinese government was supposed to do an inspection and they haven’t gotten around to doing it on time.  So, this same government is delaying our residence visas and Adam’s work permit until the business license is fixed.  The inspection won’t happen until after the week long holiday that’s coming up in the first week of October.  We’re going home tomorrow as planned, but now we have to come back again in October.  So, more road trips for Smudgie.  I’m mostly angry because eating out every meal in Shanghai is expensive, and also fattening.

So since we haven’t been doing anything, this blog will just be a bunch of random pictures.  I did get a new lens for my camera, which was more expensive than I wanted it to be.  But since I was already paying a lot, I decided to upgrade to a lens with super zoom because there have been many times when I wished I could’ve zoomed farther.  I used to have an 18-55mm and now I have a 75-300mm.  It may be a little overboard, though, because now I can’t take normal pictures of things that are right in front of me.  The picture below was taken from across 4 lanes of traffic, and this is with the least amount of zoom I could do: 

Smudgie is letting me know he doesn’t have to poop by sitting on my feet:

A trash can with a special receptacle for dog poop:

Smudgie playing in our bed linens:

A hoard of people doing light exercise outside of a mall:

Really cool octopus sign:

 

 

In other news, even though I haven't studied Chinese in a while, I surprised myself by being able to understand a couple of people this past week.  At a restaurant we accidentally ordered something that had a lot of peppers in it because from the pictures they just looked like green vegetables.  I tried one and made a face and the waitress said, "Zhege la ma?"  Which means "Is it spicy?"  And I was able to say "Yes!  Too spicy."  Then we were in a taxi today and the driver turned around and told us there was a traffic jam so he was going to go another way.  Actually, I only understood the words for "traffic jam", but that's really all I needed to know in order to tell him, "meiyou wenti!" which means  "no problem!".

The Crash

First, a little background.  Our driver in Huainan, Mr. Liu, was a crazy driver.  He always seemed like he was in a rush to get us to and from work.  At times it was nice because we got home nice and fast as long as traffic wasn’t too bad.  But there were times when I genuinely feared for our safety with some of the moves he pulled.  But, nothing ever happened.  And after experiencing amazing driving by a tour bus driver in Spain, I tend to trust professional drivers.  Well, our relocation company wasn’t able to find a driver that was willing to take Adam to work and back in Rui’an because it’s a long drive and the driver would have to just hang out in Taoshan Town all day until 5:00.  Pretty boring.  But somehow, Mr. Liu agreed to relocate and continue to be our driver.  That’s dedication!  He started on Tuesday and I noticed the difference right away.  It used to take Adam about an hour to get home when he took a taxi.  Now it takes him 45 minutes. 

Today Mr. Liu drove us to Shanghai so we could renew our visas and residence permits.  We needed to drive because we don’t have a dog sitter yet so Smudgie needed to come with us.  We were about an hour into the drive when… Mr. Liu rear-ended someone pretty hard.  Shortly after that, we were rear-ended more lightly by the car behind us.  I didn’t see how it happened because I was busy trying to take a picture of what looked like a Christian church.  Smudgie was sitting on my lap looking out the window.  I was just about to take the picture when all of a sudden, my head was slamming into the back of the driver’s seat.  First I checked to see if Smudgie was ok.  He was on my lap so he didn’t have far to go.  If he’d been sitting on his pillow in between me and Adam, he might have flown into the front of the car.  Luckily Smudgie wasn’t hurt.  He was, however, freaked out.  And in his fright, he let out a rather juicy fart which stunk up the car for quite some time.

Then I noticed my camera was broken:

Arrrrggggg!  I thought it was completely broken but after messing with it tonight I discovered it was just the lens that broke.  So we’re going to try to find a new lens in Shanghai.

We decided it was safer outside the car than in, just in case more people decided to get in on this miniature pile up.  So we got out and Adam took a couple pictures with his phone:

 

We were damaged way more than the people we hit, but Mr. Liu eventually ended up giving them 500 RMB and they were on their way.  That’s it, no exchanging of insurance or anything.  We’re extremely lucky the car could still run because I don’t know what would have happened if we’d needed a tow truck.  I don’t know how long we would have had to wait, or if the tow truck would have had room for all of us and our luggage.  So I’m just super thankful because we were in the middle of NOWHERE.  Here’s a picture of the church:

We were in a “remote” location to say the least.  And we were on a bridge.  Here is the extent of my injuries; one blood blister:

 

We're safe and sound in Shanghai now and Smudgie is fast asleep already.

 

 

Even with the setback, we made it to Shanghai in record time.  Hopefully I can get my camera fixed soon because I don't like having to borrow Adam's phone.

The Grounds

I regret never taking any pictures of the grounds around our old apartment so here are some pictures around the new one.  Notice the absence of people.  :)

This is the pathway I take Smudgie down for potty breaks

At the end of the pathway there's this circular area paved with tennis court rubber in green and red.  I have no idea what it's for and have never seen anyone using it.  And there's a sandbox at the far end.

Rui'an has a ton of these canals running through it, probably to catch all the rain water.  It rains a lot here and just yesterday it rained tropical storm style with thunder and lightning and high winds. 

Bridge over the canal

Area just outside our front door and new apartments being built on the other side of the canal.

On a particularly sunny day, Smudgie curls up on his pillow to soak up some rays.

First Week in Rui'an

Living in Rui'an has been pretty relaxing so far.  I looooove being able to walk to the grocery store.  No more taxis!  I forgot to mention that I actually won’t be working at this plant like I originally thought.  I’m not sure of the exact reason, but I don’t really care.  I’m happy to take a break and enjoy China more.  I am loving how deserted this city is during the day.  Rui’an is a business city so most people have day jobs.  As such, our apartment complex and the surrounding area have almost no one roaming around during the day.  Smudgie and I can take walks in peace, only occasionally getting stared at.

Our building

Remember when I mentioned that our apartment has heat lamps in the shower?  Well now we know why.  There doesn’t seem to be any hot water in our apartment.  Not in the kitchen or either bathroom.  We think the heat lamps are there to keep you from freezing your ass off as you’re showering in luke warm water.  It’s tolerable for now, but I’m worried about what it will be like to shower in the winter time.    

There’s an overabundance of grown women who are afraid of Smudgie in our apartment building.  Something is wrong when a 10 lb fluff ball causes you to jump back and cower.  I was taking Smudgie out yesterday and when the elevator opened there was already a family of three in it with a 6 year old daughter.  I was holding Smudgie so there was no chance of him jumping on them, but even so, both the mom and the daughter gasped with fright and hid behind the dad as I entered the elevator.  This isn’t the first time women have been scared of him, just the most over-the-top reaction I’ve gotten.  And it wasn’t like once they realized he was harmless, they calmed down and felt stupid for being afraid.  No, they maintained their scared expressions until I got off the elevator.  Honestly, he’s a dog, have you not seen a dog before?  I’d understand if he were bigger but there’s just no excuse for this.

Don’t be scared of me, love me!! 

 

We don’t have a housekeeper so I bought a whole bunch of cooking oils and sauces and am learning how to use them.  So far so good!  One thing I'm really missing is stoves that have 4 burners.  And ovens!

 

Our neighbor has a kid that practices his saxophone every night and we can hear it loud and clear.  He's not very good, either, but there's nothing we can do about it.  He does play "Glory Glory Hallelujah", which is interesting.

 

Leaving Huainan, Arriving in Rui'an

Before we left Huainan, Mr. Tong (one of the three partners in the Huainan JV) invited us to dinner with some of his closest friends because he couldn’t make it to the dinner we hosted.  I honestly thought he just blew us off because he was mad about Guilford pulling out, but apparently not.  He also gave us a gift: a set of coins bearing the image of King Liu An, one solid gold, one solid silver.  Liu An was king of Huainan 1,800 years ago and he’s the inventor of tofu.  Huainan people are very proud of this and they never let you forget it.  J

 

Then on Sunday we packed and cleaned.  We generated a lot of trash, and the trash bins outside are small so we had to distribute our trash around the neighborhood under the cover of night.  Eight apartments all share this one little bin that gets emptied every day:

 Smudgie stowing away in a suitcase!

He’s really going to miss this curtain.

Take a look at the progress of the construction that has been going on the entire time we’ve been here:

November 2011

September 2012

We seem to have accumulated a lot of stuff.  We moved here with 5 suitcases and now look at all the crap we have:

Well, we were going to take all this stuff in a van but since we decided to bring our mattress and washer/dryer combo, the relocation company brought us a truck.  They only brought a very small car to drive us and Smudgie, so there was only enough room to bring our computer bags.  I was about to pack the toiletry bags but there wasn’t room.  But they said the truck would be arriving a couple hours later than us so I shouldn’t worry. 

Smudgie was worried at first we were going to drop him off at the housekeeper’s and leave him.

But once we hit the highway, he settled down.

The trip took 10 hours and our driver was very efficient.  He only stopped for bathroom breaks/gas and we just ate snacks all day long.  I think he wanted to get there as quickly as we did!  He introduced us to some really awesome snacks and I hope I can find them at the RT-Mart.  One was these little wheat crunchy things that kind of look like little dried maggots.  But they are fantastic

We finally got there and the apartment is awesome, although the kitchen is not very clean.  Take a look at our epic, but really ugly dining room table:

 

And here’s the very large living room:

 

It got to be about 9:00pm so we called Gary to find out when the truck would be arriving.  He gave us the devastating news that it wouldn’t be here until noon the next day.  Apparently the driver got tired because he’d been up since 5:00am (he drove from Nanjing to Huainan in the morning) so he decided to take an unscheduled nighty night break.  This was not supposed to happen.  We didn’t have any clothes, toiletries, or anything with us.  Smudgie has never slept without his crate either so we didn’t know how that was going to go.  Luckily we had a pillow for him in the car so that became his bed last night.  Smudgie surprised me very much on this trip.  He’s grown up so much from a year ago.  He used to whine continuously in the car and puke without fail every time the trip was longer than 10 minutes.  This time, he only whined a little bit at the beginning when he thought we were going to leave him.  But as soon as we hit the highway, he realized he was coming with us and he laid patiently the whole way!  And no puke!  Now last night, without a crate I wondered how he’d behave.  But he was just a little angel and he stayed on his pillow the whole night.  We slept on the couch nearby.

Our stuff finally arrived at 1:00pm today during a brief period of time when it wasn’t raining!  So that’s one good thing about the truck coming late because it was pouring last night.  For lunch we had Do & Me, which is a KFC knockoff chain and it’s really good!

Random stuff:

Just two days before leaving Huainan I saw my very first Chinese frog.  It was a little brown guy.  Now I've been in Rui'an for just over 24 hours and I've already seen 3 frogs/toads.  Yay!!

Our complex has a lot of trees that have this pretty flower: