trust issues

Chinese people have very interesting ideas about trust. I am forever having Chinese friends or even strangers on the bus, tell me to be mindful of thieves trying to steal my purse. It has a long strap, so I wear it diagonally across my body, and it usually falls behind me. It has a snap closure, so I very seriously doubt that short of cutting it off of me, there's any way anyone could relieve me of it, or any of its contents, without my knowing. They always want me to wear it in the front though, so I can see it and be sure.

Chinese are also people that put bars on their apartment windows... regardless of whether they live on the first floor, the sixth floor or the twentieth floor. Naturally, The Crack Den 2.0, my old first floor apartment in Songyuan, was an unfortunate, rare exception to that rule. People were always telling me there that I shouldn't open my windows even if I was home because I might not hear an invader. Here in Xiamen, my eleventh and a half floor bedroom windows have bars on them (though they're not very secure so I'm not even sure what the point is). My eleventh floor living room balcony does not have bars.

So you have things like that, where people are maybe a touch paranoid, but then you have things that go 180 degrees in the opposite direction...

As I've mentioned before, China basically doesn't have clothes dryers (I have met one person that owned one in past 14 months). The washer will either have a killer spin cycle or it won't spin at all and you'll have to manually move the clothes to the "dryer", which will just spin them a bit.

So everyone hangs their laundry out to dry. Everywhere. Apartment building rooftops, public parks, in front of restaurants, I mean everywhere; there is always laundry hanging in random places you KNOW nobody lives. And apparently no one is worried about their clothes being stolen. Now, I don't worry about my purse being on my back or someone coming in my eleventh story window (heck, if they can manage that, I will just GIVE them something for the effort, I'll be so impressed), but my laundry is something I wouldn't leave to dry outside of my own apartment.

More importantly than clothes, let me tell you about money. Actual money. A lot of businesses that I frequent don't have a cash register. Maybe they have a cash drawer, a completely unorganized drawer full of loose change and bills with absolutely no system of accounting for it at all. Or if they're fancy, maybe they do have a cash register, but usually the cash isn't divided like you might think, with a slot for the 1s, a slot for the 5s, a slot for the 10s and so on and so forth, the cash register is just a facade for the cash junk drawer. And it's common for someone to give me change out of their own pocket instead of the drawer. You trust your employees this much?! Granted a lot of businesses are small and family, but not everyone there is family...

And then there's the weird situation I am in with my rent and utilities. I pay rent quarterly here, same goes for utilities (water and electric). My landlord gets the bills for the utilities and then I pay when I pay rent.

After living in my apartment for one quarter, when I should have seen my first round of utility bills to pay, the property manager said she didn't have them because she had too many properties to manage, she just told me an arbitrary amount and expected me to pay. After quite a bit of back and forth, I paid the random amount and she agreed to email me all past and future utility bills. Never got a thing. 

After the second quarter I was here, I asked for the bills so I could pay, but she wouldn't even let me pay rent, she was on holiday and couldn't be bothered to pick up any money I transferred to her. I ended up paying rent three weeks late and still no utility bills. She told a Chinese friend of mine if she didn't produce them I didn't have to pay.

This sounds great and all, except that this woman has 3,500 RMB in deposits from me that I want to get back when I move out- 3,000 RMB for the apartment and 500RMB for utilities. I'm thinking if she keeps not asking me to pay, she's going to screw me in the end, never show me any bills and keep my deposit. My Chinese friend says that the landlord and I are friends so she probably just won't make me pay at all. What?

So, we don't trust people with purses and breaking into our apartments, but we trust everyone in the public with our laundry, all employees and utilities don't need to be paid... or something like that.

bizarre old man skin disease

One piece of my health problems I had beginning in August turned out to be a kind of eczema, eczema pityriasis rosea to be exact. I found this out during a trip to my American dermatologist on a short trip back to The States in late September-early October of last year.

Unfortunately, she got my biopsy back after I had returned to China, so I have had to rely on intermediaries or interwebs for more info like: How did I get this? (Interwebs don't know. It's not a thing anyone else in my family has.) Will it ever go away? (Probably, say interwebs, but I apparently belong to the two percent of people that suffer recurrences.) How do I prevent outbreaks? (I don't.) Interwebs also suggest that eczema and pityriasis rosea are two different things, instead of pityriasis rosea being a kind of eczema, like my derm seemed to say.

I still have it now and have been getting regular-sick, the cold or flu-ey kind, more often since I developed this, because it's a fun kind of dermatological thing that also can come with upper respiratory tract infections, fevers, headaches, nausea and fatigue, yay.

At this point, I'm sure you're thinking, "This might be a bit of an overshare, or at least significantly less interesting, compared to her usual posts..." BUT, there's a reason for it.

An older, American male friend of mine here has another form of eczema that has gotten significantly worse since he moved to China.

Another American male coworker, my age, was complaining last week about a weird skin patch on his leg that developed since he came to China and hasn't gone away in months. He showed me and the older gent and we both agreed that it's definitely eczema.

Same thing with another younger, American male friend here.

I think it's a little strange that so many people around me have developed, or aggrevated their existing, eczema here. The coworker that's had it for a while before China explains it to me as allergy related, and he alters his diet and what touches his skin in his affected areas (not an option for me anyway). Wikipedia doesn't seem to be saying mine is allergy related though, and as far as I know I'm not allergic to anything. 

Weird. Sucky and weird.

Tomb Sweeping Day

Not too far off the heels of Spring Festival is Tomb Sweeping Day/Clear Brightness Day (this one was actually Thursday). I ever-so-politely invited my SO and I to a Chinese friend's family home in Shi Shi, a suburb of Quanzhou, for the holiday.
Shi Shi is about an hour and a half away from Xiamen by bus and about thirty minutes outside of Quanzhou. It's apparently known for a booming clothing manufacturing industry. Coincidentally, Quanzhou is also where the school I initially signed on with when first coming to China is located.

I knew my friend's family had a lot of money because A.) she has not one but two siblings and B.) she's going to grad school in England and her father is paying for the whole shebang. When we arrived at her apartment though, I discovered that were we staying at the nicest home I have ever been to in China.

Napoleon? Of course.

I absolutely love this wall. The door to the storage room (or what in a western home would be used as the pantry) is all but hidden when it's closed!

Oh yes, that is a projector you see over the couch and central air vents over the loveseat. I've never even heard of central air here before.

I think she felt a lot of pressure to entertain us in Shi Shi. The 24ish hours we were there, we rode in three of her family's cars (three!), went to two coffee shops, three restaurants, one temple, one museum and one beach. When I asked her what she'd be doing if we weren't there, she said sleeping, ha.

The temple in Shi Shi was nothing too special. More colorful than your typical, northern China temples- much closer in style to Taiwan's temples, but I realized I hadn't been to a temple in southern China at all yet. The best part was definitely the view of the harbor.

Because Buddha like juice boxes too you know.

After the temple we went in to Quanzhou to go to the museum (and as my third Chinese museum, I have decided they're all pretty awful).

This is somehow underwear. My Chinese friend was also confused...

They are way too trusting with these tiny "No Touching" signs and no other barriers or precautions to prevent said touching.

Seriously, too trusting.

I mean come on, this guy is begging to be touched.

Does this bother anyone else? It remind me of this (second photo from the bottom).

That night we ate out with her family for her brother's birthday. Her family isn't big on drinking (which we discovered when we were the only people that ordered beers with dinner). After dinner we returned home to eat chocolate cake and watch a movie. Everyone except her brother went to bed after the cake though; it was a very chill night. Not what I was expecting at all, especially since there had been rumblings of ktv for the birthday boy.

I was also surprised to find that their entire movie collection seemed to be subtitled American action movies. Her was just apparently the only one interested enough to stay up and watch Minority Report (after he'd turned off Looper because it was too long).

Awesome projector screen movie viewing experience.

The beach the next day had a sand sculpture contest. There were a bunch of Disney sculptures and some Chinese themed designs as well that I enjoyed.

You know you love this. I certainly do.

After the beach it was time for us to catch our bus home to Xiamen and leave the family to do the actual holiday thing. Tomb Sweeping Day is about honoring ancestors by visiting their graves and burning "money" for them to use on the other side (this used to be real, but now they mostly print fake money for it). Not exactly something we needed to crash.

Chinese New Year

Life has finally just about returned to normal in China after Chinese New Year/Spring Festival. Spring Festival is the biggest, most important holiday all year and interrupts almost all aspects of life here for about three weeks. I missed the whole thing last year, but I did catch Lantern Festival, which fell soon after.

This year, Spring Festival was quite soon after my family had come to visit me for a two week excursion around China and my SO had moved to Xiamen from The States. My SO and I decided to conserve funds and stick around town whilest everyone else was traveling for the holiday. It was really quiet around town, especially the area we live in, which was actually quite nice and relaxing, though it was pretty challenging to find food or entertainment outside of our home.

We really only did one authentic Chinese thing over the holiday. For the actual day itself, Chinese New Year, we joined a coworker at her family's home an hour outside of the city.

We sat around drinking baijo with the grandparents and parents (my SO's first and probably last experience with baijo, I think). We had a big family hot pot lunch where we were seriously force overfed. We went for a walk in "the country", which turned out to be a themed park with paddle boats, farming exhibits, a ropes course and other random treats. I stumbled upon and joined a grandpa, son and baby trio shooting off fireworks in (at?) "the country". And then we went home because we were exhausted.

Spring Festival didn't seem like as big of a deal here in part because everyone goes home to their families and few people are actually from Xiamen, and also in part because fireworks are illegal on the island. Lantern Festival actually happened without us even knowing until the night of because of this (which was SO disappointing). Ah well.

skewed vision

Chinese people have a bit of the same stereotype-y ideas about looks that we do. The same way that someone in The States might say all Chinese look the same, a lot of Chinese would say that all non-Chinese look the same. 

In Songyuan, many Chinese thought my black, Jamaican friend and I were sisters. Tonight on the street, someone told me I look like Beyonce. I'm about as white as they come.

So, clearly, there are some interesting things with perception going on here.

But I've come across something else pretty funny recently. I dyed my hair hot pink a few weeks back, and naturally have gotten quite a bit of attention for it. What's been surprising to me though, is the number of Chinese people that think it's my natural hair color.

After assuming it's my real color, they will almost always tell me there is something wrong with me. I don't even know what to say to that. I can't imagine even a child anywhere else possibly thinking this color was natural.

this week's highlights

1.  I saw a rat the size of a guinea pig fall from a freeway overpass onto an old lady's shoulder. Hilarity ensued. Many Chinese are afraid of tiny pet dogs, so if you can imagine a pet dog sized rat...

2.  A child in one of my classes threw a fit and wouldn't let other kids draw cards from his hand during a game of Old Maid. After he started crying about it, my Chinese teaching assistant explained to me that he was upset because he didn't want to lose money. He's five.

3.  I invited a Chinese friend to do something later in the week, four days in advance to be exact. The day I invited her she told me she wouldn't be able to come, four days later, because her boyfriend has diarrhea.

4.  I saw a guy riding a bike in a t-shirt that said, "MICHAEL JACKSON NEVER TOUCHED ME."

5.  An elevator opened in my building to two twenty-something men fiercely, and I mean fiercely, making out, who then proceeded to do a terrible and fantastically awkward job of pretending nothing happened as they got out of the elevator. Too bad being gay isn't allowed here.

6.  When buying multiple cases of beer for a party, the shop owner asked me if I had friends coming over. I explained that I did because of a holiday and she asked me if it had to do with Jesus. Priceless.

random pix: for the ladies

This was in the nail salon down the street from my apartment. They laughed when they figured out I was taking this photo during my pedicure.

Subtle, right?

This is for a business in my building. I think they remove butt cracks via health food.

You'd never know it at a glance, but this is an ad in my elevator for a nearby gym.

They apparently offer umbrella dancing classes?