Familiar Food and Some...Not So Much!

One of the things I love about China is that we eat a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables! One of this things that is so annoying about China is that I can't find much in the way of frozen foods!

There is a small fruit and vegetable market just outside our courtyard. I can buy zucchini and carrots twice the size of what I find in Canada. Broccoli comes in the winter, potatoes and onions (red and white) are available most of the year round. Celery and eggplant (3 kinds) are abundant.
I can get apples, oranges, and large bunches of bananas.
Pineapple and strawberries and mangos show up sometimes during the spring and summer.
We also get pommello - thing gigantic grapefruit but not as bitter.
There is a small fruit that, when translated, is called Dragons Eye, not overly flavourful and the pit is rather large for the size of the fruit but it's something different to have on occasion.
There are a number of leafy green vegetables that I don't know how to translate. A lot of them look like spinach just lighter or darker, smaller or broader.
There's something called "bitter vegetable" which the lady in the shop advises not to buy!
There is one vegetable that I still can't figure out. It has a stem about 8 inches long and 3 inches thick - looks kind of like a broccoli stem but much firmer and then shoots into leaves at the top. The stem, not the leaves, is meant to be eaten, not sure what you do with it other than fry it (of course!).
One of our favourite vegetables, hmmm but it might not be a vegetable, is what might be called Garlic Shoots in English. If I'm right about the name and translation, it's the green shoot thing that grows out the top of a garlic bulb. These grow to about 18 inches or so in length and are great fried up with any meat!

While it is wonderful to have access to so much fresh food we rarely eat it raw because of the amount of cleaning required. Have you ever tried to get bugs out of a broccoli or cauliflower! Not easy and it's pretty gross to bite into a broccoli and find a little green work laying in the fork of two little broccoli branches! Therefore salad is also usually out of the question, it would take me close to an hour to make a tossed green salad.

I buy eggs at this same little whole in the wall place. No coolers, no fridge, cement walls and one light hanging from the ceiling. Once home, the eggs sit on a little shelf in the unheated part of the kitchen. I stopped putting them in the fridge about 5 years ago and so far no one has gotten sick!

We haven't gotten adjusted to all the available snacks in China so I do a lot of baking. But we have grown accustomed to some things. Dried dofu (tofu) for one. Available in many flavours such as curry, chicken, roasted meat, spicy, and really spicy! Or something called Zha Cai (no good English translation!), which I think is pickled mushrooms or pickled vegetable roots of some sort. Dried yak meat is a favourite - think yak jerky and you'll be close! Seeds and nuts are also a favourite but the nuts are a bit pricey these days.

Dofu/tofu is something best bought in a restaurant only because I still don't really know how to cook it well. It's available in soups, fried dishes, fairly bland or super spicy. Tofu can be either rather dry and firm or wet and wiggly. If ever you come to China be sure to get a whiff of something called 'stinky tofu' often cooked out on the streets!

Oil! It could have it's own category here. I'd guess that most families go through 4L of oil (that's the standard size bottle of oil here) in less than a month. When we had a house helper I would hid the oil bottle and set out a small 2C container that had to last her a week. More than once I found her using my olive oil (bought for a dear price from the import store and used only for a few recipes!), which I didn't hide, because she'd run out of the normal oil before friday!

Back to baked goods, the sugar here is not very refined, the granules are quite large, for sugar. At the local grocery store I can buy brown sugar which is very dark (still has a lot of molasses) and includes ginger and dates ground into it, or donkey skin and some other kind of medicinal thing!  The taste isn't so bad as long you don't know what's in it :) Just recently we've found 'normal' brown sugar at the import store for a reasonable price - d I can get brown sugar at the import store - so it's a bit pricey but better than buying it efinitely worth it! I also buy baking powder at the import store. Generally people here don't have ovens and don't bake so just about any baking thing is a specialized item. The baking powder is a cheap $7Cdn for about 3kg! Great price but surely it could come in slightly smaller tins!

Cereal isn't a Chinese thing, yet. So we can buy it at the import store but usually it's rice crispies or corn flakes. We eat oatmeal probably 5 out of 7 mornings a week! I've yet to see a toaster in the shops but we have a toaster oven which takes too long to use as a toaster! Incidentally that's okay since we make our own bread. Most bread in the stores are either too sweet or have raisins tossed in them. Honey takes up almost a whole aisle, jam takes up less than one shelf and only sometimes can I find peanut butter. PB and J doesn't happen all that often for all of those reasons!
Fresh milk isn't really a Chinese thing yet either! I have 4 1L cartons at the moment and a box of 16 little bags each holding about 1C. The milk is called UHT milk (ultra heat treated - so it doesn't really go bad but it anything healthy in the milk has been killed off too!), is usually 3-4% mf (though little 200 ml skim milk boxes can be bought), and tastes gross! It has a shelf life of 6 months! That's just wrong somehow. Usually we can find low fat milk which is a 1% milk.
As an alternative for breakfast, youtiao (pronounced 'yo' 'tee-yow'), is made fresh in the morning at the side of the road from about 7-8am. Translated, this local breakfast is called an 'oil stick'! Along the lines of a donut but much more oily and about a foot long. When fresh and still warm they don't taste too bad!

Noodles of one sort or another are the standard lunch fare: long and skinny, long and fat, long and broad, or postage stamp size. A large bowl of soup costs about a dollar...when we first came to China they cost just under 50 cents. The soups are delicious and the noodles are freshly made. Sometimes we pick up baozi instead, "bow (as in what a dog says) - zi", which are steamed buns, about half the size of a tennis ball, filled with some combination of meat or eggs and vegetables. The kids love these things and can eat about 8 each! They can be dipped in a soy sauce and black vinegar mixture.

There is much more to local cuisine but we haven't ventured into the likes of pickled chicken feet, deep fried tentacles (from some animal) on a skewer, animal intestines, and chicken heads!

Come back soon, I'm working on my first few adventures of this year with spring clothes! Surprised that can even be a topic?! So am I, but worth a few chuckles for you I hope :)

The Journey Home

After some turbulent flights - at one point the kids screamed rather loud from the plane dropping a bit, but they did so joyously as though on a roller coaster - we landed in Xining at something like 9:30pm. We collected all our luggage, waited in line for all the suitcases to be checked against our claim tickets (they actually do that here, nice!), and found the man waiting to take us home in his van.

Nothing in China ever stays the same for very long and I noticed this immediately as we drove out of the airport. The road was different. The signage was different. The airport is about 45 minutes outside of town and I enjoyed a quiet ride along the highway towards town. As we drew nearer I could feel the excitement welling up. I wanted to crane my neck out the windows, but they don't open, and see all that I could see in the dark. However Anastasia was leaning up against one side of me mostly asleep listening to an mp3 player and Sophia was sitting on my lap preventing me from doing anything!

Xining is entered from the east end when coming from the airport and we live on the far other end. First the train station came into view, well lit in the dark, and it looks largely the same but that is slightly misleading as a train station has been built passed our apartment complex and all passenger traffic is handled there now. Parts of the middle of town were next, is that the Red Cross hospital I can see, maybe that's the hotel where some friends of ours were married a couple years ago, there's wang fu jin (an upscale shopping centre), and there's the complex where so and so lives. Everything was decorated for the up come Lantern Festival. Bright lights. Colourful lights. Lots of dragon type statues as a welcome to the Year of the Dragon. And finally here is the highway turn off for our apartment. Looks the same mostly. The closer we come to our road and our home the more the scenery has changed.
     My road has street lights! Well, on one side of the road there are street lights, the other side has plans for lights as evidenced by the posts laying in the middle of the sidewalk!
     When we moved here almost 5 years ago our road ended at our complex and over the years it was extended but the land was left mostly empty. Right before we returned to Canada a year and a half ago there were new buildings going up. Now, there are at least 100 new buildings, each about 20 stories high. They dwarf our little complex made up of a dozen buildings not taller than 6 floors!

But our own apartment complex looks the same. It's packed with SUV's as so many people have come into town, some for the winter, many just for the holiday's. Our van driver drove down the little driveway to our entrance. It turns out the lock on the security door, unlocked with a key from the outside or a button on the inside, has since been changed and our key no longer works. So, at 10:30 at night we buzzed a bunch of our neighbours and yelled into the intercom, 'open the door, we don't have the right key!'. This seems utterly rude and very unneighbourly but our neighbours have done it to us so many times, some at 2 in the morning, it just seemed the normal thing to do! And it worked!

It was a warm feeling that rose up inside me upon walking into our apartment. The orange couch. The blue rug. The purple curtains. The red, blue, white, yellow striped futon type couch! These all make up my apartment in China and on this night they came together to feel like home.

Never mind that in less than a week we would be in a new apartment! To walk into a place on the other side of world, no where near where I was brought up and where people still look at me in surprise because I'm a foreigner, and feel at home is a most wonderful feeling.                    And I was tremendously relieved.

2 Families, 1 Heart

Our colleagues leave China once every two years for a group conference.
It is a chance to see friends whom I would never otherwise see.
It is a chance to worship with a large body of believers.
It is a chance to encourage one another through stories of how God has worked since we were last together! It has moved my heart deeply to hear that Jesus has been introduced to people in some very spiritually dry, barren areas.
It is a chance to walk with each other through tough times. One couple, who has only been in China for one year must return home for a time as the husband, just this week, was told he has a tumour. Another family leaving on a home assignment is unsure of their return because of an illness affecting one family member that local doctors have been unable to diagnosis.
It is a chance to witness change. Since last conference there have been 12 children born to our colleagues. At this conference we said good-bye to 12 teenagers who will graduate from high school before our next conference (and so will likely not be back). Some of these teenagers were the same age as Eli is now when we first came to China. I have photos of them allowing Eli, 1.5 yrs at the time, to "play" soccer with them!
It has been a chance for me to sit with a number of women and listen as the tell me about their past year. The struggles they have had. The loneliness that they felt. The struggles in their family at home. They are tired, they are worn out. With some I have prayed, with some I have listened, with some I have been able to offer good advice. This has been near and dear to my heart since coming through our previous term in China.
This is my family in China, there are more than 300 adults and children, and it is good to be with them again!

But this joy has required being removed, at least physically, from my extended family in Canada.
Looking to sell a house, looking to buy a house, continuing education, birthdays,  labour strikes, maybe moving across the country, being on the stage, celebrating together in the good times and supporting in the hard times...
These are things that I will miss being present for, experiencing with my family.
This is my family in Canada, there are ten of them, and it will be hard to be physically absent for such events for the next few years.

More than 300 and 12. These are my two families and I love them both but they will never come together and so, it would seem, that my heart will never be quite whole no matter what location I may be in.

Count the Cost

I recently became certified to administer a premarital/marriage enrichment course. A significant portion of this course calls attention to 'families of origin' (the families that we were raised in) on the premise that when we marry someone we are also, to some extent, marrying their family. It also asks questions about education, income, spending habits, conflict resolutions styles, relationship styles etc. The point is to get the couple to be aware of all those areas that may be relevant to the marriage and to begin to talk about them. The less that catches us by surprise, because there will be stuff in our marriage relationships that do catch us by surprise, the better. This is similar to a count the cost occasion. Helping you to be aware of many of the variables which will effect your marriage.

When Jeff and I began the process of working overseas we had to do numerous testing inventories: mental, spiritual, psychological, relational. Churches had to provide letters of support. We were evaluated during a two week long orientation  course. The difficulty of this life was pointed out to us. In short, we had a fairly good idea of what we were getting ourselves into, much like our marriage. Again, we had the opportunity to count the cost of heading overseas.

In Luke 14: 25-33, Jesus tells his disciples to count the cost of following him. I knew, fairly well, the personal cost of choosing to live this life. Our orientation program, training, friends, and books made sure we knew there was a cost to what we would do. But there was something, as far as my memory can remember, we were not told about. And though it is in plain sight in this passage in Luke - my eyes were pretty shut to it. The cost of following him is not just personal. The expense is not paid just by me. It is paid by my children, by my parents, my siblings, my friends. I suppose it's like being told to foot the bill for an event you knew about but didn't get to attend.

During times of transition, especially where I'm getting ready to travel from Canada to China, the cost to others hits me square in the gut. My life choices cause: separation, sadness, missed milestones, birthdays that are often remembered a day late or a day early and too often are never celebrated in the same location two years in a row...for other people, regardless of if they like it or not. It's hard to take kids away from grandparents knowing that your oldest is currently 8.5 and, potentially, the next time we all come together again he will be almost 12. It's difficult to ask a good friend to remain a close friend despite the miles, the time difference, and the likely possibility of not seeing them for the next three years.

It's one thing to count the cost for yourself and find it acceptable, but it's a whole other thing to count the cost for someone else and tell them they have to accept it whether they like it or not!

So to my friends, my family, my kiddos, thank you for covering part of the cost rather than just walking away. I realise, with each passing season, how much I have asked of you and am grateful that you continue to cover part of the cost of this adventure.