Nathan's Blog

Nathan and his wife Elizabeth are presently teaching in Nanjing China.They were the young couple that were great to me during my whole stay in Hangzhou. He has a blog which I read regularly. He posted two entries that you MUST read if you really want to understand what it is like living in China as a Lao wai (foreigner). Both of them are dated Sept 13 2007 -Our Bike and You Know You Have Lived in China too Long...... They are soooo true -

His comment on driving in China is right on the mark. The Chinese are the best defensive drivers I have ever seen. Once I got used to it, I actually felt very safe RIDING (not driving) around in the speeding, weaving and lurching cars. Even though I probably have more than a million USA driving miles experience I would never voluntarily drive in China, I don't have their skills.

His You Know you Have Been in China Too Long list is a scream! Make sure you take the time to read them! He forgot a couple though --
89. When you think its perfectly normal to wear the same set of clothes for a week straight
90. You get so used to warm drinks you don't even bother putting your sodas in the fridge
91. You NEVER turn on the faucet when brushing your teeth
92. You start thinking the English don't have such bad teeth
93. You open your umbrella on sunny days
94. You don't think it is strange to walk by underwear hanging on trees to dry
http://www.whereisnathan.com

Remodeling…. Or Messing Up My Nest

Kudos, to the people that can survive remodeling. Especially, if you are living in it at the same time. I am fairly patient but I guess my strong nesting instinct is finally overriding my patience. I can nest almost anywhere and it doesn’t have to be here in my tiny red tin roofed cottage. I nested just fine in the late 60’s when I was moving around from base to base with my Marine Corp husband and I nested fairly well in China. I just need a space that I can call my own with some of my stuff in it. And the stuff needs to be fairly organized.

Obviously, I am remodeling. It was past time to make a couple of repairs on my 1940’s cottage so that it would be a little more safe and livable. I had the outside painted, some rotten decking and siding replaced, the 16 wooded windows in the living room replaced, some rewiring and had my bathroom updated. It doesn’t sound like a whole lot but as Bob (my great contractor) warned me– it is always more than you imagined - not in money but in disruption.

Updating my bathroom meant moving the bathroom door, which meant rearranging the bedroom furniture, which meant getting a new dresser, which meant painting and re-carpeting the bedroom, which lead me to the decision to re-carpet the other two bedrooms also. That decision led to the job of ME actually having to clean out the bottom of my closets so they could install the carpet – not one of my favorite jobs as proven by the number of moldy shoes I tossed out. And then there is the construction DUST to deal with, it can get onto the tiniest places. Can’t they make dustless drywall mud?

They ARE getting close to finishing. Basically, just a little of the bathroom and bedroom to finish. The carpet is being laid today. I am hoping I will have a bedroom to sleep in tonight because all the furniture of the 3 bedrooms is spread all over the house and porch and it is already 2:30pm. I may be sleeping at Rosie’s tonight. With all the furniture shuffling my Internet is disconnected which is adding to my distress. They are messing up my NEST.

Side Note –the guys were done by 6pm that night & I slept in my own house - but not in my bedroom yet (still under construction). Couple of good things that I keep reminding myself - is that most of the dust producing jobs are done and I can now get to my underwear drawers. This means I can start putting all my laundry and other stuff away. I still have lots of pictures to re-hang which is a drag because I am “tool challenged” . I can use a shoe to pound a nail like any other female – but some of the shelves and bigger pictures will need a little more than a shoe. Guess I will have to dig out the hated toolbox. Just 2 or 3 more weeks- maybe. Then my nest will be finished. (for a while)

Lima Tours

Lima was our last stop. Saturday morning we went to two museums. The first and best one was The Rafael Larco Herrera Archaeological Museum which is the world's largest private collection of pre-Colombian art. Rafael had collected 45,000 pieces of pottery with some of gold, silver, semi-precious stones and textiles thrown in for good measure. Not sure if this guy is classified as a collector or a grave robber. But at least his stuff is still in Lima - whereas the 5,000 items excavated from Macchu Picchu in 1912 by the American Hiram Bingham are NOT in Peru. It still is housed in Yale University's Peabody Museum. Supposedly he put them there for "safe keeping" Yeah right... Probably the most notorious pottery in his collection were the erotic ones. The erotic pottery depicted normal types of sex and birth. The only strange thing was that in all of them the women never looked very happy. Our second museum was the disappointing National Museum. The only interesting thing here was the museum shop. This is where I finally found my "every trip souvenir" a refrigerator magnet.

That afternoon we had our official city tour. We drove by the beach, past a couple of ruins, and visited a church and their catacombs. Going back to the hotel we had an unexpected treat when they drove us past the Japanese Embassy which was taken over by terrorist in 96. Our book club had read Belle Canto by Ann Patchett which is a great fictionalized book based on the hostage situation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_embassy_hostage_crisis

Great Peru Picture

We had beautiful weather and beautiful scenery for most of the trip - we were so lucky. Peru is not a place I would like to return to, but I am really grateful I got to see it - not even my broken ankle made me regret going. Peru was worth the hobbling around.

Cemetary

After leaving Puno with our best tour guide of the whole tour, we traveled on some really bad roads including one section that was reduced to one lane because of rocks the striking teachers had put there. The rocks were small enough to be easily moved (my guess 20-100 lbs at the most) but they hadn't been and they looked like they had been there a while hampering traffic. Strange. Anyway our guide was great in that he answered all our questions that we had stored up - so a lot of the Peruvian history and tidbits you have read about in these blogs were from him. After about an hour of bouncing around the road we arrived at another part of Lake Titicaca where there were some burials towers along with souvenir stands and "pay-to-take-my-picture" children.

Side note: Most people here are so poor you really didn't mind giving them money for a photo and buying alpaca hats that you will probably keep in a drawer for the rest of your life.

The tower above was a tomb. They buried their dead in a squat position and in a inverted cone shaped container. The size of the outside tower depended on their rank. The towers were more examples their spectacular stonework. The circular depressions in the outer stones were filled with a ball of cement-like stuff to hold it together. (Remember this is an area that has a lot of earthquakes as you probably read about- It is amazing that so many of the Inca structures survived). Clever!

I was looking around the Internet to find the name of the place I mentioned above - which obviously I couldn't find it since I still have the blog title of "cemetary"- Paula do you remember? Anyway I found this neat website while I was surfing. Try it.

Lake Titicaca Algae

If you haven´t seen the show called "World's Dirtiest Jobs" it is because you are probably not a guy. It is definitely a "guy" show. Anyway Lake Titicaca has lots and lots of algae growing on top of the shallow waters around all the boats and by the hotels. Definitely turns off any thought of taking a dip. That late afternoon when arriving at the port, we saw a dump truck and a shovel type of machine trying to pick the nasty algae up. There was a guy on the top of the truck shoveling in the "misses". It appeared that sometime the big shovel guy would "miss" on purpose and hit the shoveler with lots of the slimy green stuff on his pants and boots. yuck. We found out later that they use it as fertilizer.

The Taquile Island Climb

That's me looking down to at our boat (it's one of those small white dots on the center left of the photo). Two more hours in a boat and you arrive at Taquile Island. This island is a TALL dirt and rock island. I stupidly thought that I could do the climb with my damaged ankle and I did because after we got off the boat - it left us at the first dock and traveled around the island to the other side - so no turning back. Going up for my ankle was only a small problem when compared to the huffing and puffing (and I thought I had become adjusted to the altitude - HA). Thankfully, on the way up there were lots of kids handing us the leaves that you crush and sniff to help you breathe. Surprisingly, going down was harder on my ankle (and hip) with the 530 uneven, unpredictable stairs. To make the trip down safely I led only with my right foot which made it being really hard on my right hip. I was so slow at both going up and down we didn't have time to look at all the stuff the people were selling on the sides of the narrow path. The outside meal at the top of the hill was good- fish, bread, fries and beer. (Restaurant bathroom was also outside and just a pit)

As you can tell I mostly seem to remember the climbing part of this trip, but the island has a pretty neat history. You can spend the night here with locals in their small homes (definitely NO private baths here) and if you want to find a wife bring a big boom box. That is supposedly how the modern boys attract the girls. Not sure what you need to bring if you are looking for a guy. Also if your marriage didn't produce children in 5 years, you move on to someone else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taquile