First Weeks...Shanghai and Guilin

Hey there, and welcome to the blog! This is the way we intend to try and keep folks up to date on our adventures in China.

For those of you who don't know Coleman was asked to consult for the oncology marketing group for a six month assignment here in China. He is still with Eli Lilly (the same company he has been with for almost 7 years). They officially asked him the first week in December 2008. Later that week Coleman and I went on a house-hunting/check-it-out trip for about a week. We then came home for a couple of days. The packers came and took our stuff, we flew to Utah on Christmas Eve to be there with family, and then we flew to Shanghai on January 9th 2009. It was a whirlwind but a great blessing. We love our house and American neighborhood here in Shanghai. We love our driver and Ayi (maid/cook/nanny). And we love being here. It has been a great adventure for our family!

Over Chinese New Year our family went to the city of Guilin ("gway-leen"). It is said to be one of the most photographed places on the earth and is very beautiful.

Lunar New Year is China's big holiday like we celebrate Christmas. Coleman got that week off of work and that is the time that everyone goes home to be with their families. All the ayi's and drivers and workers leave Shanghai and go to visit family. Thankfully ours still worked when we needed them. We flew to Guilin, but I can't even imagine what the train stations looked like!! I hear it's beyond nuts. There's even a Discovery Channel show called "Shanghai Bus Terminal" about the madness that happens as people try to cram onto trains and buses to get home for New Years.

In Guilin we went into the Reed Flute Cave (that is where James is standing). It is huge and has more animal/vegetable shaped stalagmites and stalactites than you could ever want to see. Really it was amazing. We saw some of the most unusual and beautiful mountains, hills and caves that I have ever seen in my life.

While in Guilin, we took a trip to Longsheng County, which is about a two hour bus ride from Guilin into these huge mountains. Here were are overlooking the "Dragon's Backbone" which are these rice patties that have been carved into the mountains. They are still harvested every fall and are truly breathtaking. On our way up we would occasionally see little patches of gardens carved out of the steep mountainside. It was amazing and a rugged life for these people.

After we got up as far as a bus could take us we began to walk the winding stairs to the top. There are about 20 different ways to get there, so we were careful to follow our tour guide that we had had the whole week. All the kids were troopers. Grace was in a sling and all the kids did great although it was not uncommon to see Coleman with a child on his shoulders and Grace in the front pack. We saw several things on our way up that were quite entertaining.

Dried rat is a common food specifically in this area, and many men there put dead ants in their wine to give them strength. We also saw more of the snake bile wine that is very common for this area. There are actual dead snakes in the wine bottle.

We had a delicious lunch (sans snakes and rats) half way up the hike at this little town nestled into the mountains. You can see a part of it in the picture. There we ate a rice and meat mixture that is cooked inside a bamboo and you cut open the bamboo and eat right from there. We also had dim sum of some awesome food that tasted like it had been at least partly cooked over an open fire. There are many back-packers in this city and the air smells so good it reminded me of being in a ski resort.

The women of this area are known for their long black hair. They put stinky fermented rice juice on their hair as their shampoo and it keeps it from going gray until they are at least 60 years old. The women's hair is about 2 meters long (that's over 6 feet) and they only cut their hair twice in their life. They wear it up in a bun on their head. Also the women wear a lot of silver, and the bigger and heavier thier earings the more respect they have earned from their families. Many of the women have earlobes with long holes that look like they are about to rip!

The life there in Longsheng County was really amazing and rugged. Healthcare is not exactly how you might picture it, though you figure it they eat rats and drink ants, well...

We had earlier that week seen the type of "doctor/hospital" each little town has. It is nothing more than a medicine man's little store with jars of all sorts of herbs and animals. (I did buy something that you put on your head for headaches. We'll see how it works.) Some of the very wealthy could get on a bus and travel 2 1/2 hours away to a bigger hospital but that was very rare of anyone to do that - especially not for anything like childbirth, yikes!

The fireworks go the whole week of Spring Festival (the week starting with Chinese New Year). The first night at midnight they go off - and we learned an important fact - the big fireworks explode about 8 stories off the ground. How do we know? Our room was on the 8th floor of the hotel and at midnight the fireworks were deafening. Coleman got up to see what all of the noise was about and the fireworks were literally exploding outside the window of our hotel room. Someone had lit off a battery of them from the ground below! Everything goes during Spring Festival! The fireworks start again at 6 and 7 am to get everyone up to show that you are not lazy. That is the day that all the families are together and if you sleep in then your family will think you are lazy and that is not good! Especially if you want a red envelope with lots of money in it.

This is what parents and grandparents give out, and some children/grandchildren really get more than others depending on how they approve of them and everyone knows what the other kids got. When the kids grow up and get a job earning real money then they give to their parents and they may or may not get any more envelopes.

Another important tradition around Chinese New Year is the orange tree. It is like our Christmas tree, and the orange is a symbol of prosperity, so people give and receive a lot of oranges during the New Year celebration.

It is also common for employers to give their driver and ayi's a months worth of salary in a red envelope for chinese new year. Gift giving is interesting - no cut flowers it reminds people of funerals (and they wear white to funerals) no clocks because it sounds too close to something talking about visiting your parents basically at their death beds and no green hats because that's what a man who is avoiding his wife would do...who wants a green hat anyway.

We are getting accustomed to the hard beds in hotels and everywhere in China!! We ate enough chinese food during our stay in Guilin that, toward the end of the trip, we found a "Papa Pizza" "where the people are honest" and we were in heaven. We ordered enough pizza for that night, breakfast the next day and then hit it again the next night. Guilin is not like Shanghai where you can get a lot of western food, but there are a couple of restaurants that were closed for the holiday. There wasn't even cold cereal in the supermarkets - but there are always good chips and candy - and that has saved us!

While in Guilin, we went on a fun cruise down the Li river and our tour guide told us that the people on the different mountains travel to the next one by going down to the river and then taking the river to the mountain they wanted to get to. It was way too rugged to try to navigate by foot and the local buses did not go there. It really hit home when she said that. It is so beautiful because it is untouched, but untouched because it is so dangerous!

After the cruise, they dropped us off in this cool little city called Yangshuo. It reminded me of being in a city in the Alps. On the street there was a man making animal shapes out of syrup that tasted a lot like honey. He would melt down a block of some hard candy in a little pan in front of us and then pour it from his pan into any shape we chose on a on a wax board. He stuck a stick in it so we could hold it and did the whole thing in about a minute. Here is the dragon that he made for us. He had a wheel with about 20 different animals you could pick from. He was go good I'm sure he could have done anything we wanted. Our tour guide said she always used to save her money so she could get one after school when she was a little girl.

On our trip to Guilin, we also saw buddhas (not pictured at left! that's actually Coleman and Grace in front of Elephant Trunk Hill), Ling-Ling and Ping-Ping the pandas, learned to paint at a famous art gallery and bought a beautiful painting of Guilin. We enjoyed the 33 seater bus (because that's all the tour company had left due to the holidays) just for the nine of us (our 7 +tour guide+driver). We went to a place on the river called Elephant Trunk Hill because you guessed it it looks like a huge elephant getting a drink from the water.

Ellie was standing there and a man started to cut out her profile using a regular pair of scissors and thin piece of paper. It was amazing!! It was very accurate and we gave him some money and she kept it.

Later we went to a gallery where everything was cut from paper and bought an intricate dragon "to protect our house". The craftmanship is amazing. They can not make a mistake or the whole thing is ruined.

Our trip to Guilin was very memorable and a great way to start our time in China.

We came back a couple of days before the end of the holiday week and hit the Shanghai Aquarium. The aquarium was very nice and not cheap. (Especially because a family pass was for two parents and one child. Each additional child was just buying more tickets. It is little things like that that keeps reminding me I am not in Indiana anymore.) We saw some of the most amazing things! We started out seeing all the venemous and deadly underwater creatures so it was hit from the start. We saw animals in sizes that I had never even imagined. We had an upclose look at a swordfish. We saw these Japanise Spider Crabs the size of Adam, and big tanks of sting rays and sharks and turtles and fish that were all huge!!!

Whenever we pause for a few minutes while we're out, a group forms around us. We feel like rock stars...This is true for every place we go in Shanghai and elsewhere. People are crazy about the baby, and they want to take our pictures - especially the three younger with their fair skin and blue eyes. They always count the kids and can't believe we have five. Then they inevitably give us the thumbs up. One woman said to me "you must be very happy because you have five children." When we are walking along and I see them counting I just look up and say "wu ge" (pronounced woo ga, it means five, as in five children) so they don't have to ask how many I have. On the airplane I swear people were coming to the back of the plane where we were sitting, pretending to need to use the restroom just so they could talk to us :)

Coleman went to a sales meeting his first week here and they asked him to stand and introduce himself. He stood and said he has five children and there was a noticeable gasp in the crowd, but then people think we are so lucky. The Chinese are very loving and family friendly. I have talked with many women who wish they could have more, but it's only one or you get fined 5 times your annual salary and no one can afford that. The only way to have two is if you and your spouse are only children, then the government will let you have two; or you live in the country and you have a girl first you can have a second child.

The picture of Grace shows the booties made for her by our tour guide's mother while we were in Guilin. The kids are so adored and are often given gifts - mostly candy.

The children in winter all look like the Michelin marshmallow man because they have so many layers on (except for the hole in the clothing for their bum. Diapers here are seasonal - there are more in the colder months than warmer due to the handy hole in their kids clothes:) I realized that it is because most of the people do not have heating in their homes and many even stay outside in the day because it is warmer than in thier homes. My poor ayi the first week was just sweating because she was not used to how warm I keep the house and she had on all of her layers.

If I ever go out to get a massage (cheap!) or something with Grace they will put a blanket or towel on her. I take for granted the fact that I go from a heated car to heated house, and it's not even that cold outside. It's been in the 50's and 60's since we have been here. My kids have ridden their bikes and played on the playground every day we have been here. I have to beg James to put on his coat! So they make me feel like I am the negligent parent because my kids only have on two or three layers.

One thing I have learned here is that people have sure perfected their trade or whatever job they are doing. It's great because they are very accurate and efficient. Its downside is that people don't really have any other options once they start doing something. They don't change careers mid way through like we do in the states. Even our driver told Coleman that he wanted to be a school teacher, but it wasn't paying much when he was young so he became a driver. Now the times have changed and teachers get more money and so Coleman asked if he would ever consider changing his career and he said no as if it wasn't even an option and he's 43.

My ayi rides her bike (and if it's anything like every other bike on the street it is well worn and looks like it came from the 50's) a half hour each way to get to my house in the morning and at night. (She leaves it some assigned area where when she gets in and so I have never seen it.) Sometimes after Coleman is home and she is leaving I will ask her if she wants my driver to drive her home and she always says no, because she has her bike and this is at like 7 pm when it's dark and getting cold. I have definitely learned that the Chinese are seriously hard workers. They amaze me sometimes. I can show my driver a phone number to a friends house that I have been to before and it is 15 minutes away and then I just show him the same number and he takes me right there. He runs errands for me, carries everything in from the car, is so good with the kids, and such a sweet and helpful guy. He works seven days a week and is always grateful for any small kindness I show him. We really love Hans! (His americanized name-most chinese have "american" names that they use when working with the ex-pats.)

My compound is so beautiful. It is so well manicured with beautiful flowers and trees and fountains that my boys play in and ruin. There is a serene fountian to the left of my house and I am continuously reminding my boys not to play in it or throw things off the balcony into it. Here's a not so great picture of my house. It is a good size at over 5,000 sq. feet (which is really big for China). It has all hardwood floors or tile. I have no carpet in my house so it pretty but loud!! I have yet to be in a house in China with carpet - only rugs. Most chinese homes outside of the big cities have dirt floors. We even have a nice fenced in yard and a playground down the street. Most Shanghainese are in apartments. My good friend has five kids and lives on the 6th floor of an apartment and there is no elevator!!

I feel so blessed to be here and am overwhelmed with this wonderful life I lead.

Whew! That will do it for the first post. More to come about our adventures in Shanghai and our recent trip to Hong Kong. Keep in touch!