Hot Plate Fail‏

Hey, Fun Friends,

So. I know the question on all of your minds is, "Do you have a kitchen yet???"

Nope.

Why would a kitchen be important for a family of six? Doing your dishes in your stinky bathroom sink is just fine!!! Cutting vegetables while sitting cross-legged on the floor, cutting board on the floor in front of you - it's fanTAStic!! Using the top of your microwave, which is balanced precariously on your husband's future office fridge, as a countertop - fun!!! Who needs kitchens? We don't need no stinkin' kitchens!!!

Sorry. This letter is dripping with sarcasm. Yeah, no kitchen yet. We ask our interpreters every single day to call Professor Han and ask what in the H is going on. Well, if we told them to say that, they would wonder what "what the H" means. You know what I mean. We are reassured all the time - "Oh, it's being custom-built to fit the kitchen. It will be done in four days." Then, "Two to four days. Sorry. It's just taking longer." I don't know if it's a man thing - most men I know don't treat things as priorities unless they think it's a priority - or if it's a Chinese thing. All I know is this - Gage's birthday was Wednesday, and I'm so angry at him that I didn't tell him about or invite him to Gage's party. Yeah, as Beads told me on Skype the other day, "Woooo. You sure showed him." I know, I know. But it made me feel a teensy bit better. In a nice, passive-aggressive sort of way.

So we continue to eat out all the time. We have found decent bread, peanut butter, jam, and honey at the supermarket down the street, so we have that at least once per day for one meal. I've never really been a fan of pb&j sandwiches, but I can't afford to be too picky nowadays. I gulp them down. We can't find creamy peanut butter, so we settle for chunky. We can get any kind of fresh fruit and vegetable just outside our apartment complex, so that's not a problem, and we're making sure we get lots of that. We're even getting used to the milk here. It's boxed, and not refrigerated when you buy it. It gives me the willies. But you just ignore it, buy it, bring it home, stick it in your fridge, and pretend that you bought it nice and cold to begin with. You get used to it. The kids and Ben la-hove it. I'm getting used to it - it's whole milk, so it's pretty rich compared to what I'm used to. I just barely found some 1% the other day, though. I've made a friend at the supermarket. She's a freshman at the university, majoring in English. She and I are tight. I find her in the noodle aisle, and she takes me all around the store, helping me find stuff I need. Sometimes I have to look up stuff in my dictionary, but mainly, she and I understand each other. She's cute, cute, cute. Can I pronounce or remember her name? Uh, no.

The other day, I was returning from the supermarket with a few bags on each arm, and a lady was getting into the elevator at the same time as me. She spoke English amazingly well, saying, "Oh, do you have a baby?" She saw that I had bought some baby wipes. I said yes, and we chatted on our way up. She lives on the 13th floor. I told her that her English was really good, and she said, "Oh, it had better be good - I'm an English professor at the university!" I was like, "Ohhhhh my gosh, please be my friend!" She said that, if I need anything, I can just go upstairs and pay her a visit. I should have probably invited her to Gage's party, but I was worried that my cake wasn't big enough for everyone to have a slice if I had her family down.

We continue to kind of set up house here, despite our kitchen woes. . We got a pretty sweet-lookin' formica table to act as our desk while we're here. The top looks like fake tweed material, and the sides are striped in a rainbow pattern. Classy. We got it for like 8 bucks on Stinky Street. Gooooo Stinky Street!! I guess I should figure out the real name of Stinky Street sometime. We live in this neighborhood called the Candlelight District. Summer taught me how to say it: "Ju gwon jow chu." And she told me which syllables to make slope downward and which to slop upward, and which to keep up high, and which ones to make go down and up in the same syllable. She's like, "Okay, if you say this to your taxi driver when you are anywhere in the city, he will take you right home." I was excited. So the first time I got into a taxi after going shopping, I said it: "Ju gwon jow chu." With proper up, down, down, up pronunciation.

And he just stared at me, agape. And then started giggling. And then said something that I actually understood: "Wa bo ming bai ni schwa shemma," which means, "I don't understand what you're saying." Jeez Louise. So I pulled out what Ben and I call The Book of Knowledge, a.k.a. our little stapled thing of papers that have written addresses for every place we usually go - McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Da Fu Yuen (the supermarket), etc. I pointed to the paper that has the address of our hotel, and then, when he dropped me off there, I had to walk with all my groceries all the way up Stinky Street to get home. And that's how it's been all week. I really need Summer to just write down the address for "Candlelight District" for me in Chinese. My pronunciation leaves a lot to be desired. Learning Mandarin has been easy for me so far, but the pronunciation nuances are really difficult to get right. I think that's where English-speaking people struggle with Mandarin.

So this week, Summer was like, "Let's get you a hot plate so you can cook at home, at least a little bit. I'm worried about the childrens [she calls them "the childrens," and I love it] eating fast food at every meal." I couldn't agree more. So we set out to find a hot plate and a high chair for the Gage-meister. We went to a place like the underground flea market, but this one is above-ground. You can get anything and everything you can hope for at these flea markets. It's like Portobello Road. But enclosed. Summer wanted to find one of those sleeping mask things that you wear over your eyes. I guess the street light shines through her window and through her curtains, making it difficult to sleep. So we were wandering around, and we passed a little underwear-and-bra stand, and she sighed and said, "Oh, how I love the underwears and the bras." I laughed. I guess she likes pretty underwear and coordinating bras. I just love how she said it: "Oh, how I love the underwears." She found her mask and I found my high chair and hot plate.

We came home, and she showed me that there are seven settings to the hot plate. I jotted down the settings. One is for frying stuff in oil, one is for heating up milk, one is for boiling noodles, etc. etc. So I was like, sweet. We so desperately wanted to cook a healthy meal for my kids, so I thought we'd try scrambled eggs, hash browns, and fruit. You can get eggs, potatoes, and fruit just outside out apartment gate. The eggs aren't refrigerated, but they aren't in the supermarkets, either. Again, you have to pretend. Play a little game with yourself. Pretend that they've been refrigerated all along. And almost all eggs for sale are brown, which I think means that they're free-range chickens? I'll have to have Lex tell me if that's the right deduction.

So Ben ran down and got the eggs, potatoes, and fruit. And we got all ready. I pulled out and washed my teflon pans. Now, when I bought these pans, the store lady had asked Summer if our apartment was going to have gas stovetops. She checked with Professor Jerk, I mean, Professor Han, and he said yes. I thought it was strange at the time - who cares what kind of pan you use on gas stoves? I thought. When I bought this hot plate, it actually came with two pans. I figured the more the merrier. So back to my story. I prepared the potatoes first, put them in the pan, and set them on the hot plate. And the dang hot plate started dinging at me. It wouldn't turn on. Just ding, ding, ding. I was like, weird. So then I put one of the non-teflon pans (one that the hot plate came with), and no dinging. Heating up normally. Okayyyyy. So I have this hot plate that can actually detect teflon pans, and hates them. The Chinese can't even put P traps in their bathrooms (which, as my friend Melanie pointed out to me, were invented by the Romans in the 7th century, and yet the Chinese haven't caught on yet), but they can make THINKING hot plates? So we tried our best with the non-teflon pans to cook hash browns and eggs. No matter which setting we tried, the food just kept burning and burning and burning. No matter how fast we stirred and how much butter we put in the pans, no matter how attentive we were, burnt city.

So. Hot plate fail. I very reluctantly sent Ben out to get Pizza Hut for the 12 billionth time, and he brought it home at like 9 p.m. We ate and went to bed disappointed. That's the last we've tried the hot plate. When they call them hot plates, they ain't kidding. Mom suggested I try to find Ramen noodles. There is an entire aisle of instant-meal-type noodles, but I can't tell what meat taste is in them. What if I get, like, "Pickled Pigs Feet Flavor" and don't discover it until we try to cook it? The Chinese really, really love their pigs' feet. And I'm not kidding. I can't read any of the packaging, so I'm just kind of stymied by fear.

Mom asked the other night when we're going on another adventure. I know we're super-boring. It's just still so dang hot, you guys. I swear I got PTSD from our trip to Badda-Bing Lake. I just really want to wait until it's, you know, under 100 degrees and under, like, 90 percent humidity, aight? If we could get Professor Jerk to commit to a date when our kitchen is going in, I might lift my "let's not go outside" ban and arrange a day trip so that we can stay out of the workers' hair. And not have to sit in our apartment and hear the loud hammering and smell Professor Jerk's breath. The man has some funky breath. I'm just sayin'. There are a couple of other places nearby that I'd like to check out. One is called the YeSanpo Hillside. The other is called Wolf's Tooth Summit. So I don't know. If we get word on when the kitchen goes in - and we probably won't - we'll have Summer arrange something with the travel agency for us, and we'll set out for another adventure in which we play the part of the Jolie-Pitt clan, getting accosted at every turn by the loving public, photos snapping, people taking video of us as we walk, etc. So funny.

We have real, live, honest-to-goodness rope hung up for drying clothes properly. We use clothes pins and everything. I feel like my great-grandma Watts. It's crazy. But it's alright. As long as I can find a way to clean our clothes, I'm all good. I asked Summer last week: "So, how do we string up some rope? Should we get hooks and anchor them into the walls?" She laughed and said, "No, silly. You just hammer nails in the wall and tie knots. The heads of the nails keep the knots from slipping." Oh. So Jack, Ben's interpreter, helped him find some nails and rope. So then I asked Summer, "So where can I buy a hammer to hammer the nails in the wall?" She gave me a quizzical look. "Well, you just go find a rock and use that, silly." Are you KIDDING me? Is this the STONE AGES??? Come ON!!! Luckily, Ben had to buy a bunch of special kinds of bolts for the construction site, so he bought a hammer and brought it home and rigged up the rope properly. And then we hung up our two pictures that Ben got for his birthday, and a clock I bought at the corner market.

So. Gage's birthday. I've been having a hard time finding motivation to do ANYTHING. So it was the day before his birthday, and I was like, "Well, I guess we should celebrate in some way..." Luckily, I was able to order a cake from the bakery (with Summer's help over the phone) at the last minute. Then I bought a couple of toys at the grocery store.

I'm noticing that plastic things are very expensive here. It's funny to see the things that are cheaper here (clothes) and the things that are more expensive (plastic anything, makeup). Many of the toys were, like, 200 yuen - so about $30 - for something really small and simple. Things that I would probably peg as being maybe $7 or so in the U.S. It was interesting. I'm still on the hunt for a plastic set of drawers - you know the kind - 3 feet high, 3 feet wide, maybe 1 1/2 feet deep - because I'm holding everyone's toiletries in my armoire, so there's no room for my clothes. But I just can't bring myself to spend $100 on one of them. I can't find one cheaper. $100! For a plastic set of dresser drawers! Something that would cost you like $15 - $20 in the states. Crazy. So I continue to have all my underwear, jammies, socks, etc. in my suitcase for now.

When I get any time on the iPad (and it's not often), I read books that we download on our iTunes account. I read The Other Boleyn Girl this week. It was fantastic, and fascinating. I just downloaded Vanity Fair today, so I'm excited to tuck into that.

Well, I need to get off so Ben can check his work e-mail. But I'll re-size and put up Gage's birthday pics, hopefully tomorrow. And then I'll let you know when I have them up on smugmug.

Lovies,
Kar