Thunderstorm Redemption‏

Hey, all you folks lucky enough to have a kitchen!

How are ya? We're doing aight. So. I have two things to correct that I've told you in the past - 1) The "hang ten" hand sign does NOT mean the number eleven. It means the number six. Oops. So. Jot that down in your memory banks. And, 2) Baoding has SIX million people, not one million. I wondered. I know that Salt Lake City has one million, and Baoding was seeming a lot larger than the Salt Lake area... turns out, it is! So now ya know.

So here is what you do if you are a country with 1.3 billion people - instead of sending out power bills to people, having them send you checks, etc., you do this pre-paid card system. So if a person wants power to their apartment, they buy a pre-paid card from, of all places, the post office. Don't ask me why. But you buy them and load them at China Post. Then you go into the basement of your building to this big row of things that look like credit card swipey things at your local grocery store. You find the one with your apartment number, you swipe your card, and voila, you have power. Within seconds. We learned about this the hard way a couple of weeks ago, when our power turned off, and we had nooooo idea what was going on. So, two weeks ago, we put a whole bunch of money on the power card, swiped it, and then....um, forgot about it.

Until last night at 10 p.m., when our power went out. We were like, Oh yeahhhhhhh..... we should have checked our credit card swipey thing to see how much money we had left before we ran out of power. And, obviously, China Post was not open at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night. So we spent a very hot evening in our beds. I was just....seething. Seething with anger. I was like, OH THAT IS IT! I HATE IT HERE SO MUCH! WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE????? I AM HOPPING THE NEXT PLANE TO THE UNITED STATES!!!!

But then something wonderful happened while I lay there in the heat, listening to Ben snore, grinding my teeth together. We had another thunderstorm.

I've told you about these thunderstorms here - they are ca-razy. I have never seen anything like it. Sooooo much lightning, it's like there is a strobe light outside of every window. And the thunder is striking, HARD, all around us. Every building has those lightning rods on top, with wires you can see leading from the rods and into the ground. And for good reason. I swear our building itself got struck once or twice last night. Each strike made the earth just SHAKE. It's amazing. And really cool. Micah woke up and was scared, so I lay with him and just listened and watched this storm and just felt...happier. I've always loved rain, and I've always loved thunderstorms. It put me in a better mood, and once the thunder and lightning subsided a little, Mikey fell asleep, and I got back into my own bed and was able to fall asleep, at, like, maybe 3 a.m. But I felt much more at peace. I guess I'm one of those Emo girls that loves rain, like in that song by Garbage, "I'm only happy when it rains." Hahaha!

Ben went out first thing this morning and loaded our power card with more money, so we are sitting in blessed air-conditioning once more. And we were able to boil some eggs on our really hyper hot plate for breakfast this morning. We had them with fresh mangos from the market. Things are looking up. A little bit. They'll look up more when I have a kitchen....

Lovies,
Kar