Our Adventure

Last Friday Jennye and I made a trip to the fabric market to have bedding made. The fabric market is a huge room with thousands of bolts of fabric. You can find cotton, wool, silk & upholstery fabric. After selecting patterns for the three bedrooms, we found a vendor willing to coordinate the tailoring.

Aubrey went with Jennye and me to pick up the bedding on Saturday. The first video is the street we most frequently catch the bus. The second and third videos are food vendors at San Zhan market. The candied fruit was really good. I'll try the bing another day. Once the bing has been cooked, you select the meat or vegetables you'd like inside. It reminds me a little of a chalupa when I saw people eating them.

We will post photos of our apartment in a day or two. It has been challenging to find everything we need and/or want to set up our home. We weren't able to walk into one store and purchase everything at once. Day by day, we find a store to purchase a few items at a time. I did find one store where I found some vases and home accessories that have made our apartment feel a little more like home. We need art on the walls! Maybe we'll purchase some paint and try to create our own masterpieces. If there was a Target here, I think I could have had the nesting process knocked out in a couple of days. There is no jumping in a car and running down the road. Any trip requires a bus, taxi, or long walk to a market. Throw in the language barrier and even a simple trip feels exhausting. This has been a great frustration to me and motivates me to learn Chinese as quickly as possible. If it weren't for the generosity of our new friends acting as translators, we'd be unable to function.

I can't say enough about the kindness of the people we've met. Most people are gracious to try and understand my poor attempts at Chinese. Lots can be communicated with smiles and gestures. The rest, I'm afraid, will have to wait until I've memorized more words and practiced my four tones.

posted by Marilyn