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May 24 Hollywood Comes to the O.C.When I was picking up the kids from school at the end of the day, my neighbor Mike told me that he thought maybe a movie was being shot in our neighborhood. He went on to describe what was going on. There were police cars, ambulances, guys in police clothes, army clothes, scaffolding with cameras on it, etc. I raised an eyebrow and asked him if he had seen Matthew Broderick. We both laughed. There is a video at a local mall about our neighborhood, and it has Matthew Broderick riding around in a car, looking out and gasping at our houses. My other neighbor, Claire, recognized the scene and said that it was footage taken from The Stepford Wives re-make movie he did with Nicole Kidman a couple of years ago. So I gathered the kids up and went home. On our way home, I could see special umbrellas and scaffolding set up high with cameras. The kids saw it and said that they were going to take their scooters over to see what it was about. Nick was the first to go, and he ran back to say he needed his binoculars, because they wouldn't let him get close to the shooting. So he grabbed his binoculars and off he went. Curiosity eventually got the best of me, and I asked the twins if they wanted to go for a walk and see what this "movie" thing was all about. They were up for it. So off we went, but I forgot to bring my camera. When we got there, they were letting us gawkers get a lot closer to the scenes. The actors tried to talk to us. With my limited Chinese, I learned that it was for a television show, not a movie. It was so fascinating to watch. A lot of shooting scenes with fake guns or real guns with the cartridges taken out of them. No shooting sounds, though. I guess they add that later. I was kicking myself that I hadn't brought my camera. But I did have my cell phone on me. So I texted Claire a message to grab her camera and walk two rows down to come and see what was going on. When she got there, I had to get the kids back to make dinner and eat. So I asked her if she would e-mail me the photos. She did, with the subject line saying, "Hollywood Comes to the O.C." How fitting. I knew I had picked a good nickname for our neighborhood. Thanks to Claire....I couldn't have written this blog without her (she gave me such a good title) and I owe all the photo credits to her. Love the photo of the dude in the blue shirt against the wall. Such a dramatic scene! Every day is an adventure at the O.C. May 21 New NeighborsWe've met some of our new Chinese neighbors across the street. There are two little girls, ages 5 and 6, that are really interested in playing with our boys and our new basketball net. We don't understand much of what they're saying, but they're both really cute. I just posted some photos here on this site.....Jennifer is 5 and Nessie is 6. Sophia is Jennifer's mother. Sophia told me that she is going to Canada to study. But due to our language differences, I couldn't figure out what city she would be studying in. Thomas has made friends with a Chinese boy at school named Lawrence. He was born in Canada. We just figured out that his grandmother lives in Original County, and he is moving here soon. He's a very sweet little boy.
Our friends, the Bailey's, will be visiting us this weekend. We're looking forward to catching up with them and laughing together. They've been living in Beijing a little longer than we've been in Tianjin. I remember seeing them in August 2006 when they told us that they were moving to Beijing. I also remember whispering to Doug, "Wow....glad it's them and not me. Don't ever ask me to move to Asia." Well, here I am now.....
I'm very proud of my older brother, Tim, highschool math teacher by day, and amateur thespian by night. He agreed to take on an acting role at his local community theatre when a friend got ill. It's a bit of a sordid tale, with my brother playing a cad who has many lovers and meets a grizzly end. Imagine a 6'4" man in a death scene whereby he falls down a flight of stairs and over a couch. I guess he got quite a few laughs from the audience. My mother couldn't say enough about his great performance. Way to go, Tim! I've posted his photo here on this site. He's the tall chap (cad) on the couch. Too bad I missed your big acting debut, Tim. May 18 RedrumThe last day of school for my children is on June 8th. All of the other expats are chatting away about their trips home for the summer. We don't get a paid homeleave until we're here for a year. We thought maybe we could find a seat sale and fly out to some western city over the summer, to eat some comfort foods and stock up on clothing. I looked into return tickets to any western city in the world....Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto, Paris, London, Honolulu, etc., but the cost for any ticket is about $1,000 U.S. return. Multiply that by 5 and you've got yourself a large sum of money. We just found a seat sale to Stockholm, Sweden that is half that price, so we're debating that. But chances are that we will be in Tianjin for the summer. One good point is that flights within China are incredibly cheap...they average about $150 U.S. return per person. So this will be our summer to explore China...Shanghai, Chengdu (panda reserves), Qingdao (beaches), Xi'an (terra cotta soldiers), and so on. I think we may try to go to Hong Kong, too. I might be able to find some summer clothes there, because I sure can't find any here. Even with my weight loss! Yes, I've lost quite a bit of weight here. I wish I would have stepped on a scale before and after so that I knew a definite number, but I just don't know how much I've lost. I do know that I'm glad I brought some older clothes from when I was thinner, because I'm pulling those out now.
All of the expats are talking about their flight dates to their homes, but there are a few of us stuck here for the summer. I know of 3 families that aren't getting out, so we'll have to make it a point to get together with them. I was talking to one friend about my worries looking at the long summer looming ahead. There aren't a lot of summer programs for children, there are no outdoor swimming areas, and the isolation of friends all gone away. I made some joke that it might turn into "The Shining" (Jack Nicholson movie, Stephen King novel) around here, that they will get back in August, and I'll have painted "REDRUM" all over the guard's stations. Then they'll be like, "Uh, oh, Sue lost it this summer." All work and no play makes Susie a dull girl.
May 15 My 3 sonsDoug got the idea to get a portable basketball net for our 3 boys. It would give them something to do outside in this community. We asked around, and nobody seemed to know where we could get a portable one that we could move onto the street. Last week, I saw the high school P.E. teacher at the school, and popped the question to him. I figured, jocks know where to get sports stuff. I told him that there are 3 western families with children in a new community with not a lot to do outside. Right away, he told me to come with him. He brought me to some back offices and introduced me to a very nice woman named Camille in purchasing at the school. He explained to her what I wanted. She pulled out some school supply sports catalogs and I chose an industrial strength basketball net on wheels. She gave me a price quote and said that she would order it and that I was to pay upon delivery. Today she phoned me, and said that the net was going to be delivered to my house at 11 a.m. I told her that was great. I talked to Ayi about asking the men that deliver it to set it up for us, too. I hopped into the shower, and came out to find the delivery men here, Ayi, our driver (Mike), and a couple of the neighborhood guards in deep discussion. I could see that the guards didn't seem very happy about the net. Ayi and Mike had a lot to say to the guards as the deliverymen set up the net. I kept asking them what was going on, and they'd wave me away as if I shouldn't worry about such little matters. Our two great defenders of our family and our property. Then a guard turned to me and said, "meiyou, dubiqi," which means, "no, sorry." I blurted out what little Chinese I knew, "Wu de san ge erzi!" Which means, "My 3 sons." Mike the driver gave Ayi and I a gesture with the head when the guards had their backs turned to him which indicated that we should just high-tail it into the house and not give them anymore of our time with this nonsense. So I said, "Xie xie, zijian," which means, "Thank you, good bye." Then Ayi and I got into the house and giggled while the driver dealt with the guards. I then told Ayi that I was going out, but that if the guards harassed her anymore, to give me a call and I'd call the landlady. As I said to Ayi, "They're going to let those 2 big dogs next door bark night and day (it's driving us all nuts) and not do a thing about that....but they won't let some children shoot some hoops?" I got my purse, chatted to Ayi for a few minutes, then left the house. Mike was sitting in the van waiting for me. I don't know what he said to those guards but I gave him a lot of "Xie xie's."
 May 13 Happy Mother's Day!Happy Mother's Day to all of the mom's out there. Give yourself a pat on the back for all you do, day in and day out! Doug calls me "the emotional glue" of the family. I guess that makes him "the financial glue" of the family?
I got a lovely gift of a lush, green garden in my backyard. Doug and I had gone to the plant market a few weeks ago, but we were unable to communicate to anyone that we wanted to get some large palm trees delivered to our house. They were just too large for our van. I asked Ayi to write a note in Chinese asking someone to help us hire a truck to deliver some trees. So off Doug went again to try to buy some trees and have them delivered. I said good bye to him and knew I wouldn't see him for quite awhile. Shopping for anything here takes forever. When it's a market, it takes even longer, because you have to do the whole bargaining dance. No way do you pay the first price they ask for. When they see our fairer skin, the price gets instantly inflated much higher than it should be. I now use the technique of lingering near something I like until a Chinese person buys it. Then I find out the real price. Doug prefers to do the whole dance....walking away, telling them that's too expensive, then wandering back later to see if they've changed their mind. I'm not sure yet which technique works better. Doug's seems to take a lot of work and willpower. They probably take just about the same amount of time. I prefer my patient, quiet approach. It suits my personality more. Doug's approach suits his personality. Then he likes to exchange stories and laugh with his mates about their latest bargaining exploits.
So about 4 hours later, I get a phone call that there are two trucks on their way to deliver the tree. The trucks pull up, and our new Kiwi neighbors that have shopped with Doug pull up beside the trucks. I had sent Doug to a bakery afterwards because we were having some bread issues....namely, no one liked the bread I had bought (either did I....sweet and cakey....yucky for sandwiches). So four Chinese men get out of their trucks and indicate that they will not lift these huge trees and huge ceramic pots into our backyard (the only way to access our walled backyard). So they put everything in the garage. Doug arrived home a little while later and was able to move some of them himself into the backyard. He's got that crazy brute strength from doing farm chores when he was a kid. But he needed help with some of the other plants. So he enlisted the help of our new Kiwi neighbor and a couple of guards. Our backyard now looks like a tropical paradise. With all of the walls around it, and tropical trees swishing in the breeze, you'd have no idea you were sitting in China if you sat in our backyard. Except for the smell. We tried to enjoy the tropics of our backyard last night, and sat out to have a couple of cocktails with our new Kiwi neighbors. Then all of a sudden, a horrid sewage smell wafted in and that put an end to it all.
Thomas is feeling better now. He went to the Great Wall with Doug and Nick today. Doug's old co-worker is on business in Beijing. He e-mailed us last week and got a wish list of necessities for us. So he's handing those things off to Doug, too. There wouldn't have been enough room in the van, so Phil & I opted to stay home. We've had a great day of playing Monopoly, chatting, and I even had a nap! It was a very nice, quiet Mother's Day. Phil now has his buddy Alex over, so they're off playing as I write this.
Interesting sidestory here....when our driver pulled up this morning, he inquired as to Thomas' health. He then made gestures indicating that Thomas should be hooked up to an I.V. I shook my head no and somehow told him time would heal Thomas (by using the word Monday and the universal sleeping sign). Whenever my kids have a cough, every Chinese person in my life is trying to tell me big stories about sending my kids to the hospital and hooking them up to an I.V. I asked the western doctor here about why this is. He told me it's ridiculous how they treat a virus here....they actually do go to the hospital and get hooked up to an I.V. for days on end. I don't know if it was always this way, or if it all got a bit complicated after SARS. Apparently SARS was a big deal here in Tianjin a few years back, and many new health and hygiene codes were set up as precautions. I think that's the origin of the bathing cap rules in swimming pools. They'll get real upset if you don't have a bathing cap on, but then some of the male patrons will spit into side grates. Hmmm....never heard of hair spreading viruses before.
  May 09 Lucy, you have some 'splainin' to do!Yesterday was another sitcom day. You taking notes, NBC? I even have a good name for the show..."The Expat Files." It started off fairly normal. As I got all of the kids ready for school, Thomas said to me, "My throat hurts." I hear this quite a bit from my children on school mornings here. The smells and the pollution can get to you sometimes. Plus it is very dry here. We all wake up thirsty every morning. So I asked him if he was sick, and if he needed to stay at home. He said that he was good to go to school, so off he went, after I felt his forehead and noted that he wasn't feverish. He wasn't coughing at all and seemed to be fine. So then I go and do some grocery shopping. I've got it down to two stores, one day a week, and it takes just over an hour now. That's the actual shopping time...getting back and forth is not included. That time varies depending on construction projects, car accidents (very common here), and gawker crowds of car accidents (very, very common here). They don't even pretend to be doing something else when there is an accident....like our slow drive-by lookie-loo's. People just drop what they're doing and gather closely to the site. In the 2nd grocery store, I saw a friend of mine while I was standing at the checkout. She walked towards me and set off a security buzzer somehow. So she couldn't get near me. She yelled out that she had been doing that in stores all morning. I made some loud comment that maybe it was the underwire of her bra setting it off. She was surprised that I would be talking about her undergarments so loud, I could tell by her face. I laughed and said out loud, "Oh, no one knows what I'm saying here." I was at the check-out line, and then turned to the cashier. He then gave me a big spiel in English, "Welcome to E-Mart. Do you have one of our cards? Good morning." My face turned 20 shades of red after that.
Then off I went to get my hair colored at the Sheraton Hotel. Andy, the hairdresser, had painstakingly painted highlights onto different pieces of hair (he works as meticulously as a brain surgeon) and wrapped each strand in foil. He was about halfway through this process when my cell phone rang. It was the school. Thomas had a bit of a fever, was dizzy and wasn't feeling well. Could I please come and get him immediately? Anything else I could have dropped....ran out on a full meal in a restaurant (pay for it first, of course), or groceries. But partially colored hair? I had to tell the school secretary where I was. She asked if our driver could come and get Thomas. I had sent our driver on an errand even further away from the school than I was (he was getting some electronic equipment we needed - somehow the vendors sell it cheaper to him than to us). I told the school secretary that he was even further from the school than I was. So then she asked about my Ayi. "Yes!" I shouted. Ayi could do it, because our house is so close to the school. But my ayi had never been to the school before to pick up the kids. But our house isn't far from the school. I asked the school secretary if she could phone my ayi for me and explain the situation, as her Chinese was better than mine. So off Ayi went on her electric bike to pick up sick Thomas. Thomas said that Ayi put him on the seat behind her, had him hug her, and she drove slow. I sure praised her a lot afterwards, telling her how she saved the day. She was very proud that she was so helpful. She has a soft spot for Thomas, too. I was trying to buy insect repellant before we went to Thailand. I had told her that the bugs really like to bite Thomas the most. She said, "That's because he's so sweet."
So Andy finished painting my hair...that took about an hour. Then I sat there for the longest time with painted hair, worried about my sick babe. Where was Andy? Why would Thomas feel dizzy? What was wrong with him? I listened to the French mom's in the background getting pedicures, trying to see how much French I could remember from my childhood education. I heard some numbers and "printemps", which means spring. They talk way too fast for me to catch much. There were no magazines to read, I couldn't eavesdrop, and I wanted to get home to Thomas to see what was wrong. So after 40 minutes of sitting in a chair with foil in my hair, I got out of the chair, and started walking around looking for Andy the hairdresser. That was my Lucille Ball moment. A big plastic cape on, foils in my hair, walking around asking people that barely understood me, "Where is Andy?" It was now 1:45. I had gotten the phone call about Thomas at 12:30. Andy still had to cut my hair, and I was on the other end of town. I finally found Andy and told him, "I have to get out of here by 2:15 at the latest." So Andy finished up, and I have to say, it's one of the best haircuts and colors I've ever had. I feel like a new woman.
Thomas stayed home again today. He complained a bit about a headache this morning, but seems to have turned around quite a bit. I suspect he'll be back at school tomorrow. I wonder what crazy adventures I'll have tomorrow.
Interesting note: The guards in our neighborhood just got new uniforms. They say "U.S. Army Aviation" on them. What's up with that? Blog SwapMy neighbor, Claire, from New Zealand, is also regularly updating a spaces live website so that she can share her experience with her friends and family back home. We were recently admiring a few blog entries on each other's spaces, saying, "I want to print that one off and save it." I suggested we take a couple of our favorite blogs off of each other's space, cut and paste them, and then present them on our own space(with full credits, of course) for our friends & family to read a different perspective. I especially admired Claire's entry about workers in China. It was very poignant. I couldn't have said it better. Her entry about the tones of the Chinese language had me in stitches. Hope you enjoy reading Claire's writings!Workers in ChinaI think workers in China need a special mention. Often when we drive through the middle of the city and will see groups of men, some with signs, some squatting, shovel in the background congregating on a bridge. These men wear what we would consider formal clothing, jacket and trousers not tee shirt and shorts like in NZ. They are dressed in gentlemen’s colours which include dark tan, black, green or navy blue. They are waiting for work, hoping someone will stop a truck and give them a days labouring. At the moment building work has commenced because of the warmer weather, virtually all construction stops here over winter. Peasants come into the city to take down all the plastic wrapping that has been protecting the trees, score loads of workers arrive to live in tents and shacks on building sites. Most work is done by manual labour, walls are built brick by brick. Things are carried using bucket and yoke. What we would consider mind numbing menial tasks are done day in day out without complaint. Every morning a women comes and polishes our letterbox and lamppost. On the expressway in the middle of nowhere a worker will sweep the roadside with a bamboo broom. It is incredibly dangerous work. People sit for hours on end at roadside stalls selling everything imaginable breathing in toxic fumes. Even if there is an automated parking ticket machine, someone is employed to stand in the dimly lit underground basement and issue the cards manually. At every outdoor car park a person will walk up and down directing traffic and collecting one kuai bills for the privilege of parking there. There is a man at a toll gate James encounters who salutes every single vehicle that passes through. Workers often have English names written on their name tag, some of our favorites have been Crazy, Apple, Zero, Windy, Elvis and Cleveland. The work has commenced on the Olympic stadium. Rumor has it that Tianjin is hosting the football for the Olympics; the stadium being built is massive. Workers stand on the roof with only a hard hat for protection, I have never seen a person harnessed on a building site yet. In Shanghai the window cleaners sit on a bucket and are winched up and down. Men run a bicycle repair business on the pavement on a street corner or a barber’s service. I think drivers have it pretty good though. They are paid significantly more than an Ayi. They drive for short amounts of time then do a lot of waiting and sleeping and smoking and chatting to others. Tianjinese are known to be big talkers. Jim has bought in new hygiene standards at the factory, now the maintenance staff have bright orange overalls (we think Guantanamo Bay) they are thrilled as only jet pilots in China normally wear orange overalls. Taxi drivers and check out operators at supermarkets don’t deserve any sympathy. The former spit, smoke and crazy drive their way through the day. The latter specialize in painfully slow service. I think Ayi’s are the gold medal winners in the working hard stakes. They completely run the household. No job is too big or too small. On James’s birthday Louise and I made him a cake, we didn’t have any icing sugar as we hadn’t been here long and had no idea where to procure it from. While the cake was still warm Ayi took one of our business cards, put the warm cake in the basket of her bike and disappeared off. An hour later she returned with the cake iced with “jimfryer happy birthday” on it. Also she bought a candle in the shape of a flower. It sung happy birthday, but wouldn’t stop, no off switch!! So in the end we had to put it outside before it drove us to distraction. Learning Chinese
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