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Cultural surprises

/ edebock / 4 Comments

Sheila has been with us for over two weeks already but she continues to be amazed by something new almost every day. In her eyes, my kitchen is a magical place. Most of the small appliances and gadgets that we take for granted are brand new to her. Like most Chinese kitchens, the one in her parents’ home doesn’t have an oven let alone a toaster, a bread maker or a food processor. Her eyes nearly popped out of her head the first time she saw me using my electric knife!

It’s not only the appliances that surprise her, however. Most of our food is also new to her. Though she’s familiar with a lot of the ingredients, we cook them entirely differently and even I’ve been surprised at how many convenience foods I use. We tend to eat a healthy diet avoiding a lot of processed foods but I do depend on things like pancake mix that are completely foreign to her. Breakfast cereal is also something she’s never eaten before. So far, Harvest Crunch, a sweetened granola with coconut and almonds, is her favourite. She’s accustomed to a spicier diet than ours and the ketchup bottle has become her best friend. In fact, she’s dubbed herself a “ketchupholic”!

The rest of the house contained many surprises for her too. Not unexpectedly, even though I’d explained the bathroom to her the evening she arrived, it took a flooded floor to remind her that the shower curtain must be inside the tub when you take a shower! That’s a common blunder for Asians when they first arrive on our shores as an Asian bathroom is basically an oversized shower stall and bathtubs are not common in China.

Laundry brought more surprises. Though we had a fitted sheet on our bed in China, Sheila had never seen one until we stripped the beds to wash the sheets! She thought I must have sewn the elastic corners myself. (In case you were wondering, fitted sheets were actually invented by an African American lady named Bertha Berman in the 1950s.) The clothes dryer also fascinates her as clothing is hung to dry in China.

That brings me to a topic that has been a big surprise to Richard and I. When we lived in China, we were amazed to see people in the street wearing their pyjamas. What we didn’t realize until Sheila came to stay is that Chinese people wear their pyjamas whenever they’re at home! Sheila only dresses to go out and immediately changes back into pyjamas when she gets home. Of course, if you’re just stepping out to run a quick errand, why bother changing at all? Sheila has been out with me more than once now in her pjs and I finally understand why we saw people walking down Little Street dressed that way!

While we continue to learn much about Chinese life from Sheila, it’s definitely been fun looking at our own lives through the eyes of someone for whom almost everything is brand new!

The job that never ends!

/ edebock / 10 Comments

We loved our jobs in China! By far the most fun was the time we spent with the students who were preparing to come to North America to study but this is definitely the first time we’ve brought a student home with us!

Three of my former students are now in Ontario enrolled in ESL programs at their colleges of choice and preparing to enter regular studies there in January. Since they arrived in Canada, I’ve spent lots of time communicating with them via email, Facebook and Skype, consoling and encouraging the one who is having a very difficult time adjusting, cheering on the other two, answering questions and helping them find information on everything from yoga classes to how to make healthy bagged lunches!

Sheila is my fourth student to arrive in Canada and she’s presently sound asleep in our guest bedroom! We picked her up at the Edmonton airport last night after her long flight from China and she’ll be with us for just over five weeks. On January 2, she’ll fly to Windsor, Ontario to begin her studies at St. Clair College.

We encouraged all of our students to spend their first month or two in Canada in a home stay setting to help them adjust to Canadian life and to allow them to practice their English in a home where they would be immersed in the language. Sadly, both girls who chose that option found themselves in homes that didn’t meet our expectations; homes where they were left to fend for themselves and not incorporated into a family atmosphere. They probably would have done just as well or better living in a dorm. That’s not the sort of experience we want to give Sheila!

I’ve waited to start decorating the house and doing my Christmas baking until Sheila’s arrival so that she can join in all the fun. After all, this will be her very first Christmas! The whole family is coming home this year so she’ll experience all the noise and fun of a family celebration.

In the meantime, there are lots of other things we want to show her; simple things like a typical Canadian grocery store and things we take for granted such as how to use the myriad of small appliances on my kitchen counter. There are places we want to take her like West Edmonton Mall and sights we want her to see like the spectacular Rocky Mountains. We’ve also arranged for her to be able to visit our local high school to see and experience how different it is from schools in China.

Before we embark on a whirlwind of activity, however, we’d better let her sleep awhile longer and give her a chance to start getting over her jet lag!

with Sheila in China

with Sheila in China

Two questions

/ edebock / 2 Comments

Whenever we arrive home from one of our overseas adventures, we face the same two questions and this time has been no exception.

  • Are you happy to be home?

My stock answer is “It’s always nice to come home!”

As much as I enjoyed China, I am happy to be back in Canada. We are so blessed and we take so much for granted here. I’m happy to be back where the air is clean. China burns roughly as much coal as the rest of the world combined and one of those smokestacks was practically outside our window. According to a recent study, pollution from burning coal has reduced the life expectancy of the 500 million people living in northern China by five years!

I’m very happy to have my kitchen back. Cooking on a single burner got old fast! I’m even happy to have extra people to cook for. We have a young family staying with us for a little while until their house is ready to move into.

Shopping at the street market was exciting at first but the novelty soon wore off and I’m happy to be wheeling my grocery cart through the aisles of my local grocery store again. I can read all the labels and I know where to find the things I want. Heck, I even know what everything is and I don’t have to look past the pig feet and the chicken feet to find the ground beef!

Of course, the best thing about any place is the people and we’re definitely happy to be closer to family and friends again. In fact, we already spent several days in Calgary with our daughter and her growing family last week. It was especially exciting for me to be able to accompany her to an ultrasound appointment where I got my first glimpse of our next grandchild! “Baby Pea”, so called because at just six week’s gestation he/she looked like a little pea with a heartbeat, is due in mid March.

And then there’s the other question…

  • What’s next?

People started asking this one before our suitcases were unpacked and we’d fully emerged from the fog of jet lag! The answer is simple… we have no idea!

We do have a couple of feelers out concerning possible short term mission opportunities but it’s far too soon to know if either of those will pan out. There’s a great big world out there and far too much of it that we haven’t seen yet so I’m sure we’ll figure it out. In the meantime, we’re off to Family Camp at Camp Harmattan next week where we’ll park the trailer beside the Little Red Deer River and enjoy a week of fun and fellowship. Then, toward the end of August, we’ll head for the BC coast where we’ll spend some time with my parents, our oldest son and our other set of grandchildren.

Home is a good place to come back to but as everyone in our small community knows, those DeBocks don’t stay home very long!

Repairs of the week

/ edebock / 2 Comments

The ongoing saga of breakdowns and repairs in our little apartment continues! I’m not sure if a week has gone by since we arrived that something hasn’t needed to be fixed and this week was certainly no exception!

Late Monday afternoon, our power suddenly went off. Thinking that we’d once again tripped the breaker, I went out to the hall to turn it back on but discovered that this time that wasn’t the problem. Once again, Richard phoned poor Wendy, the girl from the school office whose job includes dealing with these issues. She soon called back to let us know that the caretaker wouldn’t be available until at least 8:00 p,m. The sun goes down before 6:30 so we spent more than an hour in darkness with nothing but our tiny pocket flashlight for light. When the caretaker arrived, he quickly discovered that our electricity meter had burned out. He didn’t have one on hand to replace it with so, not wanting to leave us without power overnight, he bypassed the meter and told us that he’d be back to replace it the next day. In the meantime, we’d have free power. That was five days ago and nothing more has been done! We reminded Wendy yesterday but at this point, we continue to draw free electricity.

Tuesday morning while we were getting ready to go to school, our water went off. We were less surprised by that because we’d seen water seeping out of the ground across the street from our building for several days prior to that and had noticed workmen digging there the afternoon before. When the water went off, we looked out and noticed that they were working there again and assumed that the water to our building had been turned off while the underground pipes were being repaired. Sure enough, a little while later, the water was back on and they were filling in the hole.

The heating unit on the wall of our bedroom/sitting room has been giving us trouble ever since we arrived. Though we’ve used similar units in both Japan and Saipan (it doubles as an air conditioner), we initially assumed that we simply weren’t using the remote correctly. The labels, like everything else around here, are in Chinese. Even after Wendy translated them for us, we still couldn’t figure out how to get it to work properly. Eventually, she contacted the company that made the unit and got detailed instructions for us. For a time, it seemed that everything was fine but then it started randomly shutting itself off and it took many tries to get it working again. That’s when Wendy convinced the company to send out a serviceman to look at it. Wouldn’t you know that it worked perfectly while he was here on Tuesday and that he couldn’t find a thing wrong with it! His only suggestion was that perhaps it wasn’t getting a steady flow of electricity. In this apartment, that’s entirely possible!

In spite of its temperamental nature and the fact that it can only adequately warm the room that it’s in, we’re blessed to have the heating unit. The only source of heat in many homes and most public buildings are radiators that, believe it or not, are controlled by the government! We’ve been told that this time of year is known as the hard season because even though the average daytime highs have been around 10ºC this week and the temperature still drops to less than 5º overnight, the government turned off the heat almost a week ago! Apparently, it was actually left on later than usual this year because it’s been an unusually cold spring. At this point, however, our classrooms, the university dorms and many homes are without any heat other than whatever warmth the sun provides during the day!

This week has definitely reminded us how fortunate we are to have heat, light and water most of the time and how much we take for granted back home in Canada!

An electrician’s nightmare

/ edebock / 4 Comments

Our apartment building is very old. I have no idea how long it’s been standing here but it’s clear that the original wiring wasn’t designed to handle the number of electrical appliances and gadgets that are part of everyday life today even in China. We’ve only been here for four weeks but I’ve long since lost count of the number of times we’ve tripped the breaker.

That’s right. THE breaker. Until yesterday, there was only one of them for the entire apartment. Granted, it isn’t big. Just three little rooms plus the bathroom but there are way too many things in here that use electricity for one circuit to handle the demand.

There are wires and cords snaking all over the place. I haven’t begun to figure out what they’re all for or where they go. Some of the switches and plug-ins have obviously been added over the years as they’re simply shoved into rough holes in the wall and the wiring, rather than being inside the wall, is on the outside!

Last Saturday evening while Richard was in class, I started to smell something odd. It had that tell-tale hot wiring smell but I couldn’t locate the source. I’d had a shower and had left the heat lamps in the bathroom on to dry it out so I wondered if they were the problem. I mentioned it to Richard when he got home but by then, he couldn’t smell anything so we didn’t give it another thought until the following morning.

I don’t remember exactly what we were doing but the breaker tripped again and this time, when Richard went out to the landing at the top of the stairs to switch it on again, the smell was very strong and the circuit box was hot inside! There was also a flash when he flipped the switch. Definitely not a good sign!

Though it was her day off, Richard called Wendy, the girl from the school office who handles things to do with teacher apartments. She rounded up the landlord and they came over to take a look. By then, the circuit box had cooled off and the landlord couldn’t find anything wrong. Just be careful not to use too many electrical things at once was all that they could suggest! When we mentioned the situation to our supervising teacher, his response was “Well this is China. That’s just the way things are.”

It didn’t take long to determine that those answers simply wouldn’t do! On Tuesday evening I was blow drying my hair when the breaker tripped and we were plunged into darkness. A little later on, when Richard was in the shower and we had the heating unit in the bedroom turned on because the apartment is chilly in the evening, the breaker went for a second time. Grabbing our tiny flashlight, I made my way out to the hall to flip the switch. It was hot again and it smelled terrible so when we arrived at school yesterday morning, Richard explained to the office staff that we were living in a fire trap and that something had to be done about it.

At noon, we went off to enjoy a home cooked meal at one of my student’s grandmother’s place and when we got home, the guts of the circuit box had been changed. We now have a double breaker! It’s too early to know for sure if that will solve the problem but it’s been over 24 hours and we haven’t tripped it yet.

Now, if we could just get them to install fire extinguishers on the landings, we might feel even safer! Never mind. This is China; not quite third world anymore but definitely not what we’re used to either!

 

The bathroom

/ edebock / 6 Comments

Foreign bathrooms fascinate me! If someone would finance the travel required to do my research, I think I’d write a book entitled Bathrooms of the World.

As is common in many parts of Asia, our bathroom is also a shower stall. We don’t have a bathtub and the shower isn’t a separate entity. You simply stand in the bathroom and the water goes everywhere! Most of it ends up going down the floor drain, of course, but the entire bathroom is wet after a shower. Rubber sandals sit outside the bathroom door to keep your feet dry when you enter.

The tank that’s attached to the wall above the toilet supplies hot water to both the bathroom sink and the shower but not the kitchen sink. We have to carry that from the bathroom. Fortunately, the kitchen sink is located just outside the bathroom door.

Squat toilets are still very prevalent in China but, thankfully, our apartment is equipped with a dual flush western style toilet. Most public buildings including our school are not. Toilet paper is not flushed; it goes into the little garbage can that sits beside the toilet and is carried out with the rest of the trash. This, too, is common in many parts of Asia.

One feature that I do like about our bathroom is the heat lamps! There are four of them and you can turn on either two or all four at once. They keep the bathroom warm while you shower and help it dry more quickly afterward. They’re also nice for those nighttime trips to the bathroom that are common at our age! Since we only heat the bedroom at night, venturing out to the bathroom is a chilly experience.

I do miss having a bathtub as I much prefer bathing to showering and there’s nothing more relaxing than a good soak. It would have been especially nice after this afternoon’s very long walk. We spent a couple of hours out in the sunshine exploring on foot.

Laundry day

/ edebock / 7 Comments

In the corner of our bathroom, which measures 45 inches by 68 inches, stands the tiniest washing machine I have ever seen. As shown in the photo, it’s shorter than the pedestal sink that stands next to it! It might be small but it does the job. I did our first load of laundry this morning and everything came out clean.

Though considerably smaller, the machine is almost exactly like the one we had in Japan so it was easy to figure out how to use it. I just have to remember to place the end of the hose into the floor drain before I start it or there will be water everywhere! It even plays a little tune to tell me when its job is done.

The clothes dryer is a rack attached to the building just outside our bedroom window! I’ll use that for bedding, towels and larger items of clothing. As I hung the towels today, I feared that I might drop them into the alley below but fortunately that didn’t happen. I’m not going to take a chance on losing our more delicate items to a gust of wind so they hang in the multi-purpose computer/guest room. If you come to visit, however, I’ll make sure there’s nothing hanging over your bed while you’re here!

Since some of our dress clothes will need to be ironed, I brought our dual voltage travel iron with us and yesterday we purchased a little table top ironing board much like the one we carry in the travel trailer at home. We also bought a bag of Tide laundry detergent; the same brand we use at home. Though many things are very different here, others are surprisingly familiar!

The penthouse

/ edebock / 9 Comments

I love the fact that, after reading my last post, one of our friends dubbed our upper storey apartment "the penthouse". In spite of the 67 stairs that we have to climb to get here, I love our location. We’re on the very end of a long narrow building so we have windows on three sides which let in lots of light and allow us to look out in several directions.

The apartment is approximately 390 square feet and is made up of three rooms plus the bathroom. Take a close look at the picture of the kitchen. Can you see the stove? Sure you can! It’s right behind the electric kettle. That’s right! It’s a one burner hot plate! Though you can’t see them in the photo, we also have a microwave, a toaster, a rice cooker and a crock pot so cooking is possible. So far, though, we’ve been eating most of our meals out. Why not when there are lots of eating establishments within a few minutes walk and food is unbelievably cheap? For example, supper tonight cost less than $6 for the two of us!

The kitchen also has a small refrigerator and a water dispenser. Bottled water is essential here as the tap water isn’t safe to drink. I was delighted to learn that we could have an 18.9 L jug of water delivered to the door for $2! All we have to do is tell our school secretary when we need a new one and she takes care of ordering it for us.

Our main source of heat is a small hot water radiator in each room which is adequate to take the chill off but we’re thankful that the bed/sitting room also has a wall unit that provides both heat and air conditioning depending on the season. If you take another look at the picture of the kitchen, you’ll notice that the cupboard door below the kettle has been left open. That’s because the radiator is inside the cupboard! I’m assuming that the cupboard unit must be a more recent addition to the penthouse.

The third room is our computer/guest room. That’s right, though it can’t be seen in the photo, the computer room is also furnished with a double bed. If you’ve ever wanted to visit China, now’s your chance! The love seat in the bed/sitting room also folds out into a single bed so we can easily sleep three of you at once. Just let us know you’re coming because we’ll have to find some bedding for your beds!

Did you notice that in addition to being fully furnished, the apartment even came with plants? They were pretty dried out when we got here but with a bit of water and pruning, they’re looking much better now. My favourite is the Christmas cactus blooming on the kitchen window sill. They’re one of my favourite plants and I’ve often thought about buying one. I just didn’t realize that I would come all the way to China to get it!

Where do we live?

/ edebock / 10 Comments

Our mailing address sounds pretty fancy:

Room 305,
EIE, School of Continuing Education
Liaoning Normal University,
850 Huanghe Road,
Dalian, Liaoning, China 116029

but that’s just where we work. Where do we actually live?

We were given a sheet of paper with our apartment address written in both Chinese and English that we could show to a taxi driver if needed. It says that our apartment address is: the little street of Liaoning Normal University, Lan Xiu Street, Huanghe Road, Shahekou District, The Red Building!

We went for lunch with one of our fellow teachers today. When he asked where we live, we described our location just off the edge of the university campus. “Oh, is yours the building where it looks like you’re entering a crack house?” he asked. Yes, I think that would be us!

We enter through a broken door and climb the narrow cement staircase to our apartment on the top floor. Many of the landings between floors are piled high with stuff. I’m not sure if it’s things that people have discarded or if the landings are just being used as extra storage space. I must admit that as we hauled our suitcases up the 67 stairs to the fifth floor the night we arrived here, I really wondered what we’d find at the top. In comparison to the stairwell, our apartment really isn’t bad at all but I’ll save that for another post.

In the meantime, let me tell you what’s going on right now. At the moment, it literally sounds like we’re living in the middle of a war zone. Today is the final day of the Chinese New Year holiday. There have been fireworks going off all around us ever since we arrived but we’re assuming that that must be coming to an end tonight because now they’re literally exploding non stop all over the neighbourhood! This started well before dark. I knew that fireworks were a big deal in China but I never imagined anything like this! I hope it comes to an end before we go to bed tonight or there won’t be any sleeping happening. I’m not holding my breath though. The first ones started going off at 6 o’clock this morning just as the sun began to come up. There are also bonfires burning on several street corners below us tonight.

I wonder how many more surprises this strange place we’ve chosen to live has in store for us?

Chrissy, child of my heart

/ edebock / 7 Comments

I gave birth to three of our children, one we adopted at birth and one is the child of my heart. It was a spring day in 2002, when Christina came to Richard at school and asked if she could come live with us. We talked about it, prayed about it and decided that it was a perfect fit. Our youngest, Nathan, was about to finish high school and head off to college but I wasn’t ready for an empty nest. Ours was a home that needed a child and Christina was a child who needed a home.

Chrissy hadn’t seen or heard from her father since she was a preschooler. With her mother and younger brother, she’d spent her childhood moving from place to place as her mother moved in and out of one relationship after another. When it became obvious that that was about to happen again, Chrissy decided that this time she simply couldn’t go. She had recently become a Christian, had made a new circle of supportive friends that included our daughter, was involved in a youth group and wanted to finish high school in one place.

Though we reminded her that in spite of the fact that their relationship was in tatters at the time, she had only one mother who’s place we would never be able to fill, we welcomed her into our home and took on the role of surrogate parents. Like any parent/teen relationship, ours had its ups and downs, its good times and its bad but we bonded and became family.

There were funny moments, of course, but one stands out as being the most hilarious. Shortly after moving in with us, Christina accompanied Richard and I on a trip to Vancouver to meet my parents and our oldest son, Matt. My parents immediately accepted her as another grandchild. Rather than buying gifts at Christmastime, it was their habit to send each of their grandchildren a cheque. When December rolled around and it was time to write the cheques, my father realized that he didn’t know Chrissy’s last name. He asked Matt who couldn’t remember either. He, in turn, volunteered to phone our daugher, Melaina, at college to ask her. When Melaina got off the phone, her roommate (now her sister-in-law) asked who she’d been talking to. “That was my brother,” she replied. “He needed to know my sister’s last name.” It wasn’t until she realized that her roommate was looking at her quite oddly that she realized how strange that sounded! She had to go on to explain that our family really wasn’t as dysfunctional as that made us sound!

Eventually, Chrissy went off to college too and there she met a fine young man. We were delighted when she and Buck married and lived for a time in Sedgewick. They even moved into our house and took care of it for us for the year that we lived in Japan. Now they live in Winnipeg and have a darling 21-month-old daughter who calls us Gram and Grandpa.

Ten years have passed since Chrissy visited Richard’s classroom in search of a stable Christian home. How fitting that I should spend this Mother’s Day here in her home!

Chrissy, child of my heart