Our New Home

Good day everyone. We are finally settled into our new home in Changzhou, China - sort of. What an ordeal, moving is stressful to start with but add in the fact that you are on the other side of the world far away from friends and family and barely speak a word of Chinese and its enough to make you go crazy!!! The house had been empty for many months and the musty smell was horrific and even though we had cleaners come in before we arrived we still spent 2 weeks cleaning the house to bring it to our standards. I hate to generalize but from what we have seen so far I can say that the Chinese are not the cleanest people on earth. The family who lived here before us had a full time live in maid - I have no idea what she did all day, her room was actually one of the worst rooms other than the kitchen. It took Will and I two full days just to clean all the grease out of the kitchen, it was repulsive.
We stayed at the hotel for the first week while we went to the house every day to clean, fortunately it was the Mid-Autumn Festival and Will had the entire week off. The Mid-Autumn Festival is second only to the Chinese New Year in significance. It is held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, which is usually around mid or late September in the Gregorian calendar. On this day, Chinese family members and friends will gather to admire the bright mid-autumn harvest moon, and eat moon cakes and pomeloes together.
Once the holiday was over and Will went back to work I stayed home to clean and to deal with the hundreds of problems that kept popping up. First was the fact that the A/C was not working properly and you need it here even in Sept/Oct. Our satellite TV that the owners promised us with English channels had only 1 channel and it was all movie soundtrack videos!!! The hot water tank was not working, Internet had not been installed, windows that wouldn't close, a broken security system , mold growing on walls, broken glass on the kitchen cabinets, jacuzzi tub with no motor, and a broken headboard just to name a few. Olivia, the assistant to the VP at Will's office has been helping us with getting all of these issued fixed, but with the Chinese nothing is simple. Everything involves extreme negotiations and can take several days to get sorted. Even after the contractor has arrived most of the time they don't have the tools or parts needed(since 80% of these workers drive scooters) and they have to leave several times to go back to the store or office - very annoying. Olivia tried to be at the house when someone was coming over but sometimes she could not make it, leaving me to try use my charades skills and sign language. When that didn't work I would call Olivia but if she did not answer I was out of luck.
Which brings me to another point, why the heck do the Chinese not have voicemail? This is not an option that it possible here, they suggest the use of text messaging instead, like I have time for that. Anyways, we seem to have the biggest issues taken care of but it has been a learning experience to say the least. I have been keeping busy doing little things that take longer around here. I have to do laundry every day because the washing machine is so small and even thought it is a washing/dryer, it doesn't really dry it just steams so all items need to be hung to dry and often ironed. I also have to grocery shop every second day, first because the fridges are tiny so I can only buy a few things at a time, secondly because Will still has to get his Chinese drivers licence so I have to walk/taxi and can only carry so much, and third because they don't use a lot of preservatives so thinks like bread and milk only last a couple of days.
You don't realize how good we have it in Canada until you experience something like this. I know that I sound like I am complaining a lot but I am happy that we decided to take on this challenge and I am sure things will get easier as time goes by. I am excited about my new teaching job that I start on Monday, its only a few days a week but it will get me out of the house and hopefully I will learn a lot from my students. We still have not received our container with all of our goods from Canada but it should be here next week and I look forward to a big bowl of Kraft Dinner as long as it doesn't get confiscated.

Can someone please tell the Chinese that it is rude to stare.

Hey all, sorry that it has taken me so long to update my blog but it has been a crazy few weeks. We have moved into our new home for the next two years and let me tell you it was not easy but that is a story for another day. Today I want to talk about the biggest issue I have over here - the staring!!! This is like nothing you have ever experienced before, trust me. Every where you go people go out of there way to stare at you, they will stop what they are doing, they will point you out to their friends and they even slow down in their car or scooter to get a better look. They are very obvious about it as well, I have tried to stare back, I smile, and I even say hello (in Chinese of course) and all I get is a blank stare. Occasionally the odd person will say hello back but its rare. We find that it is mostly the older generation who tend to be fascinated with us, most of the younger Chinese have grown up watching Western movies and have Western teachers but their parents don't often see foreigners. They are so curious about us and what we are doing that we often have people come over to us in the store and look in our cart to see what we are buying and sometimes they even follow us through the store. In the larger cities like Shanghai you don't get as many stares because they see Westerns more often but the smaller the city, the bigger the stares. We did have a good run in the other day while taking a stroll through our neighhood when we came across a group of young children around 5-8 years old who immediatley ran over to us - they were all yelling " Hello hello, how are you?" to us in English, they were so excited to get to practise their English, it was so cute!!