There have been a few episodes in the last edition of “Amber’s Life in China”.  Allow me to give you the brief run-down.

Catch up with old friends and meet new ones:

You remember Tom and Amy, right?  It has only been about two and a half months since their baby was born.  I dropped by their apartment last week to pay them a visit. (When I say “dropped by” I really mean “planned it in advance”)  Lucia, their daughter (or in Chinese – 路加 pronounced “loo-jyah”) is growing quickly.  She has super chubby cheeks and sleeps well at night.  Both mom and dad are happy, content, and tired. 🙂  Lucia has some health issues.  If you’re looking for something to pray for–you got it!  While I was in Tom and Amy’s part of the city (about 1.5 hours from where I live) I wanted to visit the foreign import grocery store.  There are many things you can buy there which you can’t buy at other places.  (Unfortunately, still no peanut butter M&Ms)  I was going to there after visiting them but they wanted me to stay for dinner.  Tom insisted that I use his bike to go there and then just come back to their apartment for dinner before going home.  He led me out to the underground bike parking garage and got his bike.  Now, in Chinese to say “ride bicycle” you say “骑自行车”.  (chee-zuh-shing-chuh) approx…..  the verb is “chee”.  Tom used his very awesome Chinglish to make a joke using the verb “chee” that I thought was funny.  He told me that his tires were out of air (气 — also “chee”) because “Long Time No Chee”.  hehehehe…. We steal our phrase “Long time no see” directly from Chinese. 

Baby Lucia with me

I also met a new friend at B study this past week.  Her name is Amanda and she just came back to China from living in Canada for 9 years!  Her English is amazing.  She’s a graphic designer and knows photography.  She and I will get along very well! 🙂

The tale of the Zoomer

A couple weeks ago, a friend asked me to help him get his e-bike fixed.  He just needed help talking in Chinese. (I know…funny, right?–millions of English-speaking Chinese people and he asked me…)  I went with him to the bike place and got them to understand that he needed the breaks fixed, a new headlight and a new “stand” for the bike.  They fixed those problems but couldn’t fix the much-more-complicated chain problem.  A few days after that, this friend texted me and asked me to try to fix the chain at a different place. In exchange, he would let me ride the zoomer (we affectionately call it “zoom-zoom”) for a few days.  How could I not?

So, I picked up the bike from his house on a Saturday. (The bike still works…It’s just that if the battery would happen to die while driving it, I wouldn’t be able to pedal the bike and would have to push it.  Okay…no problem…I’ll just charge the battery each night and we’ll be good to go.  First of all, the battery is super heavy.  If you remember correctly, I live on the 5th floor.  I definitely got a workout on the days I was carrying that battery.  Of course, this makes up for all the exercise I wasn’t getting while scooting around on an electric bike.  I didn’t fix it on Sunday. (but rode it to church) 🙂  I didn’t fix it on Monday because I’m gone to a different part of the city on Mondays teaching.  Tuesday rolled around and I rode it to Chinese class and other places.  I took it to a different bike place to see if I could get my meaning across. They understood me just fine but said they didn’t have the part.  They said if I would come back next month, they could have the part.  Hmmm….well, okay.

Here’s how my days of riding the e-bike went.  Sunday – ride to Chinese church to meet a friend. Ride to our church along the path of the Beijing marathon.  (almost impossible to cross the road) Ride to school to pick up some things. Ride back to my home. (battery still working.)  Take battery upstairs to plug it in.  Monday – no riding.  Tuesday – ride to school, chinese class, to Hannah’s, to bike fixing place, to the boy’s apartment for B study.  Leave the bike there.  I had had enough.  Oh it was fun to drive. So fun I considered for about 10 minutes whether or not I should buy one.  But I decided it was not a fit for me.  First of all, I really do love riding my ‘manual’ bike.  Second of all, there is a little button (see below picture) that, when I push it, honks the little horn on the e-bike.  It’s the equivalent of the bell for the ‘manual’ bikes.  It says ‘excuse me, I’m coming up behind you and would like to go around you.’  Except–when Amber’s on the e-bike.  For some reason, when I’m on the e-bike, the little horn-honking-button becomes (only in my mind of course) sort of a force field.  I think that if I push it, cars will magically not hit me.  I definitely felt fearless while riding this bike.  This would not be good for me.  It goes much faster than I need to (although I really want to).  Long story short:  my days with the e-bike were short-lived, albeit exciting. 

Here is Zoom Zoom. Ted bought him last year but never really rode him. He sort of gets passed around among the men of the group but I was fortunate enough to try him out for a couple days. He's awesome!

See that little button on the bottom? That's the horn for the zoomer. It really is the control for this force field that I was talking about. It's very dangerous.

The time when Amber couldn’t get warm

It’s been getting quite a bit colder in the capital city.  It has dropped to a chilly 30-40 degrees at night and hovers right around 60 during the day.  Now, you’re probably thinking that it isn’t that cold.  But I disagree. When you spend the greater share of your day outside on a bike, 60 starts to feel cold.  The worst part about the cold is how it invades every corner of my apartment.  Now, being the good communist country that we are, the heat is regulated.  When I say regulated I mean that I don’t get to choose when to turn it on.  I probably would have turned it on last week.  It is frightfully chilly inside of my apartment, especially my bedroom.  (I’m sure the other rooms are equally chilly…I’m just in my bedroom the most because I’m NEVER home.)  I think the “heat-turn-on-day” is November 1.  Happy Birthday, Amber…have some heat!  I’ll let you know if that is in fact the day.  I really shouldn’t complain about not getting to control the heat.  Our southern counterparts don’t even get to have heat. Granted, they are technically in a warmer part of the country but I would rather have heat inside. 

While complaining about the cold with an American friend of mine I was reminiscing about my travels last year and how I experienced the “no heat inside” part of the country in January.  This journey back in time reminded me of how I stayed warm on that trip…every place I stayed at had an electric matress pad on each bed!  Last year for my birthday, my friend Junning gave me an electric matress pad.  I had forgotten I had said matress pad.  I have never used it because the heat came on before I had a chance.  (And then the heat didn’t go off until April.)  So, naturally, I went right home and put the matress pad under the sheet on my bed. 🙂  Warm Bliss!  So now I’m warm in my apartment. At least when I’m in/on my bed. 🙂

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Many other things have happened as well.  Just not as memorable to me.  I’ve been using my camera whenever I get the chance.  I’ll share a few of my better photos below.  Enjoy the weekend!

I was playing with my camera in my apartment. I had to lie on the floor for this one. Notice the clean floor. 🙂

This was a late night adventure on Peking University Campus. The red sky is due in part to the pollution.

My plan was to get a photo of messy traffic so that you could see what I was talking about in my previous post. I happened to be there on the day that the police were regulating the traffic. This is one of many shots that I got from inside the "subway". This line of the subway is mostly above ground.

Besides going rafting for the holiday, I also did some other stuff…

I visited some places I had seen before. (798 Art District, the city of Tianjin)  I saw a not-so-awesome Chinese fairy tale movie…in Chinese. I went to a micro-brewery in downtown Beijing to drink some not-so-awesome beer.  But in all of these ho-hum activities there were awesome people involved, which made the experiences wonderful.  Oh yeah….I also helped photograph another wedding.  See a few of my favorite photos below. 

The happy couple

They didn't have any attendents so I have a bunch of pictures of just the two of them.

🙂

What you don't see in this picture is across the lily pond the hoards of people photographing these two. It was quite entertaining.

There’s an upside and a downside to every outing…usually.

Once again, I find myself with an obscene amount of vacation time after only teaching for one month.  During this holiday, there happens to be a wedding right in the middle…so, I decided to hang out around Beijing and fly by the seat of my pants.  I was online exploring things to do in the Beijing area (to see if there were things I hadn’t done) and I found a white water rafting place. ‘Hmm…could be interesting,’ I thought to myself.  I sent an email out to the group to see if there was anyone interested in rafting.  After people decided what they were going to do, I headed to the train ticket office to see if we could get tickets for THE NEXT DAY…  If you have learned anything from me during my time here, you should know that this is nearly impossible.  But I went anyway.  I took my awesome friend Gretl with me because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to communicate my needs to the ticket seller.  We waited in line for what seemed like an hour (probably only about 30 min).  Got to the window and the woman said, “什么都没有” (shenme dou meiyou), which means “nothing!”  I was skeptical (even though I knew this was an impossible task) so we made sure that we heard her correctly and then went on our way.  A little sad about the lack of train tickets, I headed back to the school to brainstorm with Gretl how else we could get there. 

We checked buses, private driver, etc.  Everything was either unavailable or unaffordable.  I sent out a mass text message that said we couldn’t get train tickets and to see what the group wanted to do.  They wanted to keep trying.

The next morning my friend Ming (who was actually coming with us–poor Gretl was helping us organize and not even coming on the trip) went to the busiest train station in Beijing.  (She did this because sometimes if you go to the station instead of the ticket office you might be able to get tickets.)  She couldn’t even get INSIDE the train station.  When she finally did get inside she had to wait in line.  She finally heard from someone that there were no tickets to ANYWHERE for that day and the next day (Friday and Saturday).  Her long trip to the station was worth nothing.  We made an executive decision and informed the group that we would be heading north to a closer, less adventurous river to do some “drifting” down a river. 🙂  They were all still “in.”

That evening, after two friends finished teaching, we headed for one of the main bus stations.  Tickets to the nearby suburbs are fairly easy to get.  Actually, we were technically using a city bus that was faster than the other city buses.  Ming had arranged our “hostel” (actually a farmhouse–called 农家院 in Chinese) and a driver to get us to the “hostel” for when we got off the city bus.  Transportation to our destination cost approx. Y18. 🙂

We were pleasantly surprised to discover that our driver was taking us far away from the city and into the mountains via some beautiful scenery. 

We arrived at the 农家院 to find a wonderful supper waiting for us.  All of the food was farm fresh and delicious.  We got to try some new things too.   Our room was equally awesome!  Not “awesome” in the way you would think… Awesome because all 8 of us got to stay in the same room and it was fun to have great company.  (BTW–people who came on the trip included, Hannah, Hannah’s Brother, Chinese friend Ming, Joseph, Micah, Tim, Chinese friend Jacob, and yours truly…aren’t you glad you know now?)  We had tons of laughs and giggles about four of the guys sharing one enormous bed. (It was actually four twin-sized beds shoved together with a piece of what was basically plywood laying on top of them.) hehehe….

In the morning, the 老板 (boss) made us breakfast and drove us to the place where we would eventually hop in the rafts. 

Here is where the pictures come. Except…when you are surrounded by water with water splashing into your raft and onto you, you don’t really want your electronic devices along with you.  This was such a bittersweet day for me, lover of images, to not have my camera. (I even brought my point and shoot with me that day because I knew the DSLR would not have been a wise choice.)  The rafting people recommended not bringing anything electronic: phone, camera, mp3, etc.  I struggled and struggled with the decision but eventually decided to leave it.  The sky was a gorgeous deep blue, the water was lovely, the cliffs were precipitous, and it was an all around great day!  I wish I could share it with you in photos.  One of the highlights of the day was sharing a boat with Joseph who is a laugh a minute.  He also didn’t like the way I paddled so I got to enjoy most of the ride without the work. 🙂  We almost capsized at one set of rapids but managed to keep our boat right. 

After the river journey we were carted back to the place where we stored our backpacks and decided to grill some chuan’r 串 (with the sole purpose of having the sticks and grill to use for roasting marshmallows).  After relaxing with beer, chuan’r (and s’mores) our driver took us back to the bus station from the night before to catch the bus back to Beijing.  We arrived in the city in time for a Peking duck dinner and headed to our respective homes.  It was a really amazing day in God’s beautiful scenery enjoying time with a great group of people!

(It’s actually 996 words, but who’s counting?)