The Year of the Horse

The year of the horse is starting!!! 2014 is going to mark the year of the horse in the Chinese Lunar Calendar and the start of the Spring Festival begins here on January 31st and runs for 15 days.  Bill and I are leaving the country today!!!   Yep, we are heading to the land down under… Australia!  Now you might question why we are leaving and not staying to experience the most important festival in Chinese culture… Reason being is that we have been told by most people we know to "get out" of the country.   The New Year or Spring Festival as they call it here is when most people travel to their home towns and spend time with their families.  This results in massive traffic jams, crammed trains, closing of most businesses in towns, for example a few local restaurants closed on Monday already and are closed until the 7th of February.  Our gym closes today and doesn't reopen until the 7th as well.  Even grocery stores close.  So we weren't quite sure what in the world we'd do if we stayed here.  This festival will also draw nonstop fireworks… think 4th of July but for an entire week straight and at all times of the day.  Yesterday I was facetimeing with my mom at 10 in the morning and there were massive fireworks going off.  (We're talking dynamite sticks!)   We took the advice of our expat counterparts and decided it'd be best to head south!

For the past week places in town have been putting up massive displays and working on their fireworks staging areas.

We leave this afternoon and head to Sydney, then we'll make a trip over to the north island of New Zealand and after a week head to Brisbane to enjoy surfers paradise for a week before heading back to China.  I'll try to post pictures/events while we are there!   Hope everyone back home is staying warm in round 2 of polar vortex!

I broke the faucet!

This morning I had a board meeting for the expat group at the Renaissance Hotel in town and I arrived a little bit early because the taxi driver drove like a bat outta hell and it only took 10 minutes instead of 15/20 it can take driving the speed limit.  I quick popped into the bathroom as I had drank a ton of coffee this morning and didn't want to have to get up in the middle of the meeting.   As I'm washing my hands the entire faucet falls off and water started spraying EVERYWHERE!

How does a faucet in a hotel come off?

Luckily my reflexes were pretty quick this morning and I was able to shut off the water only managing to soak one of my pant legs!  The floor of the bathroom didn't fair so well.   Here's my leg… just a bit wet, but I was able to conceal it to the ladies!  

This must've just been karma getting back at me for me calling out the bylaws on a voting decision that was made!  Whoops!

Don't Bleach the Water Cooler...

Today I learned a valuable lesson in cleaning household appliances…

DON'T BLEACH THE WATER COOLER!!!

I'll start by saying that for the past week I've felt that the water out of the cooler tasted "funky".  Now, we've changed the bottle twice and it's still tasting funky to me… it could just be the taste of the water here and I could've forgotten how bad it tastes while in the US for a month.  Or those filters/seals whatever is inside could be dirty since well we did let water sit for a month when gone!  Unfortunately I didn't think to unplug or take the 5 gallon water jug off our water cooler.  Sooo it sat for a month turned on with hot/cold spouts just hanging out.  My brain told me that it probably needed a clean out.

To be fair I did my research - both of the Consumer Reports Books I have say that bleach is okay to kill the germs.  I even did a few google searches and most came up with bleach being the best and then vinegar being second best.  In my mind at 6am I was thinking… "Hell this thing hasn't been cleaned in a year - lets bleach the sucker!!!"

Now Bill's saying…  "Ummm, Anne why does my oatmeal taste like a swimming pool?"

"Ohhh it's okay honey I just bleached the water cooler, a little bleach never hurt anybody!"

And now I'm saying… "Why the hell did I think bleach was a good idea."

At first I thought - oh it can't be that bad, then I took a water bottle to the gym and as I'm running on the treadmill and I take a drink of water I just about collapsed due to the pool taste in my mouth!  For the remaining hour on the treadmill all I could think about was how the heck I was going to get the bleach/chlorine taste out of the cooler.

As soon as I returned from the gym I had to take care of this.  First I needed to get the full bottle off the top without spilling the entire thing on the floor.  I managed pretty well, enough landed to wash the floor but it's okay, it needs a wash anyways!

 I decided I'd try some baking soda in the filter to maybe deodorize the taste if that's even possible!  So I dumped 2 teaspoons in with a bottle of water, then another bottle of water.  It still smelled like bleach.

 So what the heck lets try some vinegar and another couple bottles of water.  Can't hurt right?

Okay now lets put this bottle back on top and not spill…. yep more water all over the floor.  And the water still tastes like bleach!   I ran a few bowls of water out of it and then I decided to give up for awhile, I'll drink a bottle from the fridge and let this sit for awhile.  Maybe Bill can try it out later! ;-)

Lesson learned today - I will never clean out the water cooler in China again and I will never use bleach on a water cooler ever.

The Peeing Man… What a Welcome Back!

Welcome Back!!!  Yes, that is a picture of a man in broad daylight on a heavily trafficked street just peeing away in public.  Bill and I were on a walk to get some DVD's and of course only 5 minutes into our walk we witness this… he was at least courteous enough to wait until we passed him to then start peeing.   Oh an just up to the next corner of the road is a public toilet - he could've driven his van up there but instead decided to stop in the wide open!

Yep - guess what, we're back in the crazy land and are having to "re-de-sensitize" ourselves as Bill is calling it.   On the same morning after witnessing the peeing man it took me 20 minutes to order 1 small decaf coffee at Starbucks!!!   Seriously!?!?!  All I wanted was a decaf coffee - no caffeine, small coffee.  The cashier had no clue what I was saying, eventually I ended up with a small coffee which I'm 99% sure had caffeine, but I got a coffee none the less!  Just another reminder of how much the language barrier can affect simple daily tasks.

We also went to the DVD shop to pick up some entertainment for the weekend, you see we've been gone for a month so we've been missing a lot of good movies that came out while we were in the US and we're way to cheap to actually go to the theater to see a movie so we bought 10 on Saturday for a grand total of $16USD!   That's approximately 20 hours of viewing entertainment… it's now Sunday evening and we've watched 4 so far!  I bet we'll have 6 down before we hit Monday morning.

I'm debating which TV series I should start watching next...

Also, it's a good thing we stocked up on these movies because Bill says the smog is so bad our satellite TV doesn't have any reception.   I'm not sure if it's truly the smog that is causing the TV not to work or if it's just the government deciding we've had enough of this illegal TV for the moment.  Either way - we haven't had TV since Friday evening  and the smog has been in the 300's (on the scale of 0 to 500).

Again - WELCOME BACK!   Hopefully this next week will be much better than our last and we'll start to get back in the groove.