This past week started not so good and progressively became better. I always have a hard time getting back into work after a vacation, but after our time in Europe, it was SO hard to get back into the swing of things. On Monday, I was tired and grumpy and climbing a steep learning curve at work which only made things worse. My yoga class on Monday night, as always, helped me to relax and in general started an upward trend for the rest of the week. Tuesday night we had a very enjoyable dinner with a coworker of Andy’s from Boise. Wednesday was school work and a late yoga class. Thursday, a very nice dinner with some friends who helped me to realize some of the great friends I have made here in Shanghai. Before the dinner Andy and I had a massage where the massage lady told me I had a big butt. I was not offended that much because I am not very self conscious of that area of my body but I explained to the girl that all foreigners butts are probably big compared to those of Chinese woman, Chinese woman have no butts. I told her it was probably best if she didn’t say anything was big on a foreigner, ever. I am not sure that she will follow my advice, but I think her career will be much longer if she does, since it is a massage parlor visited by many foreigners. After dinner, Andy was still at the sailing club social/movie night so I decided to get a foot massage since my feet had really built up a lot of tightness from walking around in flip flops in Europe. I went to the local 520 club and had “Number Two.” Poor guy doesn’t even get a name badge with his name on it. I will tell you what though, Number Two inflicted a lot of “hurt so good” pain and worked out every last tight muscle and ligament in my foot. I had to practice my deep breathing from yoga to get through the pain, which I had agreed to because I knew I needed it to fix my feet. It is strange but once you get used to foot massages, your feet really start to crave them, especially when you walk a lot. I know it probably sounds excessive and unnecessary to those of you back in the states, but they are fabulous and with yoga, exercise and massage, my body feels very happy with me.
Friday started with an early morning (6:30 am) meeting with my coworkers in Boise. It was my lucky day and my Internet connection from home was fast, so I decided at the last minute to work from home. Around 9:30 or 10 o’clock I (swear I) heard the key turn and the door opening. I turned around from my position on the couch (makeshift computer desk) and watched an older Chinese couple walk into my house. The older Chinese women looked at me, perplexed and I must have looked completely shocked. I stood up and in my polished Mandarin (ya right!) said “wode jia” which translates to “my home.” She started talking a mile a minute and so I immediately called Andy at work to see if we were expecting the landlords or something. He said that we were not but handed the phone to his Chinese coworker in order to find out from the woman what she thought she was doing in our apartment. After their conversation, the woman said sorry and left. I called Andy back to find out what the deal was and apparently the woman said that her daughter owned the apartment and that she had come from Beijing to stay here. She said that she didn’t think her daughter was renting out the apartment. Thankfully she was gone, but we were still completely confused as to what was going on. About ten minutes later, she came back to OUR apartment and asked to call Andy’s coworker again. This time she explained to him that she had entered the wrong apartment and that her daughter really owned 32H (we live in 35H.) I was relived to know what was going on but still freaked out that her key had opened our door. We called the relocation people to get the locks changed as well as have a bunch of small broken things in the apartment that had been building up taken care of.
The excitement continued with the ayi. She came Friday afternoon and it was fun to see her since it had been a long time with work and vacation. We stumbled through the broken Mandarin to discuss exercise and fashion. She told me that she had started running since she is too fat and she showed me some exercises I should do which I think involved standing on my toes for 30 minutes. Yikes. I think I will stick with my current exercise plan. Then, later in the day/evening, I was getting ready to take my Mandarin teacher to have her first pedicure and was also getting dressed to go out to dinner later. I had on some brown pants and decided to wear a jean jacket with them. She came up to me and said “oh oh” and motioned for me to come with her to my closet. Then she motioned to my stack of jeans saying that my jean jacket would look better with jeans than my brown pants. I didn’t really know what to say, especially with a very limited vocabulary. What I wanted to say was, “oh, ya that would look good, but I do not personally like that look for me” but what I said was “I don’t like.” Well, at least the Chinese do not get offended over honesty.
Friday night was a nice dinner at a great restaurant that has a very western feel to it. After dinner, a friend and I were really in the mood to go dancing. Unfortunately, both of our husbands were about asleep at the table. Well, we decided to go anyway and left the group and had a couple of cocktails along with some wonderful conversation. It took us a few hours until we finally found a place with dancing and by then it was so late, we could hardly enjoy it. It was crazy though because at the bar there were so many western men hitting on Chinese girls. We mostly just kept to ourselves but got our dancing fix.
Saturday morning was tough because of my late night on Friday. Andy woke me up and I so wanted to tell him that I would just sleep instead of going to sailing class, but I managed to pull myself out of bed and get dressed to go sailing. We met our friend Patrik and drove out to Dianshen Lake.
Our sailing class broke in to teams of about two inexperienced sailor for each helmsman. The helmsman is the person who steers the boat and gives others instructions. I was going to be in a boat with Neil, a very experienced sailor from England (who is actually moving to Genoa, we are jealous) and with Stefan, a German guy who knows how to windsurf but does not have experience with sailboats. We spent time getting our boat set up and I, especially was trying to learn the terms of all of the parts of the boat, as I had missed the first two weeks of sailing class due to our vacation. I swear sailing is like a whole new language. There is a term for everything you can possibly imagine.
After our boat was rigged and ready to go out, I was very excited. We got on the water and Neil carefully maneuvered us out of the sheltered area of the lake used to launch boats and through the gate to the main part of the lake. Almost immediately after we were out in the main lake, Stefan asked if we should have so much water in the bottom of the boat. Neil said no and then we tried to figure out where the water was coming in at. After some time, they figured out that the center board was flexing when pressure was applied to it and then water was able to come in. In the meantime, I became very familiar with bailing water. We tried to fix the issue, but couldn’t and then ultimately switched to another boat. The other boat had a problem with the sail though so we had to transfer the sail from the previous boat to it. After the transfer was complete, we thought we were ready to go out again until we tried to raise the main sail and it wouldn’t raise all of the way to the top. We troubleshooted it for about 45 minutes and then ultimately gave up. I was wondering if I was simply not destined to sail.
About 10 minutes later, the rescue boat came into shore and took Stefan and I out to find a boat to get onto so we could do some sailing. We found Andy’s boat (he was one of the helmsman) and I agreed to take Patrik’s place on that boat. Andy has been concerned about me learning to sail from him because he thinks that I don’t like it when he tells me to do something. He is right, but in this scenario I thought it would be okay because he knows SO much about sailing and I know nothing. Plus, he was super nice, probably in an effort to avoid any issues and he was a very positive teacher to both Tintin (the other guy on the boat) and I. I really enjoyed the experience of sailing until I started to get cold and hungry. Soon after that point, we went in because I was not the only one feeling that way.
All and all it was a great day on the lake and I am really glad that I like sailing because Patrik and Andy are now in the process of purchasing a boat. (They are so excited, they are like little kids when they talk about sailing, it is so cute!) I will continue to learn about sailing and who knows, maybe I will be a natural…that is after I learn a bit of the new language and which direction the wind is coming from…
Related posts:
- Sailing, New Friends and the Crazy Little Things About Living in China Today, I hired an ayi. “Ayi” is the Chinese word for maid. She seems like she will be great and...
- Aerobatic Massage and Fear Factor Dinner Description of a Taiwanese massage in Shanghai and our ayi cooking dinner for us....
- Zhen Qi Guai – Very Strange In a couple of my International Business classes, when they brought up culture they said that one of the ways...
- A Fairly Typical Week Most of the expats forgot about Easter until the last minute. There is just nothing Easter-like in Shanghai to remind...
- We Now Officially Live in China Beginning to move into our apartment in Shanghai and dealing with the long trip's jet lag....
Comments on this entry are closed.