Ok, ok, we're here

We have received some gentle promptings from several people to update our blog. So here goes.
I sometimes feel like I am living in two worlds. It is taking some adjustment to combine being an American with living in a new culture and country. I am always overly cautious and overly sensitive about being an "Ugly American" and so I have tried to assimilate to the new culture and ideas as much as possible. Sometimes it is hard, though. I'll give you an example by showing you what my day is like here:
I wake up about 6:00 am. The normal sounds are in my apartment: kids crying, going to the bathroom, asking for breakfast. I also hear the sounds of the 10,000 students coming to the school that we live next to where my husband works. The crossing guards are blowing their whistles, the hundreds of scooters are zooming up and down my small street, the large tour buses that get their money during the week by being contracted to bring in the numerous out-of-town students all are playing in the background. My husband is getting ready to go to work. I whip up some oatmeal (luckily I remembered to get bananas and soy milk from market yesterday-more on that later). My husband goes down the elevator from our 12th floor apartment, out of our building and walks about 20 feet to the security gate to the school where he works.

(A view from our apartment of some of the school campus where Scott works)
I get Meili ready for Chinese Kindergarten, cute school uniform and all. We forgot to do her homework last night so we spend 5 minutes that we don't have finishing it up. I get the kids fed, ready, break up fights, comfort Euan who is crying in the chaos, and out the door. (So far this mostly sounds like any normal Mom's morning in America with only a couple of strange things, right? Homework for a Kindergartner, 10,000 students, hundreds of whizzing scooters).
Now, out into the new world. I greet our Guan li yuan (security guard) in my broken Chinese. Out we go, past the breakfast cafe that is attached to our building and I ask the owner in Chinese to please purchase me some bread with her regular orders(she has the hook-ups to some soft and cheap bread). I take a deep breath and venture out onto the street since there are no sidewalks (nor shoulders) while buses and scooters drive within feet of us. Asian living is not for the claustrophobic. As I walk, I greet my neighbors whose bottom floors of their houses are their businesses: the other breakfast cafe two doors down from the first, the salon lady who just woke up and is opening her gate, the lunch cafe preparing their dishes, another breakfast cafe, the old man who guards the taps to the well water (which we buy). I also greet my other neighbors who are opening their gate of the bottom floor of their houses (much like a smaller version of our garages): the 85 year-old woman who looks not a day past 70 who I also see at the track early in the morning, our electronics family who recently upgraded their bottom-floor of their house business to a larger 2 floor rented space downtown, and sometimes I even see the Bishop of our church's family. Three blocks later I arrive at Meili's school and greet the teacher who is manning the school gate. I help Meili go to her classroom and unpack her homework, lunch container, and water bottle (full of the purchased well water). I let Sophie and Euan play on the playground for a minute while the other students arrive and surround the foreigners, showing off their new toys, asking strange questions, and all the other things that small children do. It's too bad that I only understand a fraction of it.


Around 8:00 am we leave the school and continue down the road to the Farmer's Morning Market.
To be continued...