Day 3 Hefei

April 19, 2007 Thursday

Up with the chickens again. I normally get up about 6:30 in Los Angeles, when my friend Marie calls me to exercise, but if she doesn’t call, I have no trouble sleeping till 7:30 or 8. Here, I have been waking up when it is still dark. I’ve been very careful not to take naps, not to go to bed really really early, and I still wake up!

Breakfast at the GH restaurant: (1 flight)

Yes, that really is a fried egg in the middle. Have you ever tried to eat one with chopsticks? It was even a little runny. There were also 3 dumplings, ½ sweet potato, cake with sprinkles and a red bean and rice soup. The red beans here are sort of sweet – so quiet different from red beans and rice in Louisiana. Back to the room (2 flights)

Walked Chuck to work. He planned to have a meeting with Jian to discuss the class. But first we were offered a tour of our apartment. Our apartment is on the 4^th floor in the Faculty Housing area of campus. None of these buildings have elevators. (4 flights)

All of the buildings look alike. I’m not sure if all of the apartments are the same size. Everyone here lives on campus and they have a kindergarten, elementary school and high school for the children of the faculty. Hongfang’s daughter went from Kindergarten to Doctorate without leaving. (She now lives permanently in the USA – do we think maybe she wanted to get away from home?)

This is the foyer of the building. At night there are more bikes parked.

More of the apartment tomorrow.

Chuck went back to work and I went exploring. I planned to follow the main road outside of USTC toward the center of town. The road had been torn up when we were here in Nov. Now it is worse. They are building a double decker road, so there is a huge scaffold down the middle of the street. They are pouring concrete for the pylons. They also have huge ditches along the edge that have very murky water in them. It is an obstacle course to leave the campus. The roads on 3 of the 4 sides are torn up like this.

I only got about 1 block when I came to a department store. Since I need some towels and other supplies, I went in. It looked familiar – it was the same one that the ladies had gone to when Lois bought her husband a shirt. Who knew that it was 1 block from campus? I bought a lot so didn’t venture further. I took another route home through a street market with a lot of live chickens. Do I have to worry about Avian Flu? (1 flight)

There is a gate to the outside world next to the guest house with a restaurant right across the street, so that was our dinner choice. (1 flight) It turns out that this was a true adventure. No one spoke English and the menu didn’t have pictures. What to do?? First, I tried to oink. Pigs must sound different here – no one understood. Then I tucked my hands in my armpits waved them up and down and clucked like a chicken. A HA a moment of recognition. We had all 3 waitresses at our table by this time and they all did the chicken thing, too. Then, I tried a fish face and wiggled my hands. But I was laughing too hard to suck in my cheeks for the fish face. The brightest of the girls went running off and returned with a bucket with fish. Yes! Then just to make sure that we were on the same page, she came back with a whole raw chicken! Yes, again. Back she came again with an eggplant in one hand and some green shoots in the other. We had said (really held up 3 fingers) that we wanted 3 things. But we changed to 4 and got both vegetables.

The eggplant came back as a spicy dish, the shoots were the pea tendril things from last night, the fish were delicious and the chicken was prepared by chopping the whole thing into tiny pieces, bones, and all. It was tasty, but a little disconcerting to pick up a piece and discover that it was the chicken’s head. They brought rice after they kept asking us something and we finally answered yes. Watermelon and orange pieces for dessert. This whole thing came to 65¥. Back home across the little bridge. (1 flight to room)

10 flights of stairs again today.